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22 Eastenders and the Manufacture of Celebrity Anthony EastEnders and the Manufacture of Celebrity Anthony McNicholas Communication and Media Research Institute University of Westminster Keywords: BBC, celebrity, publicity, professionalism, private lives, tabloid press Abstract When EastEnders launched in February 1985 it represented a new approach by the BBC to programme making in many ways. One of these was publicity. Traditionally, the BBC put little effort into programme promotion but for EastEnders a much more professional approach was adopted and more resources employed. In part the publicity was based on the real life histories of the actors involved, many of whom had been cast because they had similar backgrounds to the characters they played. However, the full-blooded entry of the BBC, the UK’s largest cultural producer into the business of publicity was to have unforeseen consequences, as the tabloid press, following a logic of its own created the kind of feeding frenzy around the actors’ private lives with which we are so familiar today. The launch of EastEnders, it is argued, represents therefore a significant moment in recent British cultural history as the private lives of relatively minor characters, as much as their on screen personas became public property. Introduction Social phenomena such as celebrity culture are not uniform across the globe though they may be present very widely. They are inflected differently, and ‘have numerous points of origin, numerous points of change’ (Turner 2004, 12) in the various places where they occur depending on the nature of the society out of which they both come and inform. In the UK, we ‘celebrate’ if that is the word, certain individuals or classes of people in our own distinct way. This article is about celebrity and the early days of a very British creation, the popular BBC soap opera EastEnders, which was first shown in February 1985. That the title ‘celebrity’ is no longer confined to the major stars of the cinema screen and is bestowed upon a widening circle of people of mixed achievements and abilities hardly needs saying. Celebrity’s ranks are now swelled by the inclusion _______________________ Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture © 2005 (University of Westminster, London), Vol. 2(2): 22-36. ISSN 1744-6708 (Print); 1744-6716 (Online) 22 McNicholas, EastEnders and the manufacture of celebrity of the minor stars of the small screen: chat show hosts, newscasters, game show guests, weather people and increasingly in an age of reality television, the general public. It has been estimated recently that in Britain almost ‘a quarter of a million ‘ordinary people’ appear on television every year, with over 20,000 of them having a speaking role’ (Ibid, 53). Growing numbers of us, it would appear are indeed living in hope of our very own fifteen minutes and we are prepared to see the most intimate details of our daily lives and personal histories splashed across the newspapers in order to achieve it. This is where we are. The question remains how did we get here? How have celebrity and the marketing of private lives come to achieve their present ubiquity? This article takes an historical rather than a theoretical approach to the subject. It is based on wider research contributing to volume six of the official history of the BBC and uses internal BBC documentation, interviews with those involved as well as secondary sources. What is of note about the coming of EastEnders it is argued, is that it saw the BBC, the UK’s biggest cultural producer, taking a fundamentally different approach to how it publicised its programmes. From adopting a largely passive position, from allowing the programmes to speak for themselves, the BBC began to promote itself more actively, more professionally. In part, in the case of EastEnders this was done by making the actors as individuals a selling point. This was then taken up by the tabloid press in ways which were impossible for the BBC to control and events then followed an inexorable logic of their own. This represents a significant moment in recent British cultural history, and shows how the BBC became involved, hesitantly but inevitably in the manufacture of celebrity. Celebrity and Religion Celebrity culture is often linked, both in journalism and in the academy with the supposed gap left by the decline of religion in modern societies. In the context of the present article this link can be explored to provide a clearer understanding of the nature of the celebrity brought forward by the promotion of Eastenders, and I would like to do so before moving on to the historical departure of this particular show. For, as much of the media portrayal of contemporary celebrity, in particular reality TV participants and other minor but familiar characters, is unevenly balanced between some degree of elevation of the individual to a life ‘beyond’ ordinary people and a considerable emphasis on mundane activities and grubby personal details (see Palmer in this issue for an elaboration of tabloid treatment of reality TV characters), we can in the making of the Eastenders soap stars see the beginnings of an attitude to celebrity which drew on stronger notions of familiarity and ordinariness than previous ‘star’ adulation (see Dyer 1998, first published 1979, for an analysis of the Hollywood star system). If seen in relation to ideas of 23 Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(2) celebrity and religion, it is possible to elucidate some distinctive cultural functions of this kind of celebrity construction. To writer Justin Cartwright, (2001), celebrities possess, like the old gods they have replaced the one thing mere mortals do not: immortality. Though the belief systems of our grandparents no longer serve, we still hanker after the non-rational, the immortal and the adulation of celebrities meets this spiritual need. Chris Rojek (2001, 90-91) writes of celebrity as part of ‘a cult of distraction’ filling the vacuum left by the death of God and masking the consequent meaninglessness of modern life in capitalist societies. Attractive as these notions appear at first sight, one might have reservations for a number of reasons. First of all, the notion that stars somehow possess an aura of immortality or transcendence from the everyday. Stars can indeed seem larger than life – on the stage that is, but just because people say ‘Eric Clapton is God’ does not mean they actually believe it. Some few individuals may touch so many people so deeply that they may seem to have stepped out of the mainstream and hang, pristine and splendid in the firmament like the stars that light the night sky but increasingly our celebrities blend one into another, and come and go so quickly that we scarcely note their passing. Their actions – the parties, the drug-taking, the infidelities and breast enhancements – do not map them out as special, or even particularly individual. As for immortality, they are created and destroyed overnight. We no longer feed our children to Moloch, it is we who devour the Gods. As P. David Marshall has noted, ‘what is enduring is the process’ (2004). To premise celebrity culture upon a weakening of religious belief is similarly open to question. To say, for example, ‘God is dead’ does not imply of necessity that life has no meaning, rather that for those individuals concerned, it has one in which God plays no part. In any case, what has declined for certain in most western societies is not necessarily a belief in God but in organised religion. It is true that the picture is not entirely clear, some recent work (Voas & Crockett 2005) has argued that both adherence to a particular faith and faith itself are in decline, with the latter more steeply than the former, but as it is often pointed out, in the last census conducted in the UK, in what is generally accepted as being among the most secular of societies, 77 per cent of the population of England and Wales claimed a religious affiliation (Census 2001). Falling church attendances do not tell the whole story. Logically at least, it would follow that we might expect the most secular society to have the greatest fascination with celebrity and though it is certainly the case that celebrity culture is more of a feature of British society currently than before, that this affects Britain more than other comparable countries is by no means certain. Conversely, the society with which we would most associate celebrity culture, the USA is the least affected of all by this supposed celestial demise. God is alive and well and living in the mid west. 24 McNicholas, EastEnders and the manufacture of celebrity Furthermore, the gap which, according to this theory celebrity aims to span, is a chasm so great, an idea so powerful – which led to the willingness to suffer martyrdom on the part of thousands, and then to the Crusades, the Thirty Years War, the Spanish Inquisition and so on – that it would surely be beyond even the combined talents of John Wayne, James Cagney, Madonna, Geri Halliwell and Jade Goody to bridge? I am not merely being facetious here, what I am trying to say is that there are significant differences between celebrity and religion. This not to say that we can find no similarities in the role played by the media and by religion. Jean Seaton (2005) has argued persuasively that the media, specifically the news media, have inherited from the clergy the function of explaining the meaning of life, death and suffering to us. But, if we accept the idea as a conceit, then what kind of modern gods are contestants of reality shows and the stars of soaps – the Makosi’s, (Big Brother) Debbie Dingle’s (Emmerdale Farm) and Dirty Den’s (EastEnders) of today? They are clearly not replacements for Jehovah, nor even for Zeus and co.
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