Beyoncé has mastered this celebrity age as creator of worlds, sayer of nothing
In this era in which stars keep tight control of their publicity, Beyoncé’s offer to answer fans questions was refreshing – if the answers were … not always clear-cut
I need not remind you that we were forced to stare directly into the concept of Josh Brolin’s allegedly red-raw anus last week, so I think it is fair to say that we live in a brave, unheralded, fantastic new era of celebrity overshare. This, as best I can tell, is the third age. In the studio-contract, golden-age-of-Hollywood days, stars said basically nothing, sharing only titbits of their life via fanzine-level magazine features and newspaper columnist gossip items, and most of those were distributed by savvy studio heads, chomping six inches deep into a cigar while they did it. We only learned about all their threesomes long after they all died.
Then a little loosening of the rules, some chum in the water: deep-dive magazine profiles, rock stars saying outrageous things live on television, high-profile relationships and the monetisation of divorce. Britain’s cottage industry for “posed paparazzi photos of someone in the despair of their life” is a particular guilty thrill of mine, which is why I love Arg from Towie so much. He provides a rolling feed of it, constantly either moving in or moving out of Gemma Collins’s house or being told by a doctor he is going to die if he doesn’t stop eating Toblerones in the bath, and there is forever a long-lens camera trained on him while he does it, thickly enacting what he thinks anguish looks like.