Britain's ten most desperate celebrities: The star who calls the paps on themselves. The one who begs us to write about her. And the ultimate fame desperado. Our showbiz snitches' secrets list that exposes the truth stars will HATE
Some celebrities glide effortlessly through a world brimming with media opportunities and hefty pay cheques, while others take any old gig in a desperate bid to stay relevant.
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Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Tom Lehrer shut up far too early
Tom Lehrer died on Saturday, aged 97. His album That Was the Year That Was records a live performance, including his introductory stage backchat to his own songs. At one point, he says, 'It is a sobering thought…that, when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.' Lehrer's own life prompts almost the opposite thought. That brilliant LP, which came out in 1965, contained the last new material he ever produced for the general public. Yet he lived for another six decades. So even by the time that I, aged 12, had become an ardent fan of his work, Lehrer was already a thing of the past. He had won a place to study mathematics at Harvard aged only 15. After less than a decade of showbiz fame, he became a teacher at that great university. A few years after that, he forsook composing and performing satirical songs; he stayed on at Harvard for ever. I notice that none of his obituaries had anything to say about his maths classes. It is hard to imagine they were not funny. Why did Lehrer stop singing? No doubt it was partly because he got sick of adulation and – he was always shy – of public performance. Perhaps he felt his best work was the product of his youth and could only decline with advancing years. As a mathematician, he knew that originality often does not last. But I do wonder if his decision to stop also had something to do with cultural change. It related both to the precision of his wit and the openness of his mind. As the Harvard connection suggests, Lehrer's work was of the kind which some would now call 'elitist'. The jokes were quick-fire, and contained many scientific, historical, musical and literary references. This from Smut, for example: 'I don't need no hobby, like tennis or philately. /I've got my hobby: re-reading Lady Chatterley.' He often parodied other writers, composers or genres (Gilbert and Sullivan, Cole Porter, operatic arias, Irish ballads, jazz). One of his best songs New Math guys his own academic discipline ('It's so simple/ So very simple/ That only a child can do it!'). It was not essential to know the references he was making – most of the jokes stood up well in their own right – but it helped. Lehrer's lyrics contained words not always in popular parlance. I remember being introduced to 'genuflect' for the first time in his The Vatican Rag, which satirises the Catholic Church's modernisation after Vatican II. Knowing a little theology was useful too: 'There the guy who's got religion'll/ Tell you if your sin's original.' With this playful, almost donnish tone went the liberalism of the period. In Britain, comparable comedy, with comparable politics, also coming out of university (chiefly Cambridge), was the so-called Satire Boom, starting with Beyond the Fringe and ending with That Was The Week That Was (TW3). Lehrer's New York Jewish background loved to mock the pomposity of old establishments, the bigotry of the Deep South, the early insouciance about the atom bomb and American sentimentality ('those super-special just plain folks/ In my hometown'). One of his few political jokes that failed the test of time was his little aside about the impossibility of an actor like Ronald Reagan becoming president. Because Lehrer was genuinely liberal – in the proper sense of loving freedom – he never went in for Leftish self-righteousness. One of his best songs, about America's National Brotherhood Week, laughs at the very idea: 'Be nice to people who/ Are inferior to you./ It's only for a week, so have no fear./ Be grateful that it doesn't last all year!' And The Folk Song Army skewers the sort of protest which became so popular in the United States in the Sixties about Vietnam and has recently had a second flowering (if that is the right word) about Gaza, Black Lives Matter etc. 'We are the folk song army./ Every one of us cares./ We all hate poverty, war, and injustice,/ Unlike the rest of you squares.' One of its stanzas parodies, musically and verbally, the way folk songs disregard tight rules of scansion, rhythm or line length, 'The tune don't have to be clever/ And it don't matter if you put a couple extra syllables into a line./ It sounds more ethnic if it ain't good English/ And it don't even gotta rhyme (excuse me, rhyne).' The song signs off with a rousing motto aimed at those who prefer words to action: 'Ready, aim, sing.' Perhaps Tom Lehrer feared that, if he went on much longer, that would be his motto too. For more than half a century, we Lehrer fans have been lamenting his long silence, and discussing whether anything could persuade him to speak and sing once more. I had such a conversation, by chance, only the week before he died. But our discussions often ended by quoting approvingly a line from the man himself (again, I think, from That Was The Year That Was). 'There are a lot of plays around just now about people who can't communicate,' he says, 'Well, I feel that if people cannot communicate, the very least they can do is to SHUT UP.' Amen to that. Our current culture is swamped by people who cannot communicate but do it all the same with tremendous pride and ill-founded self-confidence. They leave little room in the public square for a witty genius like Tom Lehrer.
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
Writing is all about discipline, love, luck and endurance – and I sure know about endurance
'If I wrote another book, who would read it?' I lamented. 'I would!' enthused my brother, perhaps echoing Kurt Vonnegut's remark, 'Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.' Over the years, commercial publishers had reliably dampened my enthusiasm by teaching me to ask two questions as soon as even the idea of another book crossed my mind. Who will sell my book? Who will read my book? But my brother's fireproof confidence in me fuelled me to pen a proposal that successfully wound its way through acquisitions until a contract landed in my inbox. Overnight, the dream of writing another book was replaced with the dread of producing said book – a guide to writing engaging opinion and advocacy columns mixed with a personal account of being a physician exposed to a great variety of experiences. Being a columnist had made me more observant, deepened my appreciation of medicine and honed my understanding of why every word we say (or write) matters. When I began to teach writing classes, I wanted to democratise what I knew. Then, George Orwell made me quail. In his famous essay, he accused writers of being motivated by 'sheer egoism', calling them 'more vain and self-centred than journalists, although less interested in money'. Ouch. At least the last bit was true, although not by choice. As I wrangled with the ego issue, the wonderful Annie Dillard rescued me with her prescient writing from back when I was a teenager. 'The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.' She knew my reason to write. High principles aside, it was on to the next two unglamorous years, starting with a blank document and progressing page by page, draft by draft. How I found the time is how every writer I know finds the time – by squeezing it from elsewhere. I still haven't watched Breaking Bad and only finished Succession when news of the final episode was everywhere. Patient care came first. My notional 'writing day' was inevitably taken up by the exigencies of family life, leaving spare nights and weekends to write. Being a writer is heady but doing the writing is painful. This got me wondering about how the writers I admired were so expert and fluent. What innate talent did they possess that I lacked? Enter James Baldwin with his no-nonsense counsel. 'I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.' Now, there was a word I recognised from 15 years of medical training: endurance. The next two years of conversations went like this: 'I thought you said you finished your book.' 'That was just the last draft.' Having exhausted the generosity of the people who read my (numerous) drafts and nurtured my spirits, and feeling no more 'done', I ventured to AI for inspiration and distraction. It produced some nice suggestions but when it rewrote my manuscript, I found it stiff, formal and, frankly, dishonest. The truth was that I loved the act of rearranging the same 26 letters in so many ways and was in no rush to wrap up the book. On days that I lost a patient or made a patient cry over bad news, I couldn't wait to escape to my perennially unfinished manuscript to calm my mind. Oliver Sacks knew exactly how I felt when he called the act of writing an indispensable form of talking to himself. My explicit permission to dawdle came from Joan Didion. 'Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.' Maybe, Orwell was right after all. Nearing the end of his life and suffering from oesophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens remarked that an awareness of mortality was useful for a writer because it helped one avoid the fear of public opinion, sales, critics, or for that matter, friends. What timely words to strengthen my resolve to publish the work I could no longer stand to read! At this point, dare I imagine my ideal reader? As if eavesdropping on my thoughts, Joyce Carol Oates warned against it. 'He/she may be reading someone else.' Touché. Then, just after I had hit 'send', Annie Dillard swung back into my life with a vengeance. 'Assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients … What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?' Gulp. I would be the first to say my terminally ill patients have better things to do than read my book. After all, what food for thought could I possibly offer to compete with the contemplation of mortality? My book is out today. In an unexpected gesture, one of my terminally ill patients pre-ordered it so he could tell me in clinic that he looks forward to reading it. But, he added, beaming from ear to ear, if he doesn't get to finish it, he will leave it to his granddaughter who wants to be a doctor and a writer. This kind of generosity really does feel like sufficient reward. Ranjana Srivastava is an Australian oncologist, award-winning author and Fulbright scholar. Her latest book is called Every Word Matters: Writing to Engage the Public
Daily Mail
4 hours ago
- Daily Mail
I was drinking two bottles of wine a night... Then three simple rules took willpower out of the equation - I could finally stop after just one glass
For years, Heidi Anderson lived a double life. To her listeners, she was the bubbly, confident voice behind the mic - a larger-than-life radio personality lighting up the airwaves.
