Alexis Petridis 

Chris, Gwyneth, Kim and Kanye and a golden age of celebrity mag cobblers

Alexis Petridis: Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow's split and the Kanye West/Kim Kardashian wedding allows the celebrity magazines to hit rich seams of utter tosh
  
  

Celebmag cover
Real people, real stories: how Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Chris Martin and Gwyneth have been reported by celebrity magazines recently. Photograph: Christophe Gowans/Guardian Photograph: Christophe Gowans/Guardian

This week, Lost in Showbiz hoves into view a little unsteady of gait, a party hat askew on its head, two-litre bottle of Tesco Everyday Value cider in its hand. It offers you a swig and invites you to join it in a celebratory conga to the euphoric strains of Chas & Dave's Knees Up Jamboree Bag No 2. "But Lost in Showbiz," it hears you cry, irritably batting away the streamer it blows in your ear, "what is there to celebrate? We live in dark and terrifying times. The Middle East peace talks are on the verge of collapse, Nato foreign ministers are running a book on where Putin might invade next and Courtney Love's dogged attempts to locate flight MH370 surprisingly appear to have come to naught."

Indeed so, friends, but let's not get all "sadface". Civilisation as we know it may be teetering on the brink of the abyss, but in the world of the celebrity magazine, these are truly great days, days for revels and rejoicing. Raise us a dais of silk and down, hang it with vair and purple dyes, carve in it doves and pomegranates, then get someone from Made in Chelsea to be photographed on it in their knickers, for we live in the age of Chris and Gwynnie and Kim and Kanye: real stories, important stories, stories that demand extensive coverage of an unerringly high standard.

No more will Britain's celebrity magazines be forced to flam together desperate space-filling cobblers on the flimsiest of pretexts ("Voice coach Will.i.am could be planning to bring out his own dictionary … he's famous for his crazy sayings on the show including 'dope' meaning great and 'fresh' meaning cool"). No more will they be reduced to reprinting the philosophies of noted thinker Joey Essex, 23 ("I'd like to learn to tell the time"). With the shock Martin/Paltrow split and the upcoming Kimye nuptials, they're twice blessed with sagas their crack teams of journalists can really get their teeth into.

There's so much that LiS is impressed by in their coverage that it's hard to know where to start. Perhaps with Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, who was prevailed upon to discuss his magazine's investigation into "allegations of serial infidelity" denied by Paltrow, before mentioning that there was "one recurring name in this area of scholarship". This area of scholarship! That sound you can hear is legions of hopefuls applying to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for postgraduate funding: "Dear Sir, I plan to write an interdisciplinary thesis speculating wildly about who Gwyneth Paltrow has been getting her leg over with."

Or perhaps we could open with the doughty investigative reporter who was dispatched to solicit the opinions of a woman who sold Chris Martin a milkshake at Glastonbury last year. I know, I know: a milkshake! At Glastonbury! What marriage can hope to survive the kind of reckless search for crazed, hedonistic kicks those words imply? Sadly, the woman who sold Chris Martin a milkshake at Glastonbury last year wasn't able to offer a vast amount of insight into the state of his relationship at the time, despite having spent at least two minutes in his company. Indeed, reading what she had to say you would have thought she was talking about a complete stranger, but we all know that wealth and privilege can buy silence if it choses.

But no: LiS's favourite aspect of the coverage was the way it enabled Britain's celebrity magazines to utilise their tried and tested "special moves". In the case of Paltrow and Martin that involved the deployment of a legion of Anonymous Friends Close To The Couple, all of them eager to spill their guts. LiS is sure there are cynics out there who will claim that when the phrase "said a friend close to the couple" appears in a celebrity magazine, it essentially means: "said our intern, who was making things up because we told them to". But no: LiS clings steadfast to the belief that if it says A Friend Close To The Couple, it means A Friend Close To The Couple. Indeed, given how many of them seem to have been quoted over the past week, it can't help but wonder if some extra strain may have been placed on the Martin/Paltrow marriage by the fact that their entire social circle appears to have consisted of people devoted to spying on them, then ringing up OK! and Now at the slightest provocation.

In the case of Kim and Kanye, however, the tried and tested special move involves the publication of the Wildly Speculative Article. LiS has come across The Wildly Speculative Article before – it's something of a standby when a celebrity wedding is on the horizon – but never with quite the weird, hallucinogenic quality of those relating to the West/Kardashian wedding. It's almost as if the magazines in question noted that West had already proposed by hiring the AT&T Baseball Stadium in San Francisco, lighting it with flaming torches, employing a full orchestra and a vast firework display, decided that in that case all bets were clearly off, and simply told a journalist to do their worst.

So it is that we are confronted with a description of a wedding that sounds as if it's been made up by a nine-year-old driven temporarily insane by an excess of Tizer. We have variously learned that West's wedding gift to Kardashian is 10 European branches of Burger King; that Kardashian is planning to walk down the aisle following an experimental fake tan that involves her being blasted with diamonds and 14-carat gold; that the wedding cake may be festooned with real jewels and cost $12m; that the invites will cost £600 each to manufacture out of gold leaf and pearls; and that the goodie bags will contain thousands of pounds' worth of champagne, cosmetics, trinkets, spa vouchers and, in all probability, a lifesize statue of Kanye made out of rhodium washed in the tears of poor children that spouts molten lava out of its nostrils and bumhole and that, at the climax of the ceremony, every wedding guest is to be blasted into space on the back of a giant hen.

If that seems farfetched to you, then LiS would merely posit it's no more farfetched than the idea of an editorial meeting taking place at Closer magazine at which it was decided that it would be a good idea to recreate West and Kardashian's recent Vogue photoshoot starring Vanessa Feltz, Ben Ofoedu, former vocalist of Phats and Small, and a doll. And that definitely happened because the resulting photos are on the newsstands as we speak, with Feltz and Ofoedu looking no more like Kim and Kanye than they do Morecambe and Wise. LiS humbly offers said photos as further proof of the golden age of the celebrity magazine that this nation is blessed enough to be living through, then feels impelled to neck as much Tesco Everyday Value cider as it can before passing out.

 

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