Lights... Camera... Action!!!

There is an epidemic that seems to be sweeping across the country, taking down every ordinary, completely unexceptional and downright boring individual it comes across.

 

I like to call it: Celebrity complex

 

Now if any of you are journalists, you will know exactly what I’m talking about…

 

Somewhere along the line, between watching to much of Channel 41 and listening to Britney Spear’s – My Prerogative…  (oh my god… this makes this the second post in a week where I’ve written the words ‘Britney Spears’), many South Africans have imagined that the media are all after a piece of them.

 

After clicking on one too many headlines on News24 with ‘Paris Hilton’ in the title… completely regular South Africans begin to imagine that the paparazzi are a serious problem in their life. War in the Middle East? Whatever…. HIV crisis? Who cares….  The media is the root of all evil.  

 

Now I don’t even work in glamorous or controversial media… I write for a business magazine that targets a really niche sector… yet more and more often, when I call people requesting info or comment, I get greeted by the hand in the face and almost expect the person on the other side to break out with “Everybody’s talking all this stuff about me… why don’t they just let me live! It’s my prerogative!”

 

One phone call from a journalist and Mr Frans Stoffel Hendriks running a B&B in Kakamas will immediately begin his insta-Celeb delusion. “You media… you always twist my words…. Make it sound like I said things I didn’t! It’s my prerogative!”

 

But on a completely seprate topic – I just learnt how to operate a tele-prompter…. So cool! I’ll be signing autographs between 5pm and 6pm.