2017’s relatable celebs were boring mirror images of our regular lives
The famous need to stop sharing their domestic details and exhibit their flashy X-factor instead, writes Sarah Caden
THE most-liked picture on Instagram in 2017 was that which announced Beyonce’s pregnancy with twins. What everyone liked so much was a lush but slightly loopy picture of the singer, dressed in frilly knickers and a lacy bra, kneeling in front of a funereal-looking giant flower arrangement with a lime-green veil flowing to the floor behind her.
Beyonce cradled her pregnant belly and looked for all the world like someone who allowed a small child to unload the contents of the dress-up box on her. This didn’t matter, however, as 11.1 million people double-clicked on the image to convey their joy at the good news being shared by Queen Bey and her husband Jay-Z.
Millions of double-clickers around the world couldn’t have been happier if they had been expecting twins themselves. Much was made of the four years since the arrival of their first child, Blue Ivy, and how this pregnancy was much longed for. Hearts around the world filled with joy for them, eyes filled with tears, hugs were shared — and mostly via emoji, obvs.
Millions of people felt a rush of emotion for these strangers that was stronger than they’d feel for the baby news of someone they actually knew, in actual real life.
This is where we’re at by end of 2017, locked into virtual involvement in what are really the more mundane aspects of the lives of celebrities. Right now, we’re less interested in the red-carpet outings, the glitzy trimmings and the glamorous aspects of being a star than we are with the dull stuff.
You know, the stuff we’re all doing, like getting married, having babies, settling down. It’s the stuff that isn’t wildly exciting in regular life and yet we manage to get wildly excited when the celebs are at it.
Louise Redknapp is having a stay-at-home-mum crisis followed by a happy-new-year divorce? Yes, tell us more. Cristiano Ronaldo had not two, but three babies, making that the second most-liked 2017 Instagram posting.
There are three new Kardashians on the way? Or are there? How can these people tease us by witholding confirmation? Why that’s positively cruel in a culture where the domestic mundanities of the rich and famous have become their pulling power.
In a world where every Tom, Dick and Harry is a public person, the poor old celebrities have had to come up with a new trick. In this age of sharing our every move, of everyone as a professional show-off, the celebs have had to nobble us at the normal stuff.
We’ve muscled in on their game — ostentatious attention-seeking — so now they’re muscling in on ours and making a display of how they can do the domestic, dull stuff to the hilt. Anything we can do, they can do better.
Being relatable is the celebrity commodity in the social media age. Envy of their status, wealth or fame is too obvious and a little off-putting these days. We can cope, just about, with the sense of inadequacy that comes with trying to keep up with our actual friends and their over-filtered feeds, so we don’t want the celebs making us feel even more inferior.
We accept that they are better than us in the bignoise, big-bucks stakes, but we clearly crave a core belief that despite the differences, the stars are just like us at heart.
So we send love hearts and “oh bless” messages when Cheryl Cole settles down with the boy from One Direction and has a baby called Bear. We enjoy pics that prove that Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber are back together, despite both being about 12 years of age.
We wonder has that flighty Taylor Swift finally found true love and wish her the best, instead of wishing that she’d relish a less conventional life path than the rest of us?
The UK royals really went to town with the relatable trend in 2017, though possibly to their long-term detriment. To mark the 20th anniversary of their mother Diana’s death, Princes William and Harry gave a series of interviews in which, essentially, they spoke about their discomfort at being different. Which might be all well and good if the ordinary people weren’t paying their wages for doing the job of being different.
Harry took the whole thing especially far, in stating that “no one really wants to be king”, prompting some to hunt around for a sarcastic boohoo emoji.
Harry was frank about his desire to modernise the monarchy, and there’s no doubt that his honesty about his mental suffering during his grieving adolescence and 20s was helpful to many.
However, the problem with too much relatability is that you become too ordinary altogether and then your celeb value is lost.
Not that Harry would identify himself as a celebrity, but how interesting that he is marrying one. Harry’s end-of-year engagement saw him bring a little glamour to the essentially fuddy-duddy Windsors in the shape of his actress fiancee, Meghan Markle.
American, mixed race and an actress, she makes “commoner” Kate look like a norisk choice for William. And Meghan was so comfortable in front of the cameras on the day of the engagement that Harry had to lovingly ask to get a word in.
Meghan Markle will be paparazzi-fodder to rival even Diana and the extent to which she relishes it will make for an interesting ride for the relatable, focused Harry.
That said, Harry dropped a clanger over Christmas to which many could relate, as he angered his in-laws by saying the Windsors were like the “family [Meghan] never had”. Not kingly, not kingly at all, though it probably earned him ‘likes’.
You’d nearly miss the old days, when celebs were different and didn’t so much care about being liked as they did being envied.
But then, somehow it has happened that we have sun-holiday queen Coleen Rooney for that. Wayne’s fundamentally immature transgressions keep us feeling sympathy for her, in particular his conviction for drink-driving this year, while behind the wheel of a car belonging to a woman he’d met in the pub that night.
Poor Coleen, pregnant with child number four, was off on her umpteenth sun holiday when it happened, and apparently these sun skites are an issue in her marriage. Still, there was no one on Wayne’s side in that dispute.
Coleen is a girl who relishes her rags-to-riches status, makes no apology for her life of luxury and doesn’t care if we can relate to her or not. Hence her refusal to react to months of speculation over whether she was or was not wearing her wedding ring.
Hence, when she finally took to Instagram to say the marriage was worth saving, despite her husband being a div, it was apparently without his prior knowledge. Coleen, to her credit, doesn’t care so much about getting the likes as getting the old-fashioned public boot in.
Now that’s the kind of other-world celebrity we can get behind, and more of it would be welcome in 2018.