in motion

The price of celebrity status

Here’s a rather long-winded tale, please stay with it.

Every Tuesday afternoon I sit in on a lecture, except it’s a little different: it’s a video conference. People at universities in Glasgow, St. Andrews, Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt watch the same lecture, which is broadcast (usually from Glasgow). Then there’s me out in the Pentlands by myself. When you have something to say, the camera switches to your venue, and then it doesn’t leave your venue until someone else has something to say. So when I talk, people just see me. A four-foot large head of me, projected onto the wall of their room. There I am, drinking Coke, eating a sandwich, and there’s nothing I can do about this new-found visibility.

Just before Christmas I went through to Glasgow for a Stats department Christmas dinner. Not knowing many people, I introduced myself, and got the reply from a fair few, “I already know who you are, you’re in the video conference.” I’m now left with this one-sided intimacy that I appear to have given away, not of my own accord. It’s a little unsettling, but this is precisely the kind of situation that celebrities wish for: to be noticed, gawped at, revealed to the public.

Only after reaching a certain status do they get annoyed at the intrusion of cameras outside restaurants, microphones in their faces, and someone searching through their rubbish. I’m not equating my position with someone like Sienna Miller, who appears in the Metro if she buys two sandwiches at lunch (who’s the second sandwich for? etc.), and I’m not condoning the behaviour of many paparazzi, but these people must live with the knowledge that the public want to know more about them than they would ever wish to be known. Why the public want to know this, is a different story entirely, but for me, I’ve learnt never, ever to yawn. You never know who’s watching.

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