The world of reality TV is an odd one.
Here in the UK, everyone’s is being very cautious with each other. No one wants to mention it to each other, but everyone has the horrible feeling they time-travelled in their sleep, because they turned on the TV the other day and Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, aka Speidi, are back on TV screens nationwide thanks to Celebrity Big Brother. “I don’t understand...” we all think to ourselves, searching the faces of our fellow commuters for the panic we’re feeling inside “Surely these reality stars stop existing after their respective TV shows are over? How can these people have returned? This is impossible. It is far more likely that I have slipped through a Donnie Darko-style wormhole than any self-respecting TV producer would have let these people anywhere near a camera again.”
Sadly not. Reality stars, it turns out, are actually very very real. They actually exist in the same time-space continuum as us. What’s confusing, is that unlike most other celebrities, like singers and actors, reality folks needs to generate their own publicity to keep themselves relevant. If Rihanna ever feels her star waning, she drops a new album and goes on tour. Paris Hilton has to do something totally weird like pretend to be a DJ. Attention seeking is literally their whole career, and the ones with the most resilient careers are those most skilled at attracting it.
Arguably, few have been quite so successful at this as Kim Kardashian, and by association her recently announced baby daddy Kanye West. The latter is better known for interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the VMA’s in 2009 than he is for any music he’s produced since. I still don’t understand, logically, what Kim Kardashian is famous for. But both are excellent at fanning their own flames, be it a sex tape or deciding that the only person they would follow on twitter would be some random guy from Coventry. (In all fairness, that was awesome).
So it comes as no surprise that the announcement that they were expecting a baby was greeted by skepticism and derision by a good part of the twittersphere. This is, after all, a woman who was married for the grand total of 72 days this time last year. You can hardly blame Joe McHale via The Soup for commenting that her entire pregnancy would last about four marriages in her time, or the tweets that have hinted that the whole thing is just one big publicity stunt.
Personally though, what I’m worried about is the new breed of celebrity that this is about to unleash on the world. We’ve had a generation of kids of famous people who became famous singers or actors in their own right - awesome people like Isabella Rosselini and Liza Minelli, and the not so awesome like Charlie Sheen. We’ve also had a wave of kids who are already famous because of the awesome superstardom of their own talented parents - the Suris, Shilohs, and Blue Ivy’s of the world. What will a Kimye baby be? A baby famous for having parents who are famous for being famous? Surely there is so much vacuousness in that equation that the child’s fame will, in fact, create some kind of supermassive black hole in modern civilisation and western culture?
It could actually turn out that the Mayans were right - the world as we know it might actually be on course to end after all.