WHAT’S ER FACE…?

A ghastly headline from a ghastly (and massively hypocritical
when it comes to such things) "news" paper.

I suppose that it's a bit poor of me (it is… isn't it?) that I had to look up who this Judy Murray person was, when her name popped up all over the morning news. In my general ignorance of all things “celeb-y”, I thought she could be something to do with Radio 4...

It turns out that the thing that most immediately popped into my head – connection wise - when I heard the name was “Woman’s Hour” but that’s a completely different Ms Murray and wasn’t even the connection that I was making, but merely explains the “Radio Four” thing, I suppose.

For some reason I actually thought, if you’d asked me (and why would you?), that Judy Murray was a radio newsreader, but there you go.

It’s not as if I’ll be watching the dance contest which she’s apparently going to be taking part in anyway, but sometimes my lack of knowledge of matters “Celebrity” does still bother me…

Slightly.

Obviously not enough to go out and do some research and find out more about it (God, no…!) but enough that it causes me a twinge of angst every time one of these little “moments” comes along when it is implied by the media in general that I should know who whichever person it is happens to be without further explanation.

Granted, my inability to recognise Mr and Mrs “King and Queen to be” and their ankle-biter when they’ve popped up on the news from time-to-time has proven to be an occasional social faux pas, but generally, I find that these things rarely matter.

A swift moment of perceived disbelief, a quick explanation, and life somehow manages to move onwards.

Of course there are those who doubt that you could possibly traipse through life without knowing who these various people are, but if you go around just assuming that everyone is living much the same life as you, and is interested in exactly the same stuff as you are, then you’re probably exactly in the demographic group that the producers of such programme and magazines are looking for.

And whilst I still manage to rattle along and engage as best I can with the modern world and all of its socially mediocre, sorry, media ways, from time-to-time, names and faces that seem to be as familiar to the rest of you as those of your own family, will, never-the-less mean little or nothing to me and you may (or may not) feel that you want to explain further.

Most of my own “pop culture” references tend to grind to a halt in the mid-1990s, and whilst the odd more “up-to-date” face might be familiar to me, most of them will not, so picking me for the photograph round on your quiz team is probably not a good idea.

I think that a lot of this might very well come simply from not being a parent, which means that I’m not required to keep up with who is “current” in “rock’n’roll” circles, and I have far too much dignity than to try and plough that particular minefield without seeking out further guidance.

Not that I want or need it.

I still think of “Oasis” as a “new and upcoming band” and am quite often surprised to find that records that I think of as being quite recent are already a couple of decades old.

Equally, I appear to be watching fewer and fewer television programmes, and heading off to the cinema far less often, too, which means that the actors whom I do recognise are mostly dead, or are, at the very least, far, far older than when I was originally aware of them. Not having any desire to read the “chat” magazines, or watch any soap operas or “trendy” TV, or any of those Saturday night “entertainment” shows, does tend to mean that names, faces, scandals and certain references are all likely to pass me by, and when it comes to the world of sport, well, apart from the odd cricketer or two, I wouldn’t recognise most of the rest of them in a line-up.

I’m not doing this deliberately, though… after all, if it’s to do with something that I am actually interested in, then I’ll take as much interest in it as anyone else might, but there are fewer of those situations, it appears, than is considered “normal” (for want of a better word) nowadays.  It’s more to do with the fact that I really just don’t care who most of these people are. It is, after all, just telly, or pop music, or movies, or sport, nothing that really matters all of that much in the great scheme of things, and most of these people are “here today, who’s that person at the end of the row on that  ‘Buzzcocks’ programme” anyway (if that’s still running…?) if you get my meaning…?

So, being something of a glutton for punishment (and lacking any company during that particular lunch hour), I (perhaps unwisely) mentioned my vagueness about this particular “famous” person on FizzBok and, to my surprise, it turned out that it’s not just me after all, to which my immediate reaction was “Oh, thank God for that…!” because I genuinely thought that I was going to have another one of those “angst-y” moments that I sometimes have about such things which leads to musings like this being churned out...

Anyway, it turns out that my newsreader guess wasn’t far out, because the Jenni Murray that I was thinking of was once a Radio Four newsreader, albeit back in the dark and dismal days when I was still a student.

See…! As long as it’s to do with anything more than a couple of decades ago, it appears that my mind DOES actually know some of this sort of stuff after all…!

Mind you, if you asked me to name a member of a pop or rock band from the last fifteen years, or someone from the cast of “Hollyhocks” you’ll probably be met with little more than a blank stare…

But that’s alright.

You can go away feeling all smug and superior because you know something I don’t, and I can go away feeling precisely the same way, and for precisely the same reasons.