Whatever happened to CELEBDAQ?

Back in the days when you had to plug your computer into your telephone line in order to download pornography, sorry, in order to go online, the BBC had a website called CELEBDAQ.  It was fabulous, but it’s probably a good thing that this site no longer exists, for the reasons explained below.

CELEBDAQ was, as the name implies, a trading game.  It was sort of a combination of Fantasy Football and Hello! magazine.  So it was a fantasy trading game, but unlike a game of trading footballers so that you could demonstrate that you were just as fucking clueless as any other manager in the Premiership about squad selection, or fantasy share dealing where you could pretend to be the sort of person who in their day job in the City meddled with the economies of developing countries and fucked them up, then at the weekend continued to spread social ill by supporting the drugs trade and so, generally, being the sort of person Dickens tried to warn us about, you traded in how famous a particular celebrity was that week.

Celebrity fame fluctuated, so if somebody had a film premier coming out, they would get more time in the media and their profile would rise and they would become more valuable as a celebrity.  However, as their fame rose, so their share price did, so if you knew that a blue chip famous person like Tom Hanks was going to be in London promoting his new film, he’s a sound investment for that week but you could only buy a few shares.

Much, much better to go to the ‘B’ listers or, as they were also known, those who appeared on television.

As far as I am aware, ‘personalities’ were not listed.

It was tremendous fun.  You had to register, all the cash was virtual and every week there was a star trader award.

Obviously, it had to end.

The trouble with celebrities is that they have, in recent years, traded fame for infamy.  Jimmy Saville got a lot of press coverage after he died, because it turned out that more than just looking like a nonce, he was a nonce.  Who knew?  Apparently, everyone knew.  People in the industry new and, in front rooms up and down the country when the news broke people who had seen him on telly years ago knew, or at least said ‘I fucking knew it’ under their breath.  Then Operation Yewtree got underway, and might as well have been titled Operation Yewboat because it sank the careers of quite a few telly personalities without trace.

That, as we now know, was just the tip of the shitberg.  Who would have imagined that greasy fucktards would have used their positions of power and influence to take advantage of vulnerable young people.  I mean, really, who knew?

We all know that nonces look like nonces.  We all now also know that any bloke with a fat BMI who is pictured with his arm around a young woman who looks like she is wishing that teleportation were a thing is what the newspapers term a ‘predator’.  And not something sleek that lives on the veldt, or even something with a cool shoulder mounted laser canon that hunts Arnie in the jungle, no, the sort of predator that disguises its distinctive scent of sweat and fat with money and lawyers.

Bluntly, it is no fun trading celebrities when they might make the news for all the wrong reasons.

Celebrities are, by and large, individuals who have used their talent in a way that has resulted in public notoriety in a good way.

The democratisation of the media has meant that anyone with the means to do so can upload a media clip of themselves to a media platform, and other folk can watch it and leave snarky comments.  What this has proved is that although the number of people who think they have a talent is apparently limitless, the pool of really talented people remains finite.

So maybe CELEBDAQ deserves a comeback after all, because of the listing, a bona fide list of who is, and who is not, a celebrity.  Youtubers need not apply.