Of all the dreary polls and games bored people like to post on the Web, my least favourite is probably ‘Celeb Haikus’. It’s a version of those “Spotted!” pages in magazines like Heat, where readers are encouraged to send it sightings of celebrities. <\/p>\n
“Dale Winton, in a road”
\n“Sue Pollard, buying things in a shop”.<\/p>\n
That’s not an anecdote or even proper gossip. It’s just filling space and encouraging banality for its own sake, not to mention consolidating the notion of celebrity prostration in a godless void. It’d only be justifiable if this yen for so-called celebrity surveillance was of the neighbourhood watch persuasion:<\/p>\n
“Spotted! Michael Parkinson, seen washing human entrails from his hands, laughing.”
\n“Spotted! Bruce Forsyth, killing a boy.”<\/p>\n
Haikus have always annoyed me too; at school I regarded them as the quadratic equations of poetry. Cheap rules, cheap aftertaste. So here’s the Celeb Haiku to end them all, he said with foolish optimism. <\/p>\n
“Spotted!” Shaftesbury Ave Actually, I should confess I rather like the glossy graphics and fun attitude of Heat Magazine. And the TV section is pretty good. It’s just the encouragement of spying upon celebrities as a kind of national sport that irks me. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Of all the dreary polls and games bored people like to post on the Web, my least favourite is probably ‘Celeb Haikus’. It’s a version of those “Spotted!” pages in magazines like Heat, where readers are encouraged to send it sightings of celebrities. “Dale Winton, in a road” “Sue Pollard, buying things in a shop”. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nMark Frith, Editor, Heat Mag
\nNot spotted: his soul<\/em><\/p>\n