Captive Audience

“We’d been in that flat on lockdown for two weeks when he finally snapped and came at me with a meat cleaver,” explains thirty one year old Mary Frame, describing her husband Bernard’s rampage which resulted in her fleeing their Ramsgate flat in terror, risking a heavy fine for making a non-essential journey. “It was no wonder – stuck in there for twenty three hours a day, constantly watching the TV and monitoring social media on his laptop. It was just a matter of time before he cracked.” While most commentators are blaming incidents like Bernard Frame’s meat cleaver rampage on cabin fever caused by the current coronavirus lockdown, others believe that, rather than being down to the boredom of confinement, such incidents are actually a reaction to the increased activity of celebrities on social media during the pandemic. “You can’t move on the web for finding yourself exposed to some Z-lister or other filming themselves in their own home singing, dancing, cooking or whatever – all in the name of keeping us ‘entertained’ during this pandemic,” says Sunday Bystander media Correspondent Rob Balustrade. “I mean, if exposure to that sort of thing isn’t driving people mad, I don’t know what would.” Indeed, upon reflection, Mary Frame recalled that, prior to her husband’s breakdown, he had just spent several hours watching videos of Ellie Goulding juggling with broken beer bottles on TikTok.

Several recent incidents of arson have likewise been blamed on a series of You Tube videos in which Lady Gaga lights her own farts. “He was watching them for hours on end, really impressed by the six foot long blue flames she was shooting out,” says Suzie Dado, whose boyfriend Dave Bannister is currently on bail, accused of attempting to burn down their Housing Association flat in Bermondsey. “It was when she started demonstrating her ability to direct her self-produced flames to incinerate household objects that it all went wrong.” According to Dado, an increasingly obsessed Bannister attempted to emulate Lady Gaga by blowing a picture of her mother off of a table with a fiery blast from his posterior. “He dropped his trousers, bent over and ignited a fart with his lighter. Well, he hit my mum’s photo, but also overshot, setting fire to the curtains,” she recalls. “I might have been able to put the curtains out, but he had also set fire to his pants and was running around the flat, screaming in pain and setting all the furniture alight – before we knew it, the whole place was ablaze. We were lucky to get out alive.”

For Balustrade, this is just another example of the bad influence of celebrities upon their newly found captive audience. “The problem is that they are natural exhibitionists, currently denied their usual platforms for publicly showing off, they’ve found new ways of forcing themselves on us,” he opines. “Right now, we really don’t have any way to escape them, we’re so desperate for distractions from the threat of Covid-19. But if they aren’t driving people insane with their inane antics, then they are encouraging reckless behaviour resulting in potentially fatal consequences like this arson business.” According to Balustrade, at least one person has been driven to the brink of suicide by the constant deluge of celebrity lockdown videos. “He was found hanging by his fingertips, stark naked, from the balcony of his seventh floor flat in Bracknell, shouting ‘Make them stop! Please make them stop!’,” he relates. “After three weeks of watching these celebrity videos on social media in an attempt to distract himself from the strictures of the lockdown and growing ever more distressed at their sheer inanity, the final straw was, apparently, Val Kilmer’s celebrity pissing contest.” Luckily, the victim was talked down by the emergency services and sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

Balustrade believes that celebrity activities during the current crisis should be regulated far more strictly, to stop them from exploiting the global lockdowns in order to promote themselves. “Let’s face it, they must be utterly desperate to be seen, because they are doing this sort of shit for free,” he claims. “Usually, they expect to be paid huge sums for performing. But now it is just so that they can let us all know that they are still here and thinking of us poor plebs in our hour of need.” The journalist believes that there are other reasons for this celebrity lockdown onslaught, most notably that it affords them an opportunity to flaunt their success at us, as they broadcast direct from their luxurious homes into our hovels. “Let’s face it, to some extent this is all about shoving their affluence down our throats,” says Balustrade. “’Look at us, ordinary people,’ they are saying. ‘We’re fabulously wealthy but we’re still condescending to entertain you.’ It’s all so in-your-face that I’m not surprised that it is driving people crazy.” He fears that continued public exposure to celebrities showing off from their homes on the pretext of lifting ordinary people’s spirits, could lead to a mass revolt against the lockdown.

“We’ve already seen all those people in the States campaigning for the end to the lockdown,” he observes. “I’m sure that it has less to do with restarting the economy than it does escaping this onslaught of celebrities’ homemade ‘entertainment’ which is being relentlessly blasted into their homes. They’re being forced to wonder whether Covid-19 could really be worse than that?” Balustrade believes that as long as the celebrities have the captive audience provided by the Covid-19 lockdowns, they just aren’t going to stop with their attention-seeking attempts to ‘entertain’ us. “Really, celebrities are trying enough at the best of times,” he muses. “But when they start turning up, unbidden, in our own homes,, that’s really the limit. – and because it is ‘for a good cause’, they think that they are beyond criticism.” So, for the sake of the global public’s mental health, Balustrade is pleading for the world’s governments to act promptly to lockdown the celebrities completely and deny them internet access for the duration of the pandemic.