Celebrity infotainment: it's enough to make your head explode

GIVE ME A BREAK: HAIRDRESSERS never have copies of the Economist, the Financial Timesor the British Medical Journallying around.

It's always the celebrity magazines with photos of C-list wannabes and B-list almost-theres and A-list people who make a living out of being in Hello!and OK!, and you sit there perusing them while your crowning glory is being tended to, as though getting your hair cut means emptying your head. This is the one time when you absolutely have to sit still, which should be relaxing, but nobody meditates in the hairdressers.

Oh, look! There’s Obama eating a snow cone in Hawaii! Things must be looking up! And is that Jordan, wearing a Cinderella dress with a crown on her head? How many Cinderella dresses and tiaras does the woman own? She has a glum, angry, I-eat-men-for-breakfast expression, just waiting for me to project my fantasies on to her, like a grown woman playing with a Barbie. But wait! I don’t have to bother. The magazine writer has done it for me, in a puff piece speculating on how dreadful it must be for her spending Christmas “without a man” sharing her bed. How absolutely awful! Jordan is sleeping alone? Call the UN. Or even better, Ross Kemp. Gaza’s a picnic compared to Jordan’s bed.

On another page there’s a “celebrity” couple wallowing in their love, on the floor, surrounded by carefully lit baubles provided by the set decorator – will there be carefully lit babies this time next year? And, oh my, there’s a picture of that girl from EastEnders – or is it Corrie? – carrying her baby on set, accompanied by a piece on how horrible her life must be now that she’s broken up with her husband. How do they know? She looks very capable to me.

And – here’s a shock – there’s skinny Posh again on page 4, and page 5, and page 6 and page 7 and page . . . And, oh my, Madonna’s face caught by paparazzi really does look puffy, doesn’t it? She looks like she’s overdosed on collagen, or whatever it is they pump into rich women’s face these days.

In the paparazzi shot she’s nothing like in that meticulously produced perfume ad – is it an ad for perfume? Or washing-up liquid? Anyway, there she is dressed in her underwear, doing the dishes, with her hair all nicely tousled, and her boobs almost perky, and her frazzled face airbrushed to sexy-mom-tied-to-the-kitchen-sink perfection because – the context of the picture tells us – she’s been up all night with her pumped husband making more babies to wash dishes for.

Hang on, let me check my iPhone to find out more about this ad. Yes, here’s the explanation: “The Dolce & Gabbana spring/summer 2010 campaign captures the unseen side of Madonna, photographed by Steven Klein, inspired by Neorealist Italian cinema, and its iconic depictions of strong, tender and naturally beautiful women. . . The new Dolce Gabbana campaign encourages a woman to cast aside fears of showcasing her femininity because it is where her true beauty resides.” It’s the “naturally beautiful” line that has me laughing so hard that the girl doing my colour has to hold my head still.

Madonna is channelling a lusty Italian actress, Anna Magnani – so I’m off to Wikipedia to find out who Magnani was, while simultaneously wondering if Madonna is really just laughing at those of us who actually can be found hurriedly doing dishes in our nightgowns while trying to get the kids off to school, and seriously believe that a spray of whatever she’s selling might just transform us into neorealist Italian cinema actors – as if that were actually a goal to aim for.

And then I see a picture of Madonna, with her adopted child Mercy, who is dressed conservatively in a Bond Street coat and scarf, while her older sister, Lourdes, skulks behind, and I wonder is Madonna trying to recreate her original family situation, where she had to play mother after her own mother died. I have to stop myself. This is too tiring. I’m supposed to be relaxing, getting my hair done – not analysing this magazine as if I were doing a PhD in celebrity fixation. Even when I’m trying to empty my brain, I’m still thinking too much. I’m so used to processing information that I can’t sit still for a haircut without information overload, and 99 per cent of the time it’s non-news masquerading as news.

Dare I mention the Van Morrison episode? The story that he had produced a Little Van with somebody called Gigi Lee fooled me like it did the many news outlets, even though the last I heard he was still living with Michelle and their two young children in Dalkey. Morrison says he didn’t know about the story until two days later, that his website had been hacked into and there is no truth in the story.

Meanwhile, journalists around the world were holding their breath before self-flagellating and writing a hundred lines each: “A website is not a primary source.” Now the newspapers are saying that there actually is a Gigi Lee and she has business links with Morrison and . . . Oh wait, here’s something more interesting. The Telegraph has printed pictures of what a “forensic” artist claims Madonna will look like in 10 years time. Gotta see that.

And here we were thinking that the definition of news was to expand our worlds and our insight, when in reality the information age’s constant flow of infotainment belittles our intelligence by the day. Some might celebrate witty Twitter banter and a blogosphere full of lively self-expression but – call me old-fashioned – my New Year’s resolution is to turn it all off before my beautifully coiffed head implodes, or my roots grow out – whichever comes first.