Academic calls for research into celebrity cult

Who said Big Brother wasn’t highbrow? Not Honey Langcaster-James, a psychologist at the University of Hull, who has worked on the sets of some of Britain’s most popular TV shows.

Commenting on Celebrity Big Brother, which begins tomorrow, Ms Langcaster-James, said there was a need for more thorough academic research into the cult of fame and celebrity.

The psychologist has plenty of experience with reality television. She was in Fiji last year where she spent two months with the cast and crew of Love Island, providing support to the island’s celebrity inhabitants.

Her time on Love Island followed appearances as Big Brother’s resident psychologist in Series 5 and 6, and on other reality shows including I’m Famous and Frightened, and Celebrity Surgery.

Ms Langcaster-James’s interest in the cult of celebrity developed through her work as a life and career coach. Through helping some of her more famous clients cope with celebrity-specific issues, she became fascinated with what it was that made people want to become famous and the characteristics that helped them reach stardom.

She said: “Since the celebrity scene is something of a modern-day phenomenon, the psychology of fame in the UK is surprisingly under-researched, only studied by a few people.

“Reality TV may seem a strange area for an academic, but the appeal lies in finding out why people find fame so appealing, how they go about getting it and how they deal with it when they have it. It is an important part of the human psyche that should not be overlooked.”

With the permission of programme-makers Endemol, Ms Langcaster-James was able to arrange for groups of students to attend the Big Brother auditions, where they gathered research data.

She said: “Reality TV is making it easier for people to identify with celebrities, this makes it easier for my students to have an empathy with those that they are studying, and therefore gain a greater understanding of their behaviour.

“Although the cult of celebrity is often seen as shallow, deeper academic research can be very useful in understanding why celebrities fascinate us and why so many people desperately want to pursue the limelight and aim to become celebrities themselves.”

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