The death of celebrity gossip

When I was in hospital for almost half a year, learning how to face life as a ‘Halfling’ – a person in a wheelchair, patronised and petted – the thing I looked forward to most was a normal, some would say banal, event. I longed to be in my local Pizza Express, in Hove, reading Heat magazine to my husband as he ‘savoured’ his American Hot. To put it mildly, I am a far faster eater than Mr Raven, and rather than chatter to him and expect an answer, thus hindering his progress still further, I read to him. To add to the fun, I framed the problems of the Beckhams or the Sussexes as those of people we actually know, doing the appropriate voices, which rendered it delightfully bitchy.

But when we went searching for Heat on my homecoming, it took half an hour and six shops to find it; we finally located one in W.H. Smith. None of the shops with ‘newsagent’ above their door had it – indeed, only a couple of them even had newspapers. And how long is Smiths going to exist? After a whopping 233 years, the truly iconic blue and white sign will not be seen for much longer, with the brand having been sold for £76 million to Modella Capital, which will change its name on the high street to T.G. Jones. A Modella spokesperson said: ‘T.G. Jones feels like a worthy successor to the W.H. Smith brand. Jones carries the same sense of family and reflects these stores being at the heart of everyone’s high street.’

Really? To me it feels like yet another step towards the death of that gorgeous invention, the magazine. Though the sales figures of The Spectator have long been a cause of celebration round these parts, it is the exception that proves the rule. Very few magazines – like newspapers – are in a healthy state and when I opened my longed-for copy of Heat, I wondered whether it had been worth the search. For example, the old Heat would have found the concept of gender-fluid-nepo-babies hilarious; the new Heat is a humourless ‘ally’.

Heat was always different from other celebrity gossip magazines. It was neither slavish nor sleazy; it was knowing, and cheeky, and very much the brainchild of its editor Mark Frith. A boy from a Sheffield comp, he attended the University of East London, editing the college magazine but failing to graduate. He didn’t need to – at 20 he joined Smash Hits, becoming editor three years later. Smash Hits was a wonderful thing; on the surface an excitable chronicler of the teen idols of the 1980s and 90s, it was sarky and playful, written by clever journalists who loved pop music while understanding how sublimely silly it was.

Frith was perfectly placed to spread this sensibility to entertainment generally, developing and becoming editor of Heat, launching in 1999 and going on to sell half a million copies every week with a readership of around two million. Heat was such an insider that it became the medium through which the squabble between Elton John and George Michael was conducted after it published the former snarking at his friend to ‘get out more’. It was such a force that when with the porcelain-pale member of Girls Aloud Nicola Roberts it conducted a campaign calling for the banning of sunbeds for under-18s, a bill was passed in parliament.

Heat wasn’t perfect; in 2007 it gave away a sheet of stickers, one of which bore a photograph of Katie Price’s severely disabled son with the words ‘HARVEY WANTS TO EAT ME!’. No matter how much one believes in freedom of speech, it was hard to disagree with Janice Turner in the Times that ‘if a sticker mocking a blind and profoundly disabled boy doesn’t mark some new low, what possibly could?’. Mind you, it was hard not to feel a flare of defensiveness when Turner also revealed: ‘Recently at a magazine industry dinner Alastair Campbell told me he’d forbidden his teenagers from bringing Heat into his home. “It poisons the minds of women and children.”’ It was also described as a ‘dirty, filthy piece of shit’ by Ewan McGregor, which very much implies that it was doing its job properly.

The year before the sticker business, at 35, Mark Frith won the most prestigious award in magazines, the Mark Boxer Trophy, having already taken PPA Editor of the Year twice. The year after the Harvey Price debacle he left to write an excellent book, The Celeb Diaries: The Sensational Inside Story of the Celebrity Decade, in which he showcased himself as a sometimes sensitive soul, refusing to publish snaps of Amy Winehouse where she bore the marks of self-harming. Perhaps understandably, so much having happened so young, he now seems rather publicity-shy, with a LinkedIn page simply saying ‘Editorial Director at Bauer Media’.

The NME in the 1970s, Smash Hits in the 80s, the Modern Review in the 90s, Heat in the Noughties: what they all had in common was the ability to create a cool club which the nerdiest of kids could join if they had the cover price. Magazines are ruddy expensive these days; I came out of Smiths with four of them, costing me nearly 20 quid. No wonder so many people stand around reading them from cover to cover in the shop. But there’s still a lovely feeling about sitting outside a watering hole having a drink with a mate and an armful of mags on a sunny day and exclaiming over scandal together that staring slack-jawed at one’s phone can never recreate – a feeling of transcendent frivolity and ease.

Such moments are increasingly rare. Many things have led to this: the internet, the rise of PR, cancel culture – as G.V. Chappell wrote here recently: ‘Sadly, because everything’s now so carefully choreographed, there’s no danger of anything spontaneous and, therefore, interesting happening. This isn’t a rallying cry for bad behaviour for its own sake – or an argument against common courtesy, which is already in decline – but rather a call to loosen the fetters that mean, in today’s world, it’s easier and safer to say nothing at all.’ Even Popbitch, the online gossip hounds, once so eye-wateringly frank, have lost their bite. A recent item ran: ‘Eamonn Holmes fell off his chair live on air on GB News a couple weeks back. Spookily this exact same thing on the exact same chair happened to Christopher Biggins a while back, off camera, we think. After a short inquest – and to head off the threat of future C-list legal claims no doubt – GB News have dumped the slippy studio chairs and ordered new ones.’ The nearest that remains to the spirit of Heat is the Mail Online ‘Sidebar of Shame’; but crucially, without the wit, and seemingly written by AI – ‘a busty display’ is used more times than seems reasonable any time a female celeb shows a hint of cleavage.

In Pizza Express, I finally admitted defeat, put down Heat (there’s only so much pure molten excitement about Danny Dyer’s daughter I can muster) and switched to regaling Mr Raven with gossip about my actual friends. Because these days, they seem far more scandalous and fascinating than celebrities.