Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

No longer a friend of the famous

issue 21 April 2007

Piers Morgan is big in the US. After his dismissal from the Mirror in 2004 he spent a thankless year as a freelance hack in Britain before popping up as the token ‘nasty Brit’ on Simon Cowell’s blockbusting show America’s Got Talent. This book traces his journey from sacked hack to superstar but unlike The Insider, Morgan’s chronicle of his first 20 years as a tabloid journalist, the new memoir covers barely 20 months. There’s enough padding here to insulate a barn. Morgan reprints in its entirety a Mother’s Day article listing ten important things Mrs Morgan taught little Piers when he was in shorts. The chaste details of his fling with Telegraph gossip columnist Celia Walden will make fascinating reading — for Piers and Celia. There’s a whole page devoted to the moment when Frank Bruno’s wife phoned by accident, thinking Morgan was a taxi driver. And even the racier passages — Sharon Osbourne calling Madonna a c**t — are clogged up with solemn rumination:

Am I not in danger of becoming the very thing I despise most — a talentless Z-list celebrity wannabe whoring myself around the TV airwaves just for the sake of being famous?

Mulling over one’s relationship with the godhead of fame is one of the defining characteristics of celebrity.

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