The truth about 'My Saturday'

Celebrities: they're just like you and me. Worse, actually.

I’ve been up doing this since 4am, because I’m famous and very normal. Photo by Oksana Taran on Unsplash

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The truth about everything* is different every week! This week it’s Word Count – taking a closer look at popular columnists, regular features in newspapers and magazines, or media coverage in general. If you enjoy it, the coolest way to support me is to become a paid subscriber.

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The point of celebrity worship is to imagine a life so unlike your own that being famous yourself would somehow magically cancel out all your ordinary Joe problems. Utility bills would disintegrate before your eyes, you’d no longer fear the clunk of your boiler struggling into life, and your backache, tennis elbow and dental acid erosion – and mortality’s other constant threatening letters – would fade into insignificance. Being famous is glamour, it exists a comfortable ten feet off the ground where the air is clearer, it is endless holidays and personal trainers and champagne, like, all the time and instant f•ckability no matter what room you’re in.

Yet celebrities are keen to dispel this myth. They have their reasons: one, being a household name and having money in the bank (should you be fortunate enough to experience both at the same time) comes with its own pressures; and two, they don’t want us mouth-breathers, the general public, angling for a piece of pie. Hence the endless attempts at the ‘just like you’ – they eat doughnuts by the pound, never exercise really, wake up feeling awful some days, and the ultimate shot at relatability: ‘I was an ugly dork at school’.

Sure.

If you’re famous enough, you’ll achieve either a fawning profile in a Sunday supplement – where it’s obligatory to reiterate how down-to-earth you are when talking to the photographer, the length of your limbs, and a zillion other forensic details other than… what you’re actually like as a person – or, even better, you’ll summarise your normality checklist in a ‘day in the life’ column, which most weekend mags host because it’s easy to produce. A couple of emails to a PR, maybe a Zoom if the featured star actually wants to participate, a few extra questions tagged onto the end of an interview, a glancing promise of copy approval which never materialises, and you’re done! Usually these insights into 24 hours as a celeb go unremarked – visits to farmers’ markets and two hours in a yoga studio do not a scintillating read make – but occasionally one tastes the viral heights, thanks to being preposterous, humorous, or plain weird.

“My life is full – especially now I have an air fryer.” – Neil Morrissey

2024 claimed its first ‘day in the life’ scalp in the Telegraph’s ‘My Saturday’ column, when high-decibel Masterchef presenter Gregg Wallace professed his admiration for a Harvester breakfast buffet and revealed that after an hour playing in the garden with his young son, he’d retreat to quasi-goblin mode, gaming, away from the rest of his family. Wallace always carries heavy viral content energy – he’s quite irritating, presents an equally annoying show, takes himself hyper-seriously, and is that man most of us dread becoming, a pernickety low-grade tyrant who believes, like a newborn baby, that the rest of us are mere satellites in their orbit. Wallace has since debunked commenters’ suggestion he wasn’t a great dad and husband and claims this deeply upset him, so I will leave Gregg alone with his thoughts, but I fancied a look at who else has popped up in ‘My Saturday’. I went back in the archives as far as last summer as there seemed to be a two-year hiatus previously, killed off by lockdown, perhaps or, revived to compete with the other (spoiler: more interesting) columns of this ilk in rival rags. Answers on a postcard, to somebody who cares.

So, let’s scour these celebrity Saturday confessionals and see who’s the weirdest, shall we?