I happened to glance down at my “Who to Follow” list whilst on Twitter this morning. It suggested I add someone called James Arthur. I wouldn’t normally give these things a second glance, but James Arthur had a verified account and was obviously someone who Twitter believed held some sort of social standing. So I checked his account. As of this morning, Mr Arthur had 1,848,471 followers. So I tweeted about discovering this seemingly famous person who I’d never heard of:

I still had no idea, so I did the normal thing of Googling him. Apparently he won The X Factor (a fact  confirmed by some of my own followers). Now, the fact that I don’t watch the show wouldn’t ordinarily mean that I wouldn’t have heard of one of the contestants. After all, they tend to be everywhere after a win like that, with their songs in the charts, their names in the media, and their faces splashed all over billboards. But no, this guy had simply never appeared on my radar.

And that’s absolutely fine, as I’m quite sure his music wouldn’t be to my taste. I was in short trousers the last time I cared who was at number one in the charts. But even on the apparently weak viewing figures of the last series, The X Factor was pulling in an average of almost 10 million pairs of eyes each week. Which obviously sounds like quite a lot of people. But that still means that almost 53 million people in the UK decided not to watch it – over five sixths of the population.

Clearly some of those people will have heard of him since though, with many picking up his songs on the radio and his face in the newspaper. So his standing increases and more and more people who have never heard of him will start to take his image, music and musings into their collective consciousness. And again, that’s absolutely fine.

James Arthur – the chap I’ve never heard of (source)

By now you may be wondering where I’m heading with this. Well, I can see how the winner of a singing contest viewed by 10 million people might come to be fairly powerful in certain quarters. He could become very useful for advertising, for example, should he maintain his celebrity for a decent length of time. I’m sure he might also be asked to make further appearances on other TV shows to help pull in the viewers. All fine.

But what of the other people we continually see on TV? The people who appear in shows without the viewership of a flagship Saturday show, but who somehow manage to be everywhere? Shows like The Only Way is Essex, whose stars seem to be omnipresent at times. They appear on panel shows, in advertising, in newspapers and magazines. If the media are to be believed, they permeate our entire society and we should hold them in high regard.

Let’s have a look at those viewing figures though. Aside from a slight jump in the third series, TOWIE pulls in an average of just 1.5 million viewers per show over its eight series on ITV2. That’s just 1 in 42 people watching the show, yet these people are everywhere. They are fawned over by certain sections of the media and allowed to have a voice which is ill-deserved.

Perhaps it’s just me. Maybe I’m the only one who doesn’t understand the ever-increasing pull of the celebrity, which is held in such high regard above real achievement. The celebrity who is picked apart for being vacuous and dimwitted by many who see them, but often regarded as role models by younger viewers, whose worlds become filled with this absolutely nonsense.

As I said though, perhaps it is just me. I’m in my 30′s now and I’m clearly not the target audience for this sort of thing. But isn’t it all just a little depressing that we all have to put up with these people?