Someone called Amy on social media suggested that every Saturday going forward, Channel 4 should announce a Dispatches exposé to air that night, and we all guess which celebrity it will be about, and it becomes Britain’s primary form of entertainment, a sort of horrible Masked Singer spin-off. It sounds like an absolutely legitimate idea to me and, I reckon, the UK could rustle up enough subjects for it to run at least as long as Strictly. I thought about this idea quite a lot, partly because of the way it illustrates our current dystopia and partly because recent revelations have made me, like everyone else, think back to the entertainment and media I consumed in the early 2000s.
I had moved back in with my parents – I was surviving heartbreak, interning at a style magazine and doing my best to present as grown. Not only was I consuming media, I was trying my lazy hardest to learn how to work inside it, too, mining my friends’ lives for trends I could write about. Upstairs, a new lads’ mag was launching; down the hall was a gossip weekly that published paparazzi closeups of celebrity thighs surrounded by a “circle of shame”. In 2002, on Charlotte Church’s 16th birthday, Chris Moyles offered to take her virginity live on Radio 1.
