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Shilpa gets on the wrong side of the media Out of London

Those who have watched the rise and fall of media-minted instant celebrities, had seen it coming. It was a bubble that, they knew, was waiting to burst. The question was when. What was certain was that one wrong move by Shilpa Shetty and Britain’s notoriously fickle and ruthless media would be baying for her blood. And, it looks, that’s about to happen.

Barely six months into it and her much-written-about British honeymoon appears to have already started to unravel. The hype that surrounded her rise to fame is not just fizzling out but threatening to go into reverse. Once hailed for everything from her looks to her demeanour by an embarrassed white middle class, seeking to distance itself from the “racist” and “nasty” working class Jade Goody, Ms. Shetty is now getting a kicking. And seen as an arrogant, preachy, and faintly ridiculous figure who needs to be cut down to size.

Poison-tipped knives had been out for sometime, but this week they stuck it into her really bad. Her assassin wasn’t from the xenophobic badlands of tabloid journalism but from the stable of one of Britain’s most respectable media outlets — The Telegraph group, once a fully paid-up member of the Shilpa fan club.

In a profile, headed “If Looks Could Kill, Meet the Real Shilpa Shetty,” The Sunday Telegraph’s woman magazine Stella tore into her, portraying her as the exact antithesis of her public persona a nd detecting in her a “yawning gap between her public image and reality.”

According to the interviewer, Judy Rumbold, Ms. Shetty greeted her with a “languid yawn and a look of disguised boredom” making “no move to rise from her chair, shake my hand or remove her sunglasses.” Hostility hung in the air “like fog” with Ms. Shetty breaking into bigger and bigger “yawns” as the conversation progressed. Or didn’t, actually, progress.

The Bollywood actor was “bored and vacant” and annoyingly self-absorbed. So annoying that Ms. Rumbold was tempted to tell her a few home truths. “I want to tell her that she has a few months before the Shilpa love-in ends and she and her sizeable arsenal of gold jewellery are consigned to the remainder bin. In the absence of any other tangible talent other than dancing skills and a forgiving way with racist oiks [an allusion to her forgive-and-forget remarks after her row with Ms. Goody on the Celebrity Big Brother show], the brutally short attention span of the Heat-reading masses will see to it that she is over before she ever really got going,” she wrote.

But before she could say those words, Ms. Shetty was already on her feet signalling that the interview was over: “We’re done now, aren’t we?”

The first hint that Ms. Shetty’s new fame might be on the wane came when the influential celebrity agent Max Clifford, who represented her at the height of her post-CBB status, decided to part ways amid reports that he had “dumped” her. Because of his enormous influence, Mr. Clifford is regarded as a bit of a weathervane in celebrity circles and his decision to represent or dump someone is seen as a pointer to a celebrity’s current fortunes.

Not surprising then that Ms. Shetty was stung by suggestions that he had dumped her and felt compelled to issue a strongly-worded statement saying that they had “parted ways mutually … so there is no question of being dumped!”

She attacked unnamed “vested interests” for taking “potshots” at her and “maligning” her image prompting a Times columnist to comment that her protestations reminded him of “crazy bag ladies ” in their moments of anger.

Once upon a time, no news about Ms. Shetty was bad news. Gossip writers drooled over her; politicians, keen to flaunt their multicultural and anti-racist credentials, sought her out; the BBC World Service gave her a starring role in its anti-Aids campaign; and the entertainment industry wooed her with supposedly mouth-watering offers.

Increasingly, however, it seems that she can’t get anything right. There have been reports of her demanding £20,000 for talking to the media; she has been accused of hypocrisy for endorsing a Vodka brand after preaching the virtues of not drinking alcohol on Big Brother; and her agent has been in the news for allegedly not paying up his bills. She has since clarified that the matter has been sorted out. So, what went wrong? Is it just Shilpa-fatigue or did she mess it up?

Critics say that Ms. Shetty became curiously smug as she basked in the warm glow of her Big Brother success, mouthing homilies that, as one bemused writer noted, made her sound like a saint besides whom even Mother Teresa looked faintly aggressive. Her biggest mistake was to start playing prime donna with the media. And, the British media don’t do prima donnas. They are the prima donnas, silly.

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