After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Human Cost of Fame

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

You might think the idea of “celebrity” is a modern invention. In reality, its roots stretch back centuries... perhaps even millennia. People have always been fascinated by the rare individuals who rise above the crowd and capture public attention. Whether admired or despised, the famous have always held a powerful grip on our curiosity.In this episode, we explore the dark origins of 'celebrity': where it began, how it has evolved, and the strange ways it has shaped people's lives. We delve into tales of the Ancient Gods of Gossip to the Georgian actor who hired haters to heckle his rivals…And who better to take us through this episode than Greg Jenner? Greg is a public historian, broadcaster and author of works including ‘Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity From Bronze Age to Silver Screen.’ He’s the host of the BBC Podcast ‘You’re Dead to Me.’This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. Produced by Tomos Delargy. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Looking for more shady and sinister stories, sign up to History Hit. You can join us to explore the tragic life of the Bronties or discover the chilling story of Burke and Hair. Plus, with your History Hit subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe to start exploring the past. Fame, rumour, salacious scandal, we tend to think of celebrity as a modern phenomenon. But for millennia, humans have been captivated by fame. Whether craving it for themselves or spectating it in others, we chase it in the hope of glory, yet we are just as drawn to the thrill of infamy. In this episode, we trace the dark origins of celebrity and ask why being talked about

It has always mattered, despite the cost. Hello there, and welcome to After Dark. Now, you might have been noticing recently that I am flying solo at the minute because Maddie is off on a world trek discovering all kinds of new species. She's not, she just had a baby, but that's the story I'm going with. We are going to have an amazing few weeks, though, where we're interviewing some incredible historians, including the historian that we're going to chat to today, who you may well recognize. In this episode, we are going to explore the dark origins of celebrity, where it began,

how it evolved, and how it shaped the modern culture of fame we recognize today. We'll delve into tales of the ancient gods of gossip to the Georgian actor who hired haters to heckle at his rivals. And who better? To take us through this episode than Greg Jenner. Greg, of course, as you will know, is a public historian, broadcaster and author of works, including dead, famous, and unexpected history of celebrity from the Bronze Age to the silver screen. And he is the host of the BBC podcast. Of course, you are dead to me. Welcome to After Dark, Greg. Thank you for having me. Now, this was really interesting to me. I read your book probably a couple of years ago now, but I was rereading when I knew you were coming on today because we do are due diligence

at After Dark. But one of the things that really struck me, and we'll talk about some specifics in a minute, but I just want to ease in with a general idea of this history, was, and it was a relief, actually. I remember thinking this a couple of years ago. Actually, this is a relief because the culture and impact of celebrity is actually really similar still, particularly by the time you get to say the 18th century, but even before, I always felt like we had kind of let ourselves down by being so celebrity obsessed and so kind of fame obsessed and we're like, oh, God, we should be better than this.

And I am very celebrity and fame obsessed in many ways. But it has always been like that. There's always been this idea that there's something a bit grubby going on, right? Or at least again, from the 18th century onwards, this has always been a bit like, oh, they're famous. So talk to me a little bit about that, like how you experienced that as you were writing this. I mean, yeah, it's really interesting. When I sat down to write the book, this was way back when. So the book came out 2020, but it took me four years to research it.

So I sort of sat down 10 years ago, I guess. And I thought, I'll write about celebrity because, you know, everyone cares about celebrity and it's a very modern thing. We're all obsessed with it. But I wonder where it started. And in my sort of naivety, I thought, well, it's probably, it's Hollywood, maybe a little bit earlier. Maybe it's, maybe it's Oscar Wilde. We're going 1920s and no earlier. 1920, you know, Charlie Chaplin, maybe it's Oscar Wilde.

Actually, maybe there's a few Victorians, whatever. And very quickly, hang a minute, I keep finding the celebrities. I keep going back and I keep finding celebrities. And I keep going deeper and darker. And it's really interesting. there is this sort of famous complaint that people are famous for being famous. This sort of notion that they don't do anything. They don't have a skill.

They're not talented. They're not important or influential, whatever. They're just famous for being famous. And this is a lament that was made by Daniel Borsden, this sort of great 20th century scholar who wrote a book called The Image where he was sort of saying, everything's gone wrong in society. We're all obsessed with the superficial and in the olden days, in the glory days. We cared about people of great repute and renowned who did things for the service of humanity.

And I sort of read that and went, yeah. Turns out. It turns out. And it turns out, no, not at all. You know, in 1786, there was an author called, I think Thomas Busby, who complained about people who were famous for being famous. I remember this specifically from your book. And he was like, all these celebs floating around in their wigs. And he's like, how have they got all their money?

Where are they getting their money from? They're not landed gentry. they're not important. How are they getting these lovely clothes? Why are they carrying a sword around? They're not a knight. They're not a, you know, and it's funny. You just sort of go, ah, right, okay, start again.

So when I ended up, you know, having to organise the book and make an argument, make a case, I had to sort of come up with a checklist of what I thought a celebrity was. And I came up with five points that I was going to sort of defend as my criteria. And I could go all the way back to 1710 with that criteria without any problems. I could maybe start arguing about the six. 1600s and there are some scholars out there who would argue, oh, no, medieval saints for celebrities, or they would go, oh, Roman gladiators were celebrities. I'm not so convinced of that, so I wasn't willing to put my name to that theory, but I discuss it in the book. But yeah, for sure,

300 years, celebrity culture has been crucial. Around. Around and important. And understandable and identifiable to us today, right? Yeah. So clear. Like all that, I mean, obviously we now live in a very interesting moment whereby the internet has created a new type of celebrity that we call the influencer that has in many ways broken my definition. Like my definition holds up to 1980, 1980. Talk to us about that definition then. Because that's interesting. Yeah. So my definition, and I'm sort of still happy with my definition because I'm a historian and I was looking at celebrity up to 1950 and then I stopped. So, no more. No, that's enough. For me, the five points are you've got to be famous to strangers. You've got to have a personal charisma that is unique, like a brand that

people just know you for, you know, Brooklyn Beckham, right? Everyone knows. who he is because he's Brooklyn Beckham but what does he do? You're like, well, he just does Brooklyn Beckham, he's these sort of Beckham things. We don't really know, but like... That list of Beckham things. We know what he does, right? You have to have people that need to be obsessed with your personal life. So they've got to be interested in what it is you do, but also who you are,

who you're sleeping with, your health issues, where you holiday, what you look like, your tattoos, your kids. That's important. There needs to be a mass media industry supporting this. There needs to be a dissemination culture of print or iconography or imagery that, like, tells people about these people. So there needs to be an infrastructure that shares the image or the celebrity's sort of identity

so others can access it. And then finally, the most important thing for me is there needs to be a commercial economy. Now, the interesting thing about influencers is they don't technically require the mass media thing. I see. So this is where you're talking about the break. Yeah. So influencers are unique in some ways in that you tacitly opt in to following them.

and you almost sign a contract and say, I'm going to follow this person and I'm going to care. But a lot of them are incredibly famous to their followers, but they can walk down the high street and no one back to night. Tom Cruise goes down high street,

everyone is screaming, Brad Pitt, whatever. But an influencer can be world famous to their fans and totally anonymous to everyone else. And that's not what celebrity culture is. Liberty culture effectively is a sort of shotgun that fires images at you. You are bombarded every day

in every medium, advertising, newspapers, magazines, sports, culture, entertainment, music. You are being bombarded daily by ideas and images of famous people and their associations. And influencer culture is not that. You are choosing to follow and you may have all the same emotional interactions, the parissocial interactions where you care deeply and you're obsessed over them. But this person has not been, you know, shotgun across wide society. You know, your mom doesn't know who they are.

you know, your boss doesn't know who they are. They can walk down the high street. No one knows they are they are. And when they show up on strictly, because the BBC producers are like, we should get an influencer. Most of the people are like, who's this?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Never heard of him. That's always my, that's so funny that you mentioned mums because that's my criteria for when somebody is famous. I'm like, does my mum,

who is not necessarily, you know, plugged in to the zeitgeist. Very purposely out of her. She thinks she's being watched by the Chinese for some random reason. I'm like, man, what? And if she knew I was talking about around the podcast, she'd absolutely implode.

But they're not spot. lying on you, you have nothing that they want. Anyway, that is my criteria of going, do mums know who this person is? Because then they have infiltrated. Sure. And yet, with influencers, that is starting to mel. Let's take some of that lack of criteria then that you're talking about in terms of influences or they're changing it and go way, way back to ancient history.

And talk about the ways in which some of that doesn't tally with what you're saying. But there's still some parallels. I will say to you, Hero Stratis, and you will say, Anthony, you're not pronounced. announcing that correctly. No, no, I think that's fine. Okay. So let's, let's talk about what that type of fame looked like. So this is a really interesting case study, right? So Hirastratis is someone we should not know the name of. So he is a criminal. He's an ancient criminal. He's around in, I think, 4th century BCE. And he is enslaved. He's a person of low status, low money, low value in terms of societal, you know, sort of privilege.

And he wants to be famous. He wants to be renowned. He wants to have people know who he is. He wants to sort of be glorious. And he's like, I don't have any skills. You know, he's the Brooklyn Beckham of the ancient world. I've got to be fine today. He could do it. Poor Brooklyn. No, he Estatus decides he's going to do something that makes him famous. And the one thing he knows he can do is he can burn down something important. So he destroys one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Wow. Burns down the sacred temple. And this is so shocking and horrifying that his punishment is twofold. One, he's going to be punished in the normal way, you know, are he horribly killed. Two, he's going to be sort of written out of history. They decide that this is a man who

was obsessed with the idea of being known. And so the punishment will be to ensure that he is scrubbed from the records, that he will not be known, though. They're going to ensure he does not get his wish. And the ancient Greek word for that is nucleus. The problem is when people do stuff like that, you can't help to talk about it. When someone burns down something important, we all want to gossip when someone does something dramatic or transgressive. we can't help but obsess about it. It becomes this massively important public conversation, the discourse that unites us all.

You know, you chat to the taxi driving, your hairdresser, about did you hear about so-and-so? And that's what happens. So Herostratus is punished by being written out of history, but we know his name. I have two words that are blaring in my head based on what you're saying, Greg. And that is cancel culture.

Yeah. Because we have this idea that this is a new thing that being written out of something or cancelled or having, you know, come up and's for your actions is the other way of looking at it, which it is in this case. Then it's a very kind of 2000s thing or even 2010's thing. But here we are in the 4th century BCE and there is a version of this happening. And I just think that is fascinating in the ways in which we think everything is new around celebrity.

But actually the history is really embedded for quite some time. It is, and this is someone who has done something profoundly shocking for the purpose of being famous. And I used the word famous carefully there. Yes, yeah, yeah. In the book, I try to make the case to say fame is an ancient concept. We're very, very comfortable with that because it's an ancient word. Celebrity, I think, only shows up in the 1700s because that's when the commercial economy gets bolted on. When the cash starts to be added, when you've got that ability of mass media, you've got daily newspapers,

you know, the daily currents, the first daily newspaper in 1710. you start to get this industry that can then monetize fame. But fame is an ancient idea, and we have many ancient writers who talk about it. The most famous ones perhaps would be Virgil, the great Roman poet. Plutarch talks about it. Cicero talks about what it's like being famous. He sort of talks about how weird it is. Everyone knows what he's doing.

He's kind of a bit nervous about it. Virgil was famously awkward and shy and hated people knowing who he was and would hide behind columns. He's this great national poet. He's like Rome's favorite poet. But he's like this sort of slightly awkward nerd who's like, I've written a parium, but please don't look at me. I mean, he's all of us in many ways. We're just kind of doing whatever we can. But everyone is like, you know, podcasters just hiding behind the things.

He's a classic writer, right? He wants to work alone at home and he doesn't really want to have to go and do a book tour and talk to people. But we have this word fame, which the Latin word is farmer, F-A-M-A. And it derives from the Latin verb fari, which means to speak. and it is this notion of rumour, gossip, and have you heard? And that sort of notion that people are talking about you. And what's really interesting and what's very difficult and what was a nightmare for me as a historian is that when we look at it,

the Romans and the Greeks have these words that they used that actually the definitions are super slippery and they're not hugely helpful and they're sometimes contradictory. And it's hard to actually go, okay, what category are we in now? Farmer often was associated with glory. So Achilles, you know, sort of the great, you know, famous warrior of ancient Greece theory, you know, he's obviously a mythical person, but in the Odyssey, sorry, in the Iliad, rather, he is this sort of man who wants to be renowned and glorious after his death and he's got a choice. You know, how is he going to die?

He decides he's going to die at Troy. And he gets his glory. And of course, famously in the sequel, the Odyssey, he is in hell. in the afterlife and he's miserable and he complains and says oh i'm king of the undead and whatever and it's boring this is this is shit i really just i would trade it all in to be a peasant i would trade it all in to be back on the farm just you know raking shovel and shit shuffling shit raking the plant or whatever you know following the ox cart and so this is this really interesting tension whereby you get this notion of glory claus the greek word claios which means like an eternal renown your name lives on

beyond you. This is a Greek idea and that's what he craved. But we also get this this separate version of Klaus, this rumor version, which is basically people talking about you as you're alive while you're still there. So these two interacting ideas, actually they're very different. One is like this posthumous reputation that follows you on. You know, you become a great, one of the pantheon of great, Chaucer, Shakespeare, you know, that you want to be up there. But then you've also got this idea of rumor, of gossip, of people saying, oh, have you heard what Cicero's done? You will not be. believe what he's wearing. Have you seen his shoes? And that's, it gets the same word. People are

using the same word for it. But it's a totally different concept. And so Virgil is our great source on this because Virgil talks about Farma the goddess, not as this wonderful, heroic, glorious, beautiful, angelic woman with, you know, the Greek version is that. The Greek version is this beautiful, long-haired angelic sort of nymph who flies with a trumpet. And she, she toots your name. You know, she's called Fameh. And she, she, she, she, she, she, she, sort of sings your song almost and you are glorious. Virgil's like, no, no, Farmer is Godzilla. Yeah.

She is a terrifying monster and she is covered in tongues and ears, like a whole body is covered in tongues and ears and eyes. Pretty casual stuff, Greg. And the more people talk about you, the biggest she gets. And she hunts you down. She is like the predator. She'll come and get you. She will find you.

And the more they talk, the biggest she gets until her head's in the cloud. She does not sleep, she does not eat, she will find you, and people are talking about you, and she will destroy you. And so it's this sort of notion that fame, and funny enough, Lady Gaga called her album, The Fame Monster. And classicists across the world went, yes, good. I know this. I know this about it. I've never heard a Lady Gaga song, but yes. Thank you. Yeah. Because actually the idea is that this is a destructive predatory beast that will devour you. Fame will devour you. Fame will either destroy your soul or more likely will this or your career, you know, you'll do something wrong. You will mess up and the people will come for you. The mob will come for you. Oh my God. And of course, that is what happens to Cicero.

It's what happens to Caesar. It's what happens to numerous people in the ancient world who are, you know, they go from being heroic, you know, themistic lees or whatever. They go from being great hero. A year later, they are, you know, exiled or murdered in the sewers or whatever or stabbed by their friends. So fame, glory, renown, infamy. These are all these words we kind of chuck around and we feel like they're all like synonyms. They're just not. synonyms. They've all come from different places. They're all very awkwardly, linguistically, related, but not the same. And the word notorious now for us is like, oh, notorious. It just meant, it just meant known. Yeah. Until like Chaucer's time, it just meant well known,

just being noted. So the notable B.I.G is not nearly as exciting as the notorious BIG, right? And the infamous, if I said, that may be his first reference on this podcast just to let you know. But like, you know, we talk about infamy. We talk about the infamous. That is a, that's a 16th century. thing. Infamy didn't mean anything. To the Romans, it was a legal situation where you were outside of the kind of legal status of protection by the law, or maybe if you were a low status person like a gladiator, you might have infamy infamia. But the loadedness of these terms, infamy notoriety, these kind of almost quite sexy, dangerous, you know, if I say to someone, oh, she's infamous. The infamous, great. If I described you as an infamous historian, you'd be

insulted, right? You might be slightly pleased. There might be a little bit if you're like, it's nice to have a bit of brand. But you wouldn't be like, thanks. Yeah. So there are these words that we think of as the same, they're all the sort of synonyms. They're just not. Fame, celebrity, renown, they're not the same.

They don't have the same meanings. But we sort of smush them together now. I've been noticing recently as well that infamy is more and more being used in the wrong context, text where they're just saying, the infamous to mean in a celebratory kind of way, I'm just like, that's not what that is.

That's, you know, or it's not what I'm here. It's not right. That's what language does, right? It changes meaning. It gradually evolves at a time. And there's all these words in the 1920s, people started coining new words for celebrities, things like X. So the word X factor is a 1920s phrase.

Oh, so having the X factor. Having something, something, yeah. And the word we use all the time, of course, is charisma. Yeah. We talk about charismatic people. And that is an ancient word that, you know, charisma is a Greek word. It means grace gifted by God.

We get it from St. Paul. He's like one of the great ancient writers who talks about this, of like people who are blessed by the Lord's sort of generous gift of this, this grace. But later on, by that sort of late 19th and early 20th century, people are talking about it as like a sort of weird power, like a magnetism. And you have people like mesmer who talk about mesmerism and the notion that some people can get up on stage and command an audience. And what is that? And so there's all these words, this sort of linguistic shrapnel that celebrity culture has produced. And it sort of exploded.

And we've got all these shards of linguistic sort of shrapnel. Shrapnel, just around the place. You're like, what do these all mean? Linguistic shrapnel? I'm enjoying that. That's good. Now, what you're saying then in your theory, in your five pillars of celebrity is that in terms of Herostratus, for instance, what we're missing is that economic thing. Is that no commercial economy? No commercial economy. And arguably, perhaps no mass media, right? There's no newspapers in the ancient world. There's no, obviously, literacy rates are low. You know, in Rome, they had this sort of the kind of bulletins that would sort of tell you important news of the empire, but that's not really the same

as a newspaper. So there's an argument to be had there. You can debate that. Classist might want to, you know, they might want to fight me on them. That's absolutely fine. That's what history is. Physically, I'm not going to win, but I'll, you know, I'll defend my own up. Against a classicist, you might. Maybe. It depends. You know, it depends. So the interesting question of think is, like, when do we find that kind of mass media? And obviously, we find it in the 18th century very comfortably. You've got pretty culture. You've got people in the street singing songs. You've got ballad You've got newspapers, you've got print culture, you've got embroideries, you've got merch. In the 18th century, there is merch.

And what's surprising about it, and one of the definitions that was important for me is that celebrity culture isn't necessarily where the celebrities make the money themselves. It's where other people make money from them. So I talk about the commercial economy, but it's not necessarily the celebs earning the cash. It's other people monetizing their brand. So the first celebrities in the 1710s, 20s, 30s, whatever, you could buy their face. You could stick it in your pub, pop it in your front room. You could have a print.

You could have a mug with their face in it or a medallion or a brooch. You might name your daughter after them. But the celebrity's not getting any money. They haven't got an agent. There's no one going around going, oh, you're using my likeness. That comes way later. That comes in sort of 1860s, 70s. I'm even surprised as that early, to be honest.

Oh, really? Okay. No. Yeah. No. Yeah. So we get, you know, WG. Grace, the great cricketer, the Victorian cricketer with a very big beard.

He's one of the first celebrities to do advertising tie-in. where he became the face of Coleman's mustard. What a collab. It's a tale as old as time, right? So you start to see in the 19th century this notion of celebrities going, I can monetize my fame by either licensing my name and brand to a product or by sort of quite carefully and cleverly like doing deals or sort of, you know, mirroring almost what brands are doing with me

or what the people are doing with me. But in the 18th century, it's been done to them. Celebrities are victims almost of their fame and other people are monetizing it. And the celebrity's job really is to earn money through conventional means, which is, you know, either selling books or getting paid to be on stage or, you know, to a certain extent, maybe being patronized by some wealthy, you know, Duke who fancies them or whatever. But it's actually quite hard to monetize your fame in the ways that we now think of as what, you know, what influencers do all the time, right?

You know, the influencers are always doing hashtag ad, hashtag, you know, sponsored content, you know, by this tooth whitening kit, by these supplements. That's for us now is normal. In the 18th century, that's not happening. It's happening to them. It's not happening with them. So let's turn then to one of this more clear example of celebrity that you're talking about. We're going to fast forward to the early 19th century and the actor Edmund Keem.

Because he is slightly, he perfectly encapsulates this idea that there is a skill, set there, but he's also very aware of his brand. He manipulates that brand. But you were talking earlier, Greg, about this idea that it happens to you almost. And although Keen's trying to manipulate some things here, there's also stuff beyond his control that starts to shape how people are seeing. Yeah, Keene is my favorite celebrity from history because he's an absolute asshole. He's the worst. He's a toxic douchebag, but he's a genius actor. He is one of the great actors to this day. If you go to, oh, you're an actor, right? We know his name. Right. He's still, he's still. He's to linger is definitely. He's a Shakespearean sort of tragedian. That's his sort of great thing.

He comes to fame in an extraordinary way, literally overnight fame. So in the book, I argue, overnight fame does not exist except for Edmund Kien. He's a nobody. He's a sort of wasteoral alcoholic. And then suddenly he has this incredible breakout performance in 1814. And suddenly within a month, he's the most famous man in Britain. And he's brilliant. He's absolutely brilliant. He gets on stage and within minutes, people are like, this guy's different. He's, you know, So as you say, he's talented. But he then starts to manipulate his fame. He's trying to sort of leverage it.

So he gets more famous, gets more rich. He starts earning a lot more money. But he found a drinking club. This is a man with huge, a massive chip on his shoulder. He's got plenty of enemies. He starts leveraging his fans against his enemies. So he hires his friends or he pays them, the Wolves Drinking Club. He pays them to go to his rival actors, gigs and plays and to boo them

and to sort of, you know, bully them in the street. So he's sort of, he's kind of, there's a thing you do called the clack. You know, Voltaire did this. There's a clack where you hire an audience. You pay them and you sort of secrete them through the audience. A bit like modern stage musicians do or whatever. And you pay them to like clap at the right bit or to sort of say, oh, bravo, very good. That's excellent.

And then you hope that other people kind of go, oh, okay, yeah, I guess we're clapping. I think he might be good. Yeah, I think he might be good. Yeah, I think it's good. So Keene, he goes, well, I'm going to go on stage further. I'm not going to hire people to cheer me because they're already cheering for me. That's fine. I'm good at this. I'm going to hire people to boo my enemies. So that's the first thing he does is he sort of goes after his enemies by deliberately trying to, you know, trash their careers. He also, when a young rival

comes up, who's a huge admirer of him, Keene invites him to be in the play with him, takes him on to the stage with him, and then sets about destroying him by outacting him, making sure he looks stupid, destroys his career. And lo and behold, that person then moves to America and is the father. of the man who shoots Abe Lincoln. So we can blame Edmund Keane for that. So that's the booth. So we got this sort of notion of Keene also as a sort of major transgressive celebrity. He is scandalous.

He's always cheating on his wife. He has sex workers in the wings of his plays. So like the moment he's not on stage, he's literally backstage having sex. He tours America twice. He's one of the first ever celebrities to tour America. This is a hugely difficult thing to do at the time. There's no trains. It takes six to eight weeks to sail there.

So touring America is arduous. It's physically difficult. He tours America the first time it goes pretty well, but he gets to Boston and he alienates the people of Boston by refusing to go on because not enough people are in the theatre. He's accidentally shown up at the wrong time of year when people don't get to the theatre. And he's sort of like, I am the great Edmund Keen, they will come. And the theatre manager is like, no, they just don't come at this time of year.

Even for you. Even for you. But he sort of peeks out of the wings and it's half full. And he's like, well, I'm not going on there. And so he alienates people of Boston. They're furious at him. he then writes a sort of piece in the newspaper complaining about the Bostonians, you know, I've come all this way from Britain. I'm the great Edmund Keen, you should love me.

And they're like, well, okay, never come back to our city. We hate you now. Anyway, later on, he has a huge sex scandal. He's been cheating on his wife with his friend's wife, basically. He's, you know, doing the worst thing you can. And then his lover gets sick of him, moves on to another man and decides that she's going to leave all the love letters for her husband to find. So the husband then picks up a gun and goes to go and shoot Edmund Keen. So luckily someone sort of grabs the gun off him, so you can't, you know, Keem survives that. But the love letters are published in the press. And there is a court case.

He's accused of breaking up this woman's marriage effectively. It's called criminal conversation, which basically means cheating. And he is fined. He has to pay a huge amount of money. So it's a massive scandal. His sexts have been discovered, basically. You know, it's this sort of a massive, massive thing. So he thinks, well, where can I go to escape this scandal?

I know America. Oh, no. And he goes back on a boat, goes back to America, shows up in. Boston and the people of Boston physically try to kill him. They storm. Before we go to Bob, because I have a little newspaper clipping, which I know you'll be familiar with, but I'll read it out in a second. But as a man in Keene's position who had so deliberately tried to control his brand,

even by downing other people's brands, does this, does the, is it the affair? Do you think that's, or the outing of the affair that really sullies the brand as opposed to the temperament of the man? Yeah, I think so, because up to this. point he is renowned as a brilliant stage actor and people are obsessed we're going to see him they pay a lot of money to see him they will sort of smash their way into the theatre to see him you know there are sort of crowds outside who can't get in and the theatre doors are broken down because there's a sort of fever you want to see him there's these these manias there's a very famous young

child actor called master betty william betty and he it's betty mania people are people like break into the theatre with guns and they sleep overnight in the theatre to sort of make sure that they're in the front row you know it's long before the kind of queuing for harry pot or the k-pop you know We've got this in the 18th century, early 19th century. Keene, I think, is sort of doing fine reputationally, and then this major, major scandal breaks, and it does break his reputation. And in the States, he is still famous because, to a certain extent, it's exciting that he's come all this way.

So he does really well in New York. He does well in Philadelphia or wherever. He goes up to Canada, I think, and he's made a sort of honorary member of the Huron Indigenous tribe, and he sort of comes back to Britain wearing a full Native American headdress. And this is after the scandal. After the scandal and he's got a puma that he's got a lion that he's brought back from America. Don't we all. He's got a pet lion and he'll be sort of seen walking around London with his pet lion.

So he kind of wears the brand. He kind of is, I am Edmund Keane. But the scandal is, yeah, it's damaging, destructive. And he's a raging alcoholic and he dies very young. He is completely destroyed by alcohol. He's a horrible piece of work and alienates all his friends and alienates his family. And it's a tragic life in many ways because he's brilliant. And he's funny.

And there's the possibility. there, he could have been a great person, but he's still a great artist, but he is an absolute train wreck. The Boston Debating Society met in 1825, October 1825, when he took that trip to America. This is post-scandal, right? This particular one. And they had a meeting that will be held at 7 o'clock at the Pantheon Hall on Tuesday evening next.

Question for discussion. Would the public be justified in expelling keen the tragedy? from the stage on account of his private character, Joel Smith Secretary asks. And so there is this idea that there is a benchmark, despite the fame, that we expect you to live up to. It's a really interesting question, because so much of what we love about celebrity culture is the transgressiveness. Yes. And there is a contradiction at it. There is a hypocrisy at the heart of celebrity culture. There still is now. There always has been. We saw it extraordinarily clearly with the tragedy of Lady Diana, where the same newspapers who had chased her and hounded her

and literally caused her death, you know, two days later, we're like, oh, the people's princess, oh, whoa, what a tragedy, what a terrible, terrible thing. So we see it all the time, this kind of innate hypocrisy where we want to mock and shame and devour these people. We idolize them. We think they're gorgeous. We think they're beautiful. We think they're clever and talented. And we also want to judge them and judge their bodies and denigrate them and shame them and cancel them. You know, these are these sort of these rival competing instincts are fundamental to celebrity culture. Now, obviously, there are some celebrities who are not transgressive. There are some who are beloved and some who are kind of renowned and, you know, very, very kind of,

their careers are untarnished. But there's clearly a very strong subset of celebrities, particularly in the 18th century, who are renowned for their transgressions. So classic one would be Lord Byron. You know, he's in the early 1800s, whatever. He's renowned as a poet, but of course for his. sexual adventures. And he loves Keene too, right?

He loves keen. He loves keen. He loves boxing as well. His favourite sport is boxing. He's massively obsessed with boxes. And so his favourite celebs are boxers who are low status. You know, these are working class men. They're black.

They're Jewish. They are Irish. They're immigrants. You know, they're not, they're not kind of peers of his. You know, he's a lord. He sort of went to Harrow or whatever. And yet he's obsessed with these men who he thinks of as like Roman gladiators. So he's sort of harking back to an ancient world in this sort of sport.

The boxing's illegal at this point. It's bare knuckle. It's brutal. So Byron's obsessed with celebrities and is a celebrity, which is kind of interesting. And you've got people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and huge French celebrities who go mad from their fame. Rousseau went completely. He lost his mind from the fame. And Byron was a massive fan of him and toured all of Rousseau's places that he'd been to.

So you have these celebs who love celebs. And but you also have these celebs for whom the whole point of them is is is that they're gorgeous and they're glamorous, but also we want to shame them. So you have Kitty Fisher, who's a renowned courtisan. She's a beauty. She's a professional girlfriend, right? You know, you pay her. People have said the same about me. You're just a professional girl. Whatever that means. But, you know, she's famous. She's very, very famous for having an accidental wardrobe malfunction malfunction. She falls off a horse not wearing any knickers, right? We've all been there. And and then famously she's called the hundred pound miss. because supposedly her boyfriend only offered her 50 pounds, whatever it is to sleep with her. And she was like, how dare you? My rate is £100 or whatever. And she ate the money. She swallowed it.

She put it in a sandwich and ate it. She was so outraged and whatever. And so then Joshua Reynolds, the brilliant 18th century painter, painted her. He painted her as Cleopatra. And this was an in-joke for all the kind of people who loved their ancient history because Cleopatra famously had a bet with her lover, Mark Anthony, who could have the most expensive dinner party.

and Cleopatra swallowed a priceless pearl. She ate the most expensive thing you could have. And that's what Kitty Fisher did. Kitty Fisher ate money as a sort of to prove, I don't need you. And so there's this sort of interesting thing, this aping of celebrity culture and ancient culture that Byron did, but also Fisher was then shamed. And there were these things called whore biographies,

which were memoirs written by courtesans and sex workers who had slept with these powerful rich men. What they would do is they would then blackmail them and say, I'm going to tell your story unless you pay me however much. And famously, you know, the Duke of Wellington said publish and be damned to his particular mistress. And these books sold in huge numbers.

They went into sort of 14, 15 editions within the first year or so. You know, they were massively popular. But then people would come out and write books about them shaming these women or saying it didn't happen like that or she's lying or that's not true or they would do fake versions of it. In the same way, we've got AI versions of books now. You know, there's AI memoirs of celebrities that are not real, but are, you know, people are, yeah, yeah, you can go on Amazon, you can find AI books that are memoirs of celebrities that don't exist. Stop it.

Wait, the celebrity exists. The celebrity exists, but the book is, the book is, it's just a fake, yeah, yeah. So people are, they're making money off of these women that they shame. They allow them to be famous. They enjoy it. It's titillating. And then they shame them. And the most famous one perhaps would be someone like Emma Hamilton.

Yes. And Emma Hamilton is this sort of classic case study of. beautiful young woman, born working class, probably working in maybe the sex working industry, climbs the ladder. You know, she's sort of a glamorous dancer, I guess. She works in a sort of, in a kind of, like this is a famous quack doctor who has a sort of temple of health. And she's one of the dancers there who sort of suggestively dances to try and get you in the mood because it's so people who want to have a baby and they can't have a baby. So they need to have like, you know, some help from a quack doctor. So she's sort of there. And then she sort of lands a sort of a really

quite fancy husband, right? She lands William Hamilton, who is the ambassador to Naples for Britain. But then she meets Lord Nelson. And Nelson, of course, is the great naval hero. He's defeated Napoleon in the Battle of the Nile. And she sort of seduces him. And they're in a kind of weird thruple, except, of course, Hamilton doesn't quite realize he's in a thruple. It's not entirely polyamorous, sort of ethical, monogamous, whatever the sort of phrases. It's not quite that because he doesn't quite get it. But she's in a sort of three-way thing. I love this idea that he doesn't quite get it. He's like, well, I don't know.

She's out with Nelson again. Or maybe he's fine with it. I don't know. Maybe he's just like, well, you know, wives. What are you going to do? But she's sort of famously gorgeous and buxom. She famously has this very large bosom. And there's this sort of famous story of her sort of running towards Nelson

and kind of flattening him with her enormous boobs. And so like there's this public knowledge that this is happening. Everyone knows Lord Nelson is shagging someone else's wife. And everyone's just sort of, it's funny. It's titillating. It's funny. it's like, ha ha ha, hilarious, whatever. Nelson's sort of naval colleagues are kind of, they're a bit like, could you not? Like, you're embarrassing your wife. We're not going to visit you at home. We don't want to hang out with you and your girlfriend. We think this is a bit crass and tawdry. But the public are excited. They are a power couple. It is common knowledge. It's in all the magazine in the newspaper. They don't say Lord Nelson, because they'll say Lord N or whatever. But they everyone knows. Absolutely everyone knows. And it's funny. And then Nelson is killed at the Battle of Trafal. And he's killed in a heroic way by winning a battle.

He dies in the best way possible. He gets his chaos. He gets its Achilles moment. He gets to be in the pantheon of worthies. He gets a massive monument. He becomes a national hero. And the moment that happens, the kind of backlash, the moral backlash happens. And the wife, you know, the woman who'd been dumped, I guess, gets elevated as the widow

for obvious reasons. And she becomes, you know, she's allowed to go to the funeral. And everyone's very, very sort of sorry and apologetic to her. And Emma Hamilton is just suddenly shunned. She cannot go to the funeral and she can't go anywhere. And it's no longer funny. It's no longer like, hey, you know, have you heard about Nelson? Now it's like, get out.

And she is shamed and she's chased out and she dies in poverty 10 years later on. So that is a tale is oldest time. That happens over and over and over and over to women, particularly glamorous women, who rise because of their beauty, who are associated with famous men. and then they are destroyed either by aging out of their beauty. They hit 32 or whatever, some, you know, horrifically young age, and they're no longer considered beautiful. They've gained weight or whatever.

They've had children and then it was like, oh, gross. Or they are suddenly considered to be, you know, shameful. And they just get destroyed by this. So the transgressive potency of celebrity culture, this innate instinct that we want to enjoy it and then reject it. It's part of that journey and it's part of the story. Not every celebrity had that. Some celebrities were renowned and beloved and never had scandals.

But lots of celebrities. It's what energizes, what gives you the electricity of celebrity culture, is this notion of something dangerous is happening here. How do we feel about it? And the sociologist Emil Dirkheim made the argument that celebrity, well, he made the argument, criminality actually. He made the argument that you need criminals in society. You don't want too many because then that's bad. Then that's sort of madmacks and we're all in trouble. But you don't want too few.

You need enough. You need criminality. So you have your moral exemplars. You get to go. Don't do that. Society at large gets to go. We cannot cross this line. And that's what celebrities do.

They sort of cross the line and they look back coquettishly and go, ooh, look at me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can. Crossing the line. And we're kind of, we're titillated and thrilled by that. And occasionally we're outraged. And we sometimes allow it to happen a bit.

And then we pull back. And sometimes we go, no. And sometimes we go, well, that's just the classic. what are you going to do? And so it's a really interesting thing. Like there are people for whom we allow the leeway and there are people for whom we do not and there are people for whom we sort of take a little while

to figure out how to feel about it and then we make a judgment. But Durkheim's point is that you need the criminal class for a functioning society and that's when you get celebrity criminals. Yeah, let's end there because I think this is the, with an example of one of those criminals because I think it's a really good way to go out of this conversation

with just listening to you there, Greg, there's so much contemporary resonance and there always will be in terms of fame and celebrity and that's kind of the whole point, right? In terms of this through line from the 18th century that you've been talking about. But to finish, let's talk about Jack Shepherd and talk about how that transgression...

Yeah. We've seen before that it kind of goes, oh, talent, amazing, great. But transgression, now. maybe we don't love you so much. When we introduce this idea of class and somebody's coming from nothing and you're sticking it to the man, then the transgression can start to make you a little bit beloved. Give us a quick overview of how Shepard's fame, Tusha. So we're in the 1720. So really early in the history of celebrity culture. So in the book, I argue 1710 is the earliest celebrity I'm willing

to go with. And Shepard is like 1724 or something at top of my head. I can't quite remember. but he is a kind of an apprentice boy who becomes a carpenter. You know, he's good with his hands and he's sort of working in a classic sort of lower working class, but maybe there's the possibility of rising into the middle class just in terms of like, if you're good at your job, you might maybe gradually move up. So his life is not, it's not a bad life. You know, he's a London boy. He is cheeky and fun and also a bit unruly and turns out he started to steal.

He's stealing from his boss. He's stealing from other people because he's a good. carpenter. He knows how locks work on windows and he can break into doors. So he's now realized, oh, I can't just go around Knicking stuff. So. Talent as well, though, actually. It is a skill. There's a, there's a skill. He has a skill. He's not Edmund Keen in terms of delivering soliloquies, but he's got a skill. But as it turns out, you know, there are plenty of those. There's plenty of common criminals who steal stuff and whatever. And typically, they go to the gallows and hang. But what's interesting about Shepard is he's an amazing

escapologist. He keeps being thrown in present. I say keeps being, I mean, four times. he has thrown into prison in increasingly bigger, more scary prisons. Like they sort of start by going, okay, jail. Then they're like, all right, you've escaped. So bigger jail? And then eventually they're just like, the biggest jail we have. And we'll nail him to the floor. We'll bolt him down.

We'll like, you know, handcuff his ankles to his hands. Like he's not getting out. Lo and behold, he gets out. He's this amazing escapologist almost. And what happens is that people love him. They love him for this. And they think it's funny. They think it's great.

And what's really interesting is that he becomes sexy. comes glamorous. The king sends his favorite painter to go and paint this guy in jail. Women show up to have sex with him, like famous women, you know, aristocracy show up to meet him. And he writes a memoir. Actually, we think Daniel Defoe writes his memoir. And he, you know, eventually they're like, right, we need to hang this guy because he's... Too much. Too much problem.

Because he's becoming a folk hero. Yes. And the funny thing is that he keeps escaping and he keeps returning to the same pub. So the... Brilliant. So the cop, you know, there's no police yet, but the kind of the Bow Street Runners keep going. Well, we know where we know. he is, we'll just go to the pub and get him again. So they keep re-arresting him. They keep putting him in jail.

And gradually, eventually they're like, this guy needs to die. So they're going to execute him. But by this point, he now has a fan base and there's a plan in place to save him. They're going to let him hang. They're going to cut him down from the gallows, because this is before the invention of the drop, which snaps your neck. So this is where you just asphyxia. You dangle. You might be up there for 20 minutes and you might still be alive. So the idea is they're going to hang him, they're going to let him hang and his friends are going to break in, cut down his body, race him off to a doctor who's going to revive him and then they might get on a boat to America or whatever.

But they've got a plan after that. Problem is, 200,000 people have showed up to see the famed escapologists get out of this one. That's a big crowd. Even in 18th century execution terms, it's something like a third of London. It's like there's no modern equivalent that makes any sense.

It's like two and a half million people showing up in London to watch someone die. And the problem, of course, is that they're here to see the greatest apologist do an escape. And the problem is that is exactly what he's planning to do, but they're in the way. He cannot, he cannot escape because his fans are there blocking his exit and the guy hangs and dies through the irony of people showing up to see him do his thing that he does. So you've got this sort of lovely sort of yeah, this kind of, it's funny in some

ways, it's sad and others, right? The people wanted this from him and it cost him his life. And so that's an interesting thing. But he's a folk hero. In the same way that Dick Turpin was a monster, an awful bully, a terrible, terrible man, a rapist, a murderer, you know, terrible, terrible guy. But he got turned into a folk hero later in the 19th century by William Harrison Ainsworth. And now we think of Dick Turpin is quite sexy and, you know, sort of Blackbeast and all that. But we do it with pirates. Blackbeard had a kind of celebrity image in 1718. People knew about him. There was a book printed that told everyone about the adventures of pirates. Defoe wrote about them. Newspapers wrote about them. The high women was

kind of sexy. Claude Duval famously danced with his victims. He would sort of say, Madam, may I have a dance? You know, he's stealing their cash, but he's still kind of charming. And so we still do it now with pirates. We still, to a certain extent, think pirates are cool.

Yeah, yeah. You know, Pirates of the Caribbean. Everyone's like, this is fun. Yeah. I want to be a pirate. I want to be a pirate, right? I'd be a terrible pirate, but don't you make one? Sure.

So it's a really interesting thing. And historians and sociologists have long tried to sort of figure out, okay, why did these people become folk heroes? And the French equivalent was a guy called Cartouche. That was his nickname. His real name was sort of long and complicated in French. But I think it's called Dominique Gossain or something like that. But he was, Cartouche was famous for stealing from the rich to give to the poor. And he kind of go, oh, he's Robin Hood. He's like the French Robin Hood.

But he was a murderer. He went around killing people. He was pretty brutal. But people loved him. And they put plays on and the authorities have to shut down the plays because it was dangerous. So you get this sort of notion here that they become folk heroes. They become avatars for the working classes. people kind of identify with these people and go, these are our guys. But weirdly, because of the glamour of it, it's the celebrity aristocracy and the dukes and the kings

who start going, well, he sounds fun. Let's go. Can I get a painting? That's a surprising thing, right? Yeah. So although it's a low status thing that energize a celebrity, weirdly the rich and the famous are the ones who start going, well, yeah, let's go hang out with this guy.

Until they don't. Until they don't anymore, until it becomes dangerous. And then like, okay, now we get rid of him. And so there's this very interesting thing of, in the 18th century, we get this really intriguing thing where actresses who get on the stage, they are low status, they're working class, but they often portray queens and duchesses and glamorous beauties. And real duchesses and real beauties start showing up to the theatre and kind of idolising them. And there comes a point where they start swapping clothes. And the actresses are like,

oh, can I wear your costume to my ball? Or vice versa. Can I go to, you know, the king's throwing a all, can I wear your Lady Macbeth costume? And this is a renowned Duchess asking that question. So there's this sort of collapsing of the statuses. Like the low and the high classes are starting to become equals because celebrity culture has bridged that gap and they are mirroring each other. And it becomes this really interesting thing. So the criminal thing is fascinating because you get this elevation of the criminal into hero. And you also get this elevation of the monster into something sexy and interesting. Jack the Ripper was a horrific serial killer who did horrible, horrible things. But people paid money to go to the crime scenes. You could buy like

merch. You could, uh, the people did like wax, uh, effigies of the, of the bodies of the victims. There was a commercial economy attached. And there still is to this day, right? People go on Ripper tours. People are fascinated by Ripperology. So even serial killers who we don't even know who they are get elevated sometimes into these weirdly kind of captivating, alluring, dangerous, horrible celebrity images. there's a real kind of confusion and tension in that. And celebrity culture is much more messy than we think of it because you've got all these contradictory impulses where we want to elevate and destroy. We want to keep people in their place, but we also want to allow people to rise up. We want to sort of have glamour and sex appeal, but we want to also keep, you know, society's rules need to be in play. That there's all these arguments that happen. And celebrity is this sort of battleground whereby so much of who we are as a society is sort of debated and fought over. And the celebrities, they cross the line and we make a judgment call. How do we feel about it?

Do we feel like David Beckham is the baddie or Victoria Beckham is the baddie? Do we feel bad for Brooklyn? You know, it's interesting, right? People are taking sides. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the fascinating thing about it as well, in terms of what your book showed me, Dead Famous, Get an All Your Good Bookseller Places now, is just this idea that you're talking about the monster,

even from ancient times. It's always carried this thing of darkness looming in the background. And if you put a step in the wrong direction, they want you to transgress, as you've been saying, right, but transgress too much and actually will end that for you there now. Or, yeah, for a while, we'll allow you to do it, but now we're not going to do that again. It's that self-eating, cannibalizing thing that is so compelling. But also when you enter into it initially, you also know somewhere in the back of your mind that actually this is where it's going to go ultimately, that there's very few people that

survive the monster of fame and celebrity, even throughout all of history. So go and find yourself a copy of Dead Famous if you haven't already, which is written by the brilliant Greg Jenner, of course. Greg, where else can people find you if they are interested to know a little bit more? I mean, I'm on Blue Sky, mostly on Instagram and I sort of hang out. And I do this show, You're Dead to Me on the BBC, which is a sort of comedy podcast about history, which is good fun. And I've written other books too and kids' books too, if you've got kids, you know, so, yeah. And you're going on tour? Yeah, we're going on tour. You're dead to me's going on.

tour. We're doing London, Adelphie Theatre 24th of March, and then in April we're doing Cardiff, Manchester and Edinburgh, mid-April, which will be really good fun. I will be there. I will see you. I'm very excited about us. Go and find your tickets and go and see Greg Live because it's going to be a great show. Listen, thank you, as ever, for listening to After Dark for watching on YouTube. Did you know we are on YouTube? Podcasts are now migrating over. So we are on YouTube. So we are on YouTube. Go and find us. But thank you as ever for listening to After Dark leaves a five-star review wherever you get your podcast. It helps other people to find us too. If you have any ideas for future episodes, then you can email us on afterdark at historyhit.com. Until next time,

happy listening.