Doc Treatment
‘Fake me a Celebrity’
Fake me a Celebrity is documentary-experiment designed to see if any old John, Flic or Barry can con their way through the Nations media and into the nations hearts and minds. A team of hacks, PR people, internet blog-boffins, agents and fellow celebrity ‘arm accessories’ will aid them in their quest to become the next big nobody.
With so many so-called celebrities doing the ‘Loose Women – This Morning -Titchmarsh-Celebrity Big Brother-TV land crawl’ it begs the question do you even have to be that good at anything to become a regular face of the chat show carousel? You’ve only got to look as far as the likes of Peter Andre, Peaches Geldof, Colin Best and katie Price to find the answer. 
The music industry works in the same way. Five suits from the major record labels sit down with Radio 1 every Wednesday and tell them who the next big thing is, how much R1 are going to play ‘em and subsequently how much we’re going to pay ‘em. And don’t get me started about X Factor and the Christmas No.1…BUT Hold on what’s that I hear from the great British public….
‘Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’?!
Fake me a Celebrity will push and probe the recently documented relationship between ‘Celebrity’– the Money Men – the Media and way we, the public, consume what we are told.
Do the public led by the press and pushed by the money men simply absorb anything or anyone with enough coverage? Or is the Rage Against the Machine model of the consumer power here to stay? Will the nation befriend or rat-out our Fake Celebrity?
One ‘average Joe’ will be picked from a select group for the experiment and the team behind FMAC will go to extreme lengths in order to thrust them into stardom, documenting the whole process with comical and startling results.
The participant will be given a make over of their looks, history and friends. A dynamic PR campaign will be put into full motion, starting on the Internet with blogs and fake articles kicking things off and rolling onto local media and hopefully leading to national exposure. A film crew will follow the wannabe all the way through their journey, taking in celebrity appearances, interviews and hopefully some other well-known faces endorsing the ‘work’ of our starlet.
The tone of the experiment will be light-hearted and look to poke fun at the industry and fellow celebrities in the same way that Chris Morris did so well with his pastiche on British News Culture in Brass Eye. The documentary will look to pack in a few laughs but the industry-consumer theme will underpin the whole documentary and deliver serious findings.
The experiment will not run without coming across some stumbling blocks and the potential to be found out is always there. But that’s where our Internet and blogging experts will come in and create a smear campaign to counter any claims. This ‘smear’ approach will also highlight how powerful the Internet is and when in the right or wrong hands and demonstrate how spin can be used effectively.
The documentary will create its own interest through the Fake celebrity campaign and be shown following the discovery of the faker. The film would really capture a mischievous side that’s present in all of us, it would challenge, push and probe what we know to be the norm in the UK and appeal greatly to a generation of young people armed with the luxury of consumer choice. BBC Three would be the ideal broadcaster and the film would fit the channel’s experimental ethos perfectly.
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Really nice idea that rips in to our shallow celebrity culture. What is the format? Is it a series or a one-off.
Perhaps you could make it into an Apprentice-style competition in which nobodies compete to become the most famous/commented on.