This dates me, but when Take That released their Back For Good album, I phoned my friend Marysia, so we could play it down the phone to each other and scream at the best bits. I went to see them twice in concert and I believed I was going to marry Gary Barlow. I loved them. And when I was 15, I might have considered voting Conservative if Gary had come to my school with David Cameron for a photo opportunity. Maybe.
But I’m not 15, and I think the whole pop star/political endorsement thing is embarrassing. It makes the politicians look try-too-hard, while the pop stars seem ignorant at best, ranty and over the top at the Phil Collins end of the spectrum. The Gallaghers lost it the moment they walked through the doors of Number 10. Musicians sound better when they stick to dissent.
Perhaps, though, if I were more of a fantasist, I’d be swung by Gary’s endorsement, because then I might be more prone to ‘medium levels of celebrity worship’. That’s according to the Celebrity Worship Scale, devised by John Maltby and colleagues. According to Maltby et al, there are three dimensions to celebrity worship:
• Entertainment Social (I love to talk about my favourite celebrities with others)
• Intense Personal (When something happens to my favourite celebrity, I feel like it happened to me)
• Borderline Pathological (My favourite celebrity would immediately come to my aid if I needed help).
Of course, few of us are celebrity worshippers in the first place. In fact, once we’re old enough to vote, most of us have grown out of whatever idol-worshipping tendencies we have. So, does Gary’s endorsement count for anything? According to Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, authors of Connected, it does. They say that if we declare our intention to vote and talk about it to our friends, family and workmates, they are far more likely to vote as well. So Gary might be bringing people to the polling booths…. but they might not tick the Conservative box once they’re there.
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