The camera couldn't get enough of her, could it?
CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICK
No wonder...
with that impossibly beautiful face.
When she turned those doe eyes on people,
even the hard-boiled cynics
melted into a puddle of infatuated glop.
She touched people...
..literally.
HIV does not make people dangerous to know,
so you can shake their hands and give them a hug.
So, when Diana died,
we were bound to take it hard.
What happened to the British? Great convulsion of tragic sorrow.
There was a huge sea of cellophane,
all those flowers,
all those teddy bears,
all those candles,
all those crying people
had gone through a national trauma
and the world stood back and said,
"Whoa. Are these really the British?
"The tight-lipped, understated,
"self-controlled, repressed British?"
And it was clear that we'd gone through
some sort of extraordinary national trauma.
Diana was not, at that point, just a famous person,
not even a celebrity.
Whatever we made of her,
she was somebody who seemed to be Britain itself -
Britannia, if you like.
All sorts of things make Britain what it is -
our history...
..our language...
..our countryside...
..but also, our famous faces.
Today, it's easy to confuse fame with celebrity.
Celebrities come and go.
We enjoy them while they last
and want them gone when they're past their sell-by date.
But then there are others,
the famous,
who seem to be summoned by history,
who answer to a popular craving at a particular moment
and who, for a while, shape our national story.
Without them, we'd lose the plot.
It's deep-rooted, our need for heroes.
For humans who do super-human things,
people who have a touch of the god about them.
Odysseus,
Achilles,
Alexander -
titans of the classical world
made immortal across the centuries
by poetry and art.
But our first national hero
was no prince,
but a diamond in the rough.
He was a tough, young thug.
You have to think of him as a, kind of, sort of,
yobbo, apprentice, maritime,
hit-and-run thief, really.
A thief of the ocean was what he was.
His name is still known to us all.
Francis Drake.
The most audacious of sea captains
who lifted gold, silver and slaves
from the Spanish Atlantic empire.
Essentially a state-sanctioned pirate.
But what began as piracy turned into global epic.
From that pillar-to-post raging
comes what turns into an epoch-making
historical moment.
The achievement of the round the world voyage
and Drake returning home with more treasure
than anyone could have possibly imagined,
and this is part of the reason why he is an instantaneous, fantastic hero.
He's not some sort of learned geographer,
he's a man of action that makes him
the first, genuine, heroic,
famous Englishman.
It was strategic robbery,
meant to strike fear and panic into the Spanish empire
and to deprive it of the means to make war on England.
Drake may be making a killing,
but he's doing it for Queen and country...
..and it makes him an immediate sensation.
A face people want to see.
Before you knew it, there were paintings like this full-on,
fantastic celebration
of the grandeur and fame
that is Francis Drake.
We're told by John Stow,
the chronicler,
that his name and his fame were admirable in all quarters.
Stow says that, in town and country,
people were swarming in the streets daily
to try and get a look at him
and they took vows of hatred against
anybody who dared dislike him.
That sounds like absolute adulation.
Drake's exploits raised him up from his humble beginnings,
but his fame was also carefully cultivated
by those governing the embattled Elizabethan state.
They saw how a popular hero
could inspire the country
in the fight against Spain...
..but the real cult of the hero
existed in images
much less grand than this one.
Portable portraits were dispatched across the continent
to unsettle the enemy and win allies -
a very English kind of propaganda.
In 1588, the year of the Armada,
an English ambassador in Italy
reported that a small portrait of Drake
had arrived in Ferrara,
slightly battered from its travels
and that, while it was being repaired,
crowds flocked to see the face of the legend.
This extraordinary little image
is the kind of thing that arrives in Ferrara
and everybody queues round the block to see it.
It is not a great work of art,
which is what makes it so fabulous.
It is a piece of folk art, really.
You know, the dashing moustache,
the flashy eyes, the expression
halfway between a smile and, almost,
insulting self-congratulation.
It's sort of perfect.
So, here we have the terror of the Catholic world
and there are lots, lots more painted
even more clumsily, even more down in the market.
You'll notice that the artist spells Drake,
D-R-A-E-C-K, "Draeck",
which wonderfully also, in Flemish and Dutch, means "dragon"
because he is the fire-breathing
image of terror for the rest of the world.
So, there he is, Sir Francis Dragon.
And you can't actually see... Yes, you can, maybe you can.
There's a little chip out of the end,
so I'd like to think it's been wounded on its travels,
like Old Drake himself.
So, it is a marvellous example
of the way in which popular culture
has soaked up the dramatic,
almost film star-like quality of Drake
and broadcast his fame the length and breadth of Europe.
The Drake cult was perfect for its time.
An upstart hero for a start-up empire.
A century later,
Britain was turning into a formidable maritime power -
with colonies across the oceans -
and we started to get an imperial rush of blood to the head.
The idea that a famous face
like Drake's
could be used to make us feel good
about ourselves, our history
and our place in the world
would be taken up in an extraordinary way
here at Stowe,
a vast country estate in Buckinghamshire.
In the 1730s,
following a century of conflict
with Catholic Europe,
Viscount Cobham would use the spell of the famous
to sell his vision of the destiny
of the protestant Britain.
First, Viscount Cobham is your standard veteran
of the long, long wars against Louis the 14th,
hates the French, absolutely loathes Catholic absolutist despotism,
loves being British,
loves a good bloody victory -
of which, there were plenty.
Comes back home and he wants to do something which will proclaim
the triumph of English liberty.
He's got the cheque book to do it,
he builds all this,
but he doesn't simply want to make it just a grand house.
He wants it to be a living history lesson.
He wants it to be a demonstration of how glorious it is
to bask in the sunlight of English freedom,
and how's he going to do this?
He's going to create this extraordinary park
as a place where tourists can come,
the public can come
and he actually builds a pub,
The New Inn,
in order to accommodate the tourists
who he thinks are coming in, the 18th century equivalent of busloads.
Stowe was one of the first country houses
to open its doors to the public...
..and Viscount Cobham thought of everything to make a day
at his patriotic theme park unforgettable.
Affordable guide books
steered visitors along a carefully planned route
past buildings and statues
evoking ancient Greece and Rome.
These would rise before you out of the woods and fields,
little temples dedicated to classical philosophers,
whose ideas underpinned British liberty.
I feel more virtuous already
in the presence of these figures.
The first part of this history lesson in the park was the classics.
"Oh, no, Dad. Not more Latin."
Then, you looked down the hill
and saw something more surprising...
..another kind of temple.
Oh, look, this is so beautiful!
This is just fantastic.
This one filled with British faces,
Cobham's mini amphitheatre of our very own greats.
If you want to know what British strength and power
and prosperity are going to be,
you come and look at this array
of YOUR own national heroes.
You have Francis Drake
and Walter Raleigh,
and then you have the doers,
the princes, and kings and queens of England,
who stood for action,
who had the kind of, you know, rich, red blood
of what it meant to be British -
free, powerful and successful -
running through their veins.
Queen Elizabeth, King William the Third,
the head of the glorious revolution, King Alfred, the Great.
And alongside these sword bearers,
there are cultural heroes,
like the scientist Isaac Newton...
..the political thinker John Locke...
the architect Inigo Jones.
16 faces in total,
each carefully selected by Cobham
for their significance in shaping Britain.
So, you come here
and commune with the famous heroes
of the British past.
When you're actually at eye level -
notice you're at eye level -
you're in the presence of William Shakespeare
and John Milton and John Locke.
You are in their company
and through their three dimensional portraits,
you really feel the living pulse
of what it means to be British -
a direct connection with the famous Britons of the past.
So, you leave this wonderful place
and someone said, "What did you do today?"
You say, "Well, I had a word with John Locke
"and he had a word with me."
And THAT is worth a thousand books.
That's the genius of Cobham -
he knows that portraits
bring you into their own company.
Thousands of people visited Stowe
and, inspired by the faces they saw,
they left breathing the heady oxygen of British freedom.
But one face would take on more significance
than any other in the understanding
of what it meant to be British
and that was William Shakespeare.
The theatre was Britain's glory,
the treasure of the people as well as the elite.
Shakespeare had long been hailed
as an incomparable genius
and, in this newly patriotic age,
what he had done with the English language
made him the founding father of the new Britain...
..but performances had become stilted
and the bard himself an object of dutiful reverence.
For most people, Shakespeare was a, kind of, stone statue.
They heard his plays performed by actors
who specialised in a kind of grandiloquent declamation,
often in very strange quasi-Roman costumes,
and then there came along a small man with an enormous voice,
David Garrick,
and he transformed not just the way people heard Shakespeare
but what he was to the national culture.
On the 19th of October 1741,
the actor David Garrick
made his debut on the London stage
as Richard the Third.
Instantly, the audience knew they were witnessing a phenomenon.
With his natural body language
and speech rhythms,
Garrick revolutionised acting.
People trembled, and even fainted, at the force of it.
Shakespeare had been given the kiss of life
and Garrick became the most famous name in the country...
..but the excited public
wanted more than reviews,
they wanted to see his face,
and the artist William Hogarth gave it to them.
It is an absolutely huge Hogarth,
this magnificent, startling, explosive painting.
On the eve of the battle of Bosworth,
Richard the Third
is visited by the ghosts of all those he has knocked off,
who all say, "Despair and die."
And it's the one moment where Richard the Third,
kind of, monster of confidence, cracks.
Richard wakes in the middle of the night
in a cold trembling sweat
and cries out,
"Give me a horse, bind up my wounds. Jesu, have mercy."
Think of Hogarth
and you think of rakes and harlots,
but here his genius was to see
how the theatrical experience
could be exploited
to create a portrait so full of drama
you felt as if you had a front row seat.
Right at the heart of the painting
is this enormous hand with the ring.
In his trembling, shivery, sweaty, fright,
it has slipped down his finger
and the hand is pressing into our space.
The sense of Garrick projecting his presence into the audience
is phenomenal here
and this is, really, the birth of a star of the stage.
Theatre culture is born from this
in a way we think about it -
gigantic personalities who could match
a gigantic Shakespearean tragedy.
For Hogarth and Garrick,
this was more than just an artistic collaboration.
Garrick's fame meant there was money to be made
from turning paintings into prints.
Depicting the sensation of his latest performance,
the prints were an irresistible
keepsake for besotted fans.
THUNDERCLAP
Buying one was like taking home
a piece of the actor himself.
They were like publicity stills
and Garrick became a master of media saturation.
He also spotted the value in hitching his star to Shakespeare's.
He made sure that their faces
were repeatedly shown side by side.
Bard's head inclined towards his
like an inseparable power.
The prints launched not just a cult of Garrick's celebrity,
but a kind of national fever,
a Garrick-mania.
But it was something more than simply
what we think of as the fizz of fame,
the temporary and fugitive, evanescent kind of
sense of celebrity, something more profound was going on.
Garrick really transformed
what it meant to be an actor.
You were no longer simply an amusing entertainer,
you were really a pillar of British culture now,
and that's what I think the great actors
and actresses who came after Garrick really felt.
The endless reproduction
of Garrick in prints
meant his face was seen everywhere.
He was our first star.
The word was first used in 18th century London,
where the hot-wiring between theatre print shops and audiences
created the first celebrity culture.
But if you longed to be as famous as Garrick
but didn't have his talent,
or indeed any talent at all,
how could you achieve this
new-minted glittering celebrity?
The answer, shameless self-promotion.
Step one - go where you're guaranteed an audience.
For Londoners, there was another kind of stage
and it was very much outdoors.
Not the theatre, but the park.
And the cast of that particular performance
were not interested in how well they recited Shakespeare,
they were walk-on parts, but the walking was incredibly important.
Now, there was nothing like 18th century London
for people-watching,
but a particular kind of people came to ogle, to gawp,
and to gaze and to stare.
The bon tonne, the upper crust of society,
along with a lot of London's flaky pastry too,
and what they were looking at were the gorgeous.
The gorgeous could be the latest, young, dashing blade,
the most beautiful soldier
in his frockery and frocking,
and lace, and hats -
but, above all, there were the gorgeous girls,
young girls,
not so young girls,
the up-and-coming courtesans.
Essentially this, Hyde Park,
was one fabulous flesh market
and people were there to watch.
With so much already on show,
how could YOU stand out from the crowd?
Step two - give them something sensational,
something scandalous.
Enter one Kitty Fisher,
a budding young courtesan
who knew exactly what was needed
to make people stop and stare.
Kitty waited where a large crowd had gathered
and then, when a troop of soldiers trotted past,
she carefully staged
a fall from her horse
exposing an eyeful.
Finally - make sure you get maximum publicity.
Instantly, very down-market printmakers
are recording the event
to make her the celebrity of the moment.
So, you come into a tavern like this
and you're after a flagon of the good stuff
and maybe a slice of mutton pie,
and this sort of thing is lying around the table -
and you've got all the cast of characters her.
In the middle, you've got Kitty herself -
showing her legs, showing her garters.
And then there are various other kinds of people -
young gallants and there's another old geezer
whose eyesight is really in trouble.
Then there's an appalling figure,
who's kneeling with a spyglass
and has this ghastly, leering expression
and he's looking straight up her dress.
What a surprise.
Kitty became the queen of Grub Street.
A sensation - funny, saucy, irresistible.
So, she is a mistress of her own PR.
She's her own publicist.
She knows how to be a self-promoter
and turn Kitty Fisher, who comes from nowhere,
into the latest London celeb.
Kitty may have started low,
but she aimed high.
In order to bask in the golden light
of a much fancier kind of fame,
her image needed laundering...
..and, astonishingly, the man to do it was Joshua Reynolds,
who usually painted imperial heroes,
lords and ladies, even royalty.
He made women alluring...
..and men noble.
Reynolds was the great 18th-century designer of fame
and the first artist to really become a celebrity in his own right.
With his smooth social skills,
he knew how to woo the cream of British society into his studio...
..but he also understood that a client as sensational as Kitty
would mean all the eyes of London looking at the result.
You have to say about Joshua Reynolds, "Boy, is he good."
This is really a pin-up, isn't it? It's a pin-up.
It's a glamour picture
that Hollywood glamour photographers
take in the 1920s and '30s.
She's made unbelievably alluring and sexy.
It's exactly what Kitty wants.
It turns her into a, kind of, immortal.
You look at it and it looks just like,
"Oh, a beautiful society hostess."
This lovely blue gown over her shoulders,
the lustrous eyelashes,
the great, thick, ropey mane of chestnut hair,
the very loose enticing shift
around her shoulders.
He's done this little tiny highlight
on the edge of her nose,
so she's a real living, you know,
breathing, human being.
She's not this, kind of, pasty-faced queen of meditative melancholy.
Tongues wagged over the numerous sittings.
Reynolds apparently needed to paint this small portrait...
..and he's posed her as Cleopatra,
who famously seduced the Roman general Mark Antony
by dissolving a pearl in a glass of wine
and drinking it.
As we get into the details,
it becomes a lot more saucy
and sensational.
Look how she's holding that pearl...
..she's doing it like that,
and, yes, the "O" that's in the middle...
No prizes for guessing here.
..is an allusion to the sexual act...
..and Joshua Reynolds poses her in deep thoughtfulness.
Now, Kitty Fisher, bless her,
she's not actually making a living out of deep thought.
She is making a living out of deep something else.
But as a, kind of, great performance of grand glamour,
it's absolutely unbeatable, isn't it?
However glamorous the pictures,
this new world of celebrity
was a cut throat business...
..not just between the objects of the publicity,
but also between the artists who created it...
..and Reynolds wasn't the only fame-maker in town.
George Romney is notoriously -
and rather wonderfully, I think -
the opposite of urban, gregarious,
talkative, sociable Joshua Reynolds.
George Romney is inarticulate,
secretive, melancholy,
possibly manic-depressive.
Is this the unhappiest self-portrait ever?
This, kind of, cloud of brown darkness weighing in on him
only makes that face all the more intense.
Plus, the extraordinary, kind of,
tensed up body language of the arms...
He's deliberately made his hands invisible.
If you look at my hands, it's very hard to do that.
You have to do it like this and...
So, what does that capacious jacket resemble, if not a straitjacket?
Despite appearing withdrawn and defensive,
Romney was, in fact, hugely successful
with a constant stream of eager clients...
..but you feel he's waiting for that one model,
that one face,
that one body,
that'll really set him alight.
Just occasionally, there is this extraordinary electric
hot-wiring between painter and model
and so there will be.
And the model will also be someone who, in a metaphorical, I think,
rather than literally sense,
unties his corsets just a bit.
In March 1782,
the young mistress of a friend
arrived in Romney's studio.
Her name was Emma.
She came in and he was hit by lightning.
She had a smile that lit up London.
Romney was never the same again.
It's a commission that's got completely out of control
and he cannot stop painting her.
He's supposed to be painting,
you know, politicians and generals -
doesn't really care about that.
Everything goes completely by the board -
Emma after Emma, after Emma, after Emma, after Emma.
He's tormented.
He can't take his eyes off her.
Emma unleashed Romney's creativity.
In his portraits of her, his style became more spontaneous,
expressive, adventurous.
His obsession became the subject of gossip.
People flocked to Romney's studio
just to catch a glimpse
of Emma on canvas
and, when they saw her, they all wanted to take a piece of her home.
Copies and prints were made.
Even sketches and unfinished versions were snapped up.
Romney called her "the divine lady"
and it was through his countless portraits,
that Emma became the hottest celebrity of regency London...
..and the irony,
the sad, pathetic, tragic irony,
is that he's doing this in order to keep Emma,
the pure of heart Emma,
of his own, almost, manic obsessions with him forever...
but by making her famous,
putting her into the mill of fame
in regency England,
he's guaranteeing that
that's NOT going to be the case.
Someday, someone is going to come along
and take her right away from him and,
in some sense, it's mission accomplished.
Together, they make her so irresistible,
that the most famous and most important man in all of England
at the time, Horatio Nelson,
cannot possibly live without her.
For a public still new to the guilty pleasures of celebrity culture,
the romance between these two famous people
was almost too good to be true.
Both were already married
and the whole country was enthralled
by the scandalous relationship.
What's really striking is that
the two kinds of fame
come together in this love affair.
Emma is really about celebrity.
She's managed to market her beauty
and then she meets the most famous sailor,
the most famous person, in Britain,
and he is a different kind of fame.
He is the kind of fame the Romans and Greeks would recognise,
someone who's famous for doing something,
and doing something extraordinary...
But these two types of fame,
tangled together in their story,
would eventually unravel.
When Nelson was killed at the Battle of Trafalgar,
the outpouring of grief was so intense
that it was as if part of Britain itself had died with him.
The nation came together to mourn at St Paul's Cathedral
in one of the most lavish funerals in history.
Orchestrated on an epic scale,
it was the biggest state funeral
the country had ever seen.
Hysterical crowds thronged the streets of London
and emotions ran so high
that authorities feared
they would lose control
of the immense swarm of people.
Imagine what it would have been like
if Churchill had dropped dead of a heart attack
on VE day, or D-Day,
or something like that.
Everyone knew that it was a moment
when the country had been saved,
but the price of it being saved
was that they had lost the man
who'd achieved that salvation -
they had lost their hero.
Ecstasy was mixed with horror
and grief, and sadness.
Inside the cathedral, 7,000 people
witnessed the last rites -
a fitting tribute to a fame of this magnitude.
Everything is organised so everyone can get a look
and they can cry, and they can sob,
and they can sing, and they can cheer.
So, you have all of Britain -
the toffs, the officers,
common sailors -
inside this great space of St Paul's.
Nelson's body is laid on a platform,
right where I'm standing,
right at the centre of the dome,
the beating heart of the country
and, in the end, it will be lowered down,
through this hole here,
into the resting place
of the sarcophagus down there -
and there, Nelson lies in state...
..but there was one notable
and shocking absence
from this great occasion.
Emma Hamilton was banned by state authorities
from attending the funeral.
Emma's brand of celebrity
was now an embarrassment.
She had fallen victim to changing tastes,
foreshadowing high-minded Victorian morality
and anxiety about just who was deserving of fame.
Emma would die in Calais ten years later,
drunk and destitute.
Now, Nelson and Emma are back together
at the National Portrait Gallery,
the hero and his floozy within kissing distance on the wall.
Today, we have no trouble with celebrity
and renown side by side...
But when the Victorians founded the gallery in 1856,
THIS would have been unthinkable...
..for the institution began as a worthy act of moral,
patriotic education
and a response to a moment of crisis.
Britain, in the 19th century,
had become an immense
industrial empire.
For some, this brought fears
that society was drowning in crass materialism.
From his home in Chelsea,
one of the greatest historians of the age, Thomas Carlyle,
worried that the nation would forget what,
and more importantly WHO,
had put the "Great" in Britain.
Any society,
however imperially strong it was going to be,
that was only preoccupied with money
and what Carlyle called, "The soulless age of the machine"
was going to be, as Carlyle also said, "Mean and dwarfish."
If the Victorian world was going to be worthy of itself,
it had to rediscover
the nature of humanity.
Carlyle wrote about his heroes,
like Shakespeare,
as if they were the lifeblood
of what made a nation...
..but he did more than write about them.
As he worked, he surrounded himself with their portraits.
Carlyle - who wrote wonderfully
about noses, chins, brows -
believed that a portrait was worth half a dozen biographies.
So, when Carlyle thinks, actually,
how he can improve Britain
to make sure that it's not just
in the prism of the humdrum and the routine,
and the counting house...
How could he take this passion,
that he has himself,
for being inspired by living in the company of great men?
And the answer is, if you could only have a sort of gallery,
then parents could bring their children
and everybody from every class of the country
could spend time and,
by a process of osmosis of inspiration,
you could become, yourself,
great Britons -
not just rich Britons
or effective Britons,
or industrially modern Britons,
or arrogantly imperial Britons.
Carlyle's great vision
eventually got off the ground
and the National Portrait Gallery
came into being.
It would achieve his aim
of allowing people to spend time in the company of the greats.
The first portraits were selected,
not for their artistic merit,
but for their potential to mould national character,
to encourage and feed the appetite for hero-worship.
No flaky celebs on these walls...
..and, for me, there's one that really stands out -
the man who brought the British slave trade to an end.
This one, in every way,
is the most beautiful, the most moving,
the most important
and spoke to what the founders of the National Portrait Gallery
wanted paintings to do for the country.
If you asked yourself, "What is Britain made of?"
Not just iron and steel, and cotton, and banks, and money,
but the moral conscience -
William Wilberforce is the answer.
Now, the point about Wilberforce
is that he's going through an ordeal.
Notice this funny pose,
with the head to one side,
it just looks, in Laurence's lovely unfinished version,
as though he's sort of relaxing...
It's an informal pose.
..but he'd been suffering from this crippling spinal deformity,
which is why his head
is at an odd angle...
and the older he got,
the more deformed he becomes.
So, the point about being British, is that -
in pain and difficulty, and darkness -
you tough it out.
The shining light of your own conscience
makes you do good in the world.
So, if you have to say,
"What is William Wilberforce's face saying to us?"
"We can do good, you can do good, like me."
"In the midst of our imperial power
"and prosperity,
"think what it meant to act
"AGAINST our material interest.
"We are not just a country of moneybags,
"we are the country that abolished the slave trade,
"that abolished slavery, when we could have made money out of it.
"Sweetness and light is ours
"to give to the world."
"Come to the gallery,
"and just look at me,
"and think on that as British destiny."
But our craving for fame and celebrity
was too great to be confined
to such noble ideas.
The very forces of mass production
that Carlyle so hated
would now hijack our weakness
for famous faces.
At the turn of the century,
over 50% of the population smoked
and tobacco companies saw an opportunity
to up this even further -
through the little cards used to stiffen soft packets.
Someone thought,
"This is a fantastic wheeze,
why don't we put pictures of the famous on them?
"And, if we have fantastic pictures
"and a particular kind of famous people,
"they're going to buy OUR cigarettes
"rather than Bloggins' Virginia Gold
"who only managed to have, I don't know,
"dogs or horses or something -
"but WE will have portraits of the mighty."
And these are politicians and
they are heroes of the British Empire
and of British history.
The Duke of Wellington is here,
Disraeli is here...
But along with the mighty,
we've got cricketers,
actresses
and music hall girls.
The masses now had a new generation of stars in their eyes
and in the palms of their hands.
The cards proved a masterstroke of marketing...
Did you know that there was a cigarette card exchange in London?
A place where thousands of cards come every day to be sorted,
labelled, parcelled...
Their following was so fanatical
that cigarette companies
even had their own studios
and their own artists.
One of the most talented was Alick Ritchie,
who created a whole gallery of mini masterpieces for Player's Cigarettes.
He did portraits which are really little things of genius
in an almost, kind of, Art Deco style.
Here we have Augustus John, the painter,
Lloyd George is a huge favourite,
and here is Jack Hobbs, the cricketer,
or you could go in for the, kind of, grand movie stars
like Douglas Fairbanks
and Charlie Chaplin.
So, this is really a kind of democratic pantheon.
This is the working person's own individual portrait gallery
and it's filled up with movie stars, cricketers
and footballers
with the new kind of famous.
You could have a smoke, finish the packet,
and look down at your very own portrait gallery.
Cigarette companies had made the public
as addicted to fame
as they were to nicotine.
The faces could inform, amuse
and bring a little colour to people's lives -
a working man's encyclopaedia...
..but above all,
the craze for collecting famous faces was fun...
and in the drab interwar years,
they offered what people wanted most - escapism.
GRAND, FILMIC MUSIC
In the 1920s,
show-business, magic and glamour
came together in the ultimate escape.
In the dark of the cinema,
people lost themselves
in the make-believe world of Hollywood...
..and one imaginative and inventive photographer
would bring fairy-tale sparkle to his portraits.
Underneath this very high, slightly camp, manner
is a devastatingly gifted photographer -
someone who really is thinking about technique in a new way
much influenced by the movies.
Cecil Beaton dropped out of Cambridge in 1925,
desperate to become a photographer.
Right from the start,
he was a master of flamboyant style -
even when the only models available were his sisters.
Here's one of the two sisters, Baba,
and she is literally a picture
in crushed silver velvet.
I LOVE this photo
because it absolutely milks
everything it can
about movie queendom,
but it adds something really, almost, spooky.
Draped over the crushed velvet
are just ropes and coils,
and cascades of pearls.
Not real pearls but...
They are fake pearls,
but there are thousands of them.
You can't overdo pearls in this image
so, the whole thing has this kind of lunar shimmer to it.
Beaton seemed to become intoxicated by his own glistening creations.
Hungry for fame,
he now turned to a gang of posh friends
from his brief time at Cambridge.
UPBEAT SWING MUSIC
In the Wiltshire countryside,
this group of pampered young people
were attracting attention
by throwing outrageous parties.
Fancy dress balls...
..play acting...
..and champagne-soaked weekends.
They were known as the Bright Young Things
and Beaton saw them as a way
to insert himself into high society,
to experiment with his art
and get his work published in the magazines.
Darlings,
here we have a pyramid of poseurs,
circa 1927...
and it's the Bright Young Persons -
play acting and posing
in exactly the kind of guise
which they know is going to get them into the gossip magazines
and maybe even into the newspapers -
and at the centre of it all is Cecil Beaton -
heavily wearing mascara,
as is everybody.
But Cecil Beaton had this profound sense of the collective need
for self-promotion,
but also the need out there
in post-World War One society
for images of the young and glamorous.
Beaton's photographs made the antics of the Bright Young Things
famous and infamous...
Their celebrity would not last.
Things change in the '30s with the slump
and a gradual creep forward
of the dark cloud of fascism,
and public appetite for the Bright Young Things
becomes dimmer and thinner
but Beaton, of course, has other fish to fry.
He's completely ruthless about having used this moment
and these faces and these kind of poses
to advance his own career and
to move his own fame game forward
and now there is somewhere else
where he can do something extraordinary
with what he knows best -
and that is glamour.
And the place to be, if you wanted to ride the tide of stardom,
was, of course, Hollywood.
Here, Beaton fell under the spell of screen goddesses.
Greta Garbo.
Marilyn Monroe.
He captured the essence
of what made these women both irresistibly alluring and,
at the same time, impossibly unattainable.
He became a real designer for fame
because he understood pop culture.
He understood its chemistry
so that when he made extraordinary images of goddess-like figures,
he knew exactly how they would be consumed on the street,
in the magazines, and in the pubs.
It was a real, sort of, down-market genius that he had.
He, above all, was a kind of impresario of public craving...
..and we're still living with the kind of celebrity images
Beaton pioneered.
This is Keira Knightley...
Oh, yeah!
Again, I just thought,
"Wouldn't it be great to photograph her in a worker's caff?
The sort of juxtaposition between the two makes me laugh.
HE LAUGHS
Photographer Jason Bell
is famous for his artful portraits
of A-list celebrities.
It works both ways, fame explodes and dwindles
and then there's other people where you're photographing at the point
at which they're just so hot and everyone's like
"Oh, my God," you know, "You're shooting that person."
And then, a couple of years go by and it's like,
"What happened to so and so?"
Stars may rise and fall,
but the relationship between the famous
and the fame-makers
is as close as ever.
I have to say, if I'm honest,
as a photographer,
you want your work to be seen.
What happens is, I do a picture of a rat exterminator
and they run it half-page at the back
and I do a picture of a household name actor
and they run it as a cover and eight pages.
Now there's... Partly, you know, that's nice for me
to have my work used in a bigger, kind of, splashier way,
but also, creatively,
it's more fun to create a set of eight pictures.
You know, you get to play and there's themes
and you're given more space,
and I don't really set that agenda,
but the magazine responds to the public's, you know, desire to see
more pictures of Mr Famous Actor
than Mr Rat Exterminator.
Contemporary fame depends on familiarity
and the celeb-drunk public
feeds on seeing a face over and over again.
Former paparazzi photographer Alan Chapman
is at the launch party for his book of celebrity photographs.
He's no longer a pap,
but remembers only too well
what the public want from candid shots of the famous.
If so and so has got
international acclaim,
stardom,
loads of money...
"Where do they live? How do they live?
"What do they wear? What do they drive? Where do they eat?
"What do they do in their spare time?"
We, as ordinary people, like to...
voyeur into that world, I suppose.
I suppose, you know, myself and everyone else
working as a photographer for the press,
is the go-between.
We're enabling everybody else
to see all these celebrities.
It's a mutual addiction,
this fame game.
We need them and they need us.
We want to see the famous as up close
and as often as possible...
..and they, knowing how fickle fame can be,
need these images to keep up public interest...
..but all that exposure can be dangerous.
Images bring the famous closer to us
and the more we see, the more we want...
..and that's when fame can turn dark.
There's another name for this relentless following
and that's a "hunt."
This is where fame ends up,
in a shrine.
Not the kind of shrine you find in a church or in a palace...
In the palace over the road, her palace.
..but a people's palace.
A caff, Cafe Diana,
and it's perfect really.
I don't think many of the people who come here
are coming in, necessarily, as pilgrims to the cult of Diana,
they're coming here for the fantastic full English -
but then she was full English, wasn't she?
The thing about Diana was that she did both fame and celebrity.
Glamorous star...
..tabloid sensation...
..doer of good deeds.
It was all about the pictures.
The camera ate her up
even before the multitudes did.
From the very beginning, when these little nervous eyes were appearing
from under that lengthy fringe,
not quite able to look directly at the camera,
to the moment where, you know,
the doe-eyed beauty took over,
the whole extraordinary appearance of Diana became
a gorgeous national institution,
and she knew, let's not delude ourselves,
how to work the press
just as much as they could work her.
It was a two-way street, wasn't it,
that ended as a dead end.
..but she did, in some peculiar way,
go right to our hearts
and when we look into the mirror
through all these pictures, what do we see?
We don't see HER so much,
we see us...
and our appetite for the famous
and their disasters.
We see ourselves -
avid, greedy, insatiable -
and THAT is not always a pretty picture.