They tried to make her go to rehab...

Out of the many people blamed for the death of Amy Winehouse her family and friends recieved a lot of the criticism (mine included).

Everyone remembers when Renton's parents take him home and lock him in his old bedroom so he can beat his heroin addiction cold turkey in Trainspotting.

I thought;

Come on Mitch, she’s only small – you could easily sling her over your shoulder, shove her in the spare room and lock the door for a few weeks. Pop in every now and again, take her some toast- give that beehive a bath and in a month she’ll emerge all better.

Or Ronson, even you. You’re loaded. Build a rehab clinic in your house and lock her in.

Osbourne! You know alllll about drugs. Sit her down over a cup of tea and explain why she needs to change her ways. One look at Ozzy should do the trick if nothing else.

I decided to do some research and subsequently found out that life isn’t a film.

What is the likelihood of Amy calling her parents to let them know she’s constantly depressed, and thoroughly dependant on drugs and alcohol? 

A friend recently told me he has suffered with bouts of depression for as long as he can remember but despite a close relationship with his parents has never told them, for fear that they would worry rather than understand. 

Do you think addicts realise they need help and therefore actively seek it? It's a fact that drugs detach you from reality.

It is much more likely that she told the people around her she was fine and as a mid twenty year old she was left in charge of her own life. Mitch Winehouse told mourners at her funeral she had ‘"conquered" her drug addiction, was "trying hard to deal with her drinking", and was happier than she had been for a long time. 

Yet she died.

Either through an overdose of the substances she had reportedly conquered or was in the process of doing so or through taking her own life (assumption..toxicology reports will be released in a few weeks, but i'm sure we all know). 

No one likes to admit they have lost control, especially to those closest to them. The only people likely to be fully aware of her dependence on substance abuse are those who were as addicted as her.

Even in the very unlikely situation that her family knew exactly what was going on what about the legal implications of keeping someone somewhere against their will? Holding someone hostage is a criminal act. It is defined as ‘Somebody manipulated. A person or group of people whose freedom of action is restricted or controlled by a more powerful organization by implied threats or other means .’ 

So this is why no one locked her inside a room.

Is it time for the celebrity era to die? No.

 Celebrity.

We are all familiar with the concept. Someone who is widely known for something/nothing and attracts an unprecedented amount of interest into the inane details of their private lives. 

Gossip websites, magazines, television and the internet have created an entire industry dedicated to giving the public unprecedented access to what goes on behind closed doors of these public figures. Or what goes on in the supermarket. Or at the hairdressers. Or in the park walking a dog.

Tanya Gold’s column in the 20^th July issue of Stylist states “it is time for the era of celebrity to die”.

She reckons there have been “too many headlines about sex lives, and too many ruined lives.”

She rightly states that if you don’t want to be famous, you don’t have to be. If you never talk to the press they will never have anything to print. Even if at first you are hounded eventually they will get bored and focus their attention on the next ‘big thing’ who is so hungry for a headline they purposefully go without underwear, creating the perfect shot of an ‘accidental flash while wearing a short skirt and clambering out of a taxi’. 

Wonder why Madonna is rarely photographed in London? She wears very uninteresting outfits.

Heard of Steve Coogan? Yes you have. Because he talks to the press, sleeps with famous women with famous reputations for entertaining the public with details of her sex life.

But Beyonce and Jay-Z are rarely in the ‘are they on/off?’ pages of gossip magazines because they never talk publicly about their relationship. 

These superficial aspects of our culture I believe provide us with much needed light-hearted entertainment.

As human beings we are nosy. We gossip and we bitch. The celebrity industry is exactly this. The only difference is that instead of gossiping about the next door neighbour over a cup of tea, we gossip about people everybody in the entire country knows and this gossip is then published. 

The ruined lives Tanya Gold touches upon is strange. I suspect she has confused ‘celebrity’ with ‘members of the public subject to criminal acts of tabloid newspapers’.

Fame is a never ending circle that the celebrities being hounded and bored members of the public regularly complain about. Yet we still carry on consuming it and they still carry on giving interviews and creating photo opportunities.

The era of celebrity is not over.                       

I for one will carry on buying heat magazine on a weekly basis, scouring perezhilton.com for stateside gossip and camping outside chez cole for a glimpse of that cheating bastard.