Fearne Cotton - The Biography. Nigel Goodall
she was a good role model, a great campaigner and an amazing pioneer.’
She still admits to having cravings for the not-so-healthy goodies. One of these is Müller rice and the other is Jaffa Cakes: ‘I’ve had cravings in the middle of the night before and have had to go to the petrol station for a Müller rice, that’s how much I love them. If I’m working late, I do get really tired and a bit run-down and then I usually get a cold. It goes in phases, though. In the run-up to Christmas, I’m very busy but then I get a couple of weeks off to recover.’ One of her pet hates when she does get a cold is Lemsip. According to her MySpace blog, it makes her slightly trippy, and all over the shop. ‘That stuff knocks me out. I feel like my head is wrapped in a fuzzy warm blanket,’ she laughs.
Fearne signed up to MySpace in November 2005, and, in the time since then she has collected a network of almost 60,000 MySpace friends, who seem to be mostly fans, although she does have a few celebrity mates in her Top 20 friends as well, such as Reggie Yates, Christopher Parker and boyfriend Jesse Jenkins. She is said to adore the idea of logging on regularly to update her blogs, blurbs, interests, music, pictures and other typical MySpace features and reading the comments that are left for her to see. ‘I love MySpace,’ she told CosmoGirl magazine in December 2006, almost a year after she first started to log on to the website. ‘But there are tons of fake Fearnes on there,’ she complained. One, she continues, has a ‘dodgy page pretending to be me … so feel free to go on there and tell them to get lost and that they are a big fake! This is the only real page. I’m the only one who has access to it and I do check my own mails, so keep them coming, lovelies, and ignore the big old faker!’ And as if to guide those who were interested to the right page, she even gave out her MySpace account number to make sure there was no confusion. The presence of fake celebrities on MySpace, however, had been steadily growing since the social networking website went live and online in 1998 and she was not alone in her concern.
In America, for instance, where MySpace was started, it wasn’t long before users realised how easy it was to become ‘friends’ with such stars as Paris Hilton, Jenna Jameson, Hilary Duff and Madonna, to name but just a few. The profiles were real, but be warned, advised American Fox News correspondent Holly McKay, ‘Your new celebrity friend may be a faux. Any Fred or Frannie, it seems, can fake stardom on the web, and sometimes even the most cyber-savvy surfers will fall for it.’
Entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates and Donald Trump, for example, have more than thirty poser profiles, while media magnets like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton appear in their hundreds. ‘There are a lot of problems with predators who pretend to be celebrities,’ said Parry Aftab, executive director of wiredsafety.org, a site that provides help, safety information and education to Internet and mobile device users. ‘Anybody can pretend to be anybody they want and set up a profile. MySpacers need to recognise that they are often being conned. This is illegal.’
Despite the fact that it is virtually impossible to pull the plug completely on all pseudo profiles, the big names themselves are working on the problem. In America pop star Nick Lachey isn’t happy that his song, ‘What’s Left Of Him’, is the best way to describe the multiple personalities he is meant to have, due to the vast number of varying profiles online. He is currently working with wiredsafety to establish a programme that will involve putting a stamp of certification on genuine celebrity profiles across the web world.
American celebrity Montel Williams was also shocked to discover three people claiming to be him on MySpace. ‘This can be very damaging to one’s career,’ Aftab disclosed. ‘As a father, Montel was very upset with how he was depicted on one of the pages. Another fraud page was so clever and so accurate that even he was surprised. Sometimes it can be very hard to decipher what is real and what is not.’
Unfortunately for many famous people targeted in these socialising scams, their Internet imitators can bring about real-life repercussions. San Francisco public TV host Josh Kornbluth was the prey of a pretend profile containing offensive sexual references discreetly laced throughout. In June 2007 managers at his employer, KQED, received anonymous emails from people who said they saw the profile and demanded Kornbluth be fired.
Clearly, a nasty fraud site can hurt a star. But if you think that there’s no harm in setting up a site that simulates a celebrity in a supportive and non-defamatory way, think again. ‘Just in getting hits on your space by pretending to be someone famous, you are benefiting commercially and that’s illegal,’ said Aftab. ‘By all means set up a fan site, but don’t pretend to actually be somebody you are not.’
So what spurs Net users to set up these bogus bios? ‘Some fans do it out of flattery, not realising what they’re doing is wrong,’ said Australia-based media and communications specialist Stephanie Woods. ‘Others want to satisfy their alter egos or experience what it may be like to lead a “better” life. As for the defamatory profiles, they usually stem from somebody who wants to vent their dislike of a particular person.’
That said, an increasing number of real celebrities are setting up in cyberspace. ‘It’s a way of reaching your fan base on an interpersonal level,’ said Louise Kellman, a San Francisco-based PR consultant and self-confessed MySpace junkie. ‘Celebrities are allowing people to get a sense of what goes on when the cameras aren’t rolling. Fans really identify with that.’ And when it comes to developing a drove of devotees, social networking sites seem to be working.
‘People from all ages, from all walks of life, are hooked on this phenomenon and it’s rising rapidly,’ Kellman continued. ‘So it’s obvious why more and more celebs are jumping on the bandwagon. It provides them with an extra opportunity for self-promotion, the chance to stay in touch with their fanbase and of course encourages their community to participate in buying merchandise, downloading their music or going to watch their movie. Best of all, it doesn’t cost a thing to set up.’
But how can ordinary fans separate the stars from the imposters? ‘It’s safest to always assume it’s a fake,’ said Jordan McAuley, founder of contactanycelebrity.com. ‘Genuine profiles should always have official management contact details so you can verify their validity with them.’ Aftab also advises social networkers to steer clear of anyone claiming to be a star or a close friend of a celebrity and says celebrities’ publicity reps are undergoing specialist training in how to handle these hiccups. What is interesting is that while MySpace officials don’t scout around for fake pages, if they receive a complaint from the victim of a falsified profile, they will immediately remove that page.
Despite the sea of scammers surfing the Net, if you understand what is real, the revolution of MySpace and other social networking sites can closely connect you with your idols and bring about a whole new family of friends. ‘It’s bridging the gap between the fans and the famous,’ Kellman explains.
But then again, it has also become an enormous public relations accessory for many celebrities. In fact, it was once claimed that some of Lily Allen’s fame was in part due to her being promoted on MySpace. In response to an interview question in which she was asked if she was discovered by MySpace, Allen argued, that no, that was ‘not accurate at all! I had a record deal before I set up my MySpace account so that really couldn’t be further from the truth.’
Even though she was sounding off about colds and flu and detesting Lemsip on MySpace, Fearne doesn’t appear to have suffered that many colds. Well, not when she is on camera, at least, and certainly not for the year when she was presenting Diggit. It was a typical children’s show that began in 1998 and replaced Saturday Disney and the Sunday morning Disney Club, from where Fearne got her start. The programme usually aired from 7 to 9am on Saturdays and from 8am on Sundays. Initially the programme was presented by Fearne and ‘Des’ and made up of Disney cartoons, old and new, plus celebrity guests, games and features. Even at its best, it was all pretty predictable fare for what one would expect from an early morning television programme for young viewers, but for Fearne there were some embarrassing moments.
One that she particularly remembers was the challenge in the forest: ‘There were all these quad bikers and I had to run through them and in between some cones. I was being really cocky and sprinting like Pamela Anderson down the muddy track and my foot