Output details

A Great Big Shining Star

This novel concerns a young woman whose need for fame dictates her life, and the caretaker at her old school who remembers her as a child and is now following her passage through reality TV shows and lads’ mags with appalled fascination. It demanded intensive research: Griffiths immersed himself in programmes like Big Brother and What Katie Did Next; magazines such as Heat, Closer, and Nuts; the tabloids; and networking sites. He also researched such things as the biology of insects, the migratory movements of birds, and the history of St Kilda island (all important to the novel’s trajectory). He read widely concerning the nature of fame and the modern cult of the celebrity; an extensive bibliography of works consulted would comprise hundreds of items, but among the most germane were: Braudy’s The Frenzy of Renown, Payne’s Fame, Rowlands’s Fame, Brim’s Look at Me!, De Zengotita’s Mediated, plus films such as Atkins’s Star Suckers. In addition, Griffiths interviewed ‘celebrities’, online and in person, about the urge for fame and celebrity. One of the novel’s themes is how celebrity elides with pornography, and today’s cultural obsession with such material and the ease of access to it, so Griffiths spoke to sex workers in various fields (in particular those who work on webcam), read many academic studies (such as Walters’s Living Dolls) as well as many memoirs of working in the industry, of which there are now so many as to constitute a separate genre in itself (and of which Melissa Febos’s Whip Smart is perhaps the most informative and astute). Additionally, Griffiths was concerned to explore the effects of digitalisation on the collective consciousness, the speed and intensity of change of which immediately renders any research obsolete; still, works such as Erik Davies’s Techgnosis were useful here.

This novel, a satire on celebrity culture, involved an intensive three-year research programme in which Griffiths immersed himself in popular media associated with the phenomena, and its burgeoning scholarship. His sources included complete runs of celebrity television series, film, tabloid journalism, lads’ mags, social networking websites, personal interviews with ‘celebrities’ and sex-workers as well as their memoirs (exploring connections between pornography and celebrity). Known for meticulous social realism, Griffiths’s novels all involve careful research to ensure accuracy of setting and characterization, yet this one was particularly extensive, including a wider range of primary sources over a greater period of time.