'What do you reckon about Jude Law?" I say, over the phone. "Difficult one," my mate says. "I think he's peaked. I'd sell the lot now. I've made a quarter of a mill on him the last 10 days. You don't want to be greedy, do you?" "No," I say pensively. "But the dividend's going to be massive - what with him not having an affair with Nicole Kidman and all." "The market doesn't believe it," my adviser says. "You can tell. He's stopped dead at £8.12 a share. They don't think there's anything in it. The fact of the matter is..." "You can't buck the market," I chant. "Exactly," he says.
In the past month or two, a new internet game has gripped the shallow ranks of those who toil in the metropolitan media - the mediacracy, you might say. There is a certain sort of person who five years ago used to read Hello! and now reads Heat; who logs on to popbitch.com every day to read the latest scurrilous stories about a C-list TV presenter snorting cocaine off the breasts of a D-list weathergirl; who somehow always knows the real story behind, say, J-Lo and Ben Affleck without ever actually buying a tabloid newspaper. They work in PR, in publishing, or in a dressing gown in a corner of the sitting room, and despite all appearances, they are surprisingly well educated.
The BBC's Celebdaq is the new game invented for this sort of person. Like the best ideas, it is incredibly simple, utterly ruthless in its operation and endlessly gripping. Simply put, it is a virtual stock exchange for celebrity. You log on at www.bbc.co.uk/celebdaq and, in the first instance, are given £10,000 of virtual money. The site offers a long list of celebrities and you initially spend your money on shares, in any quantity to the limit of your budget, in any number of celebrities.
The price of the shares, exactly as in the case of real stock exchanges, is initially set by the administrators, who can and often do get it wrong - over-excitedly, they priced Zoe Ball at £42.85 on her issue in the wake of her marital difficulties, and at that level the market wouldn't touch it. Subsequently, the value of shares is simply decided by the punters; who is on the up, whose career is on the skids. In the absence of company profits, dividends are paid once a week based on the extent of media coverage in the previous seven days.
It has been turned into a television show, on BBC Three and therefore largely unwatched; it could only work if the joke was sustained, and the show presented by men in suits in the style of The Money Programme. The website version is the real thing. The great appeal of the game is that it is entirely amoral, and judges people without pity or sympathy. Just as in the financial market individual operators can make a great deal of money out of war and catastrophe, the punters on Celebdaq leap eagerly on anyone going through painful but newsworthy personal trauma.
I had some early information about the state of Sadie Frost's marriage to Jude Law - fortunately there is, as yet, no regulator inquiring into insider trading on this one - and plunged heavily on Sadie at £1.88. After two weeks of furious newspaper speculation about her post-natal depression, I unfeelingly sold at £30.23 and found myself in possession of a virtual yacht. Sad, eh?
Celebrities are judged quite ruthlessly with no real reference to their achievements, their status, or their significance; they rise if the market thinks the market will buy and sink if there is no interest, and no suspicion of anyone else's interest. At present, the Queen, who might be thought of as a gilt-edged investment, is priced at four pence below Nadine Coyle, a woman I have never heard of in my life (she turns out to have won a television talent show). In a rare departure from the general ruthlessness, the Pope, who used to be quoted on the market, was delisted a week or two back; I suppose it was just too naughty to expect him to vie for investment with Alan Titchmarsh.
The general savagery extends to the market information, which makes as heartless reading as the Financial Times. Here they are, starting to advise on the merits of investing in Rik Waller, the fat singer: "Wobbly-waisted warbler Rik first came to the nation's attention when he crooned his way through to the finals of Pop Idol. He sparked a massive debate in the nation's living rooms with everyone arguing over whether, given his girth, he could ever be considered a genuine pop idol."
The fantasy here, I think, is less about judging famous people, buying into and selling out of their reputations and more about the idea that our own lives, like companies, might be judged by a structure like a market. Everyone has had these periods in their lives when things seem to be going well in the eyes of the outside world and patches when nobody seems to be buying at all; and the stock market offers a suggestive sort of metaphor.
The metaphor isn't a new one. WH Auden, in his Letter to Lord Byron, playfully sketches out some literary reputations in terms of the stock market: "Joyces are firm and there's nothing new/Eliots have hardened just a point or two./ Hopkins are brisk, thanks to some recent boosts/There's been some further weakening in Prousts."
If you could be listed in this way, you would have a very specific idea of whether your life was part of a bear market or a bull market, and what people thought of you in the most brutal, frightening, but rather exhilaratingly honest way. That's the temptation of Celebdaq; it is the nearest thing on earth to the final judgment. Whether you are Fat Rik, plodding along at £1 a share, or Sadie Frost peaking at a massively over-subscribed £30.20, you are going to find out what people really think of you, and take part unwillingly in a mass fantasy, of judging and being judged.
