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Fame in the 20th Century
TV series · documentary
Fame in the 20th Century was a 1993 BBC documentary television series and book by Clive James. The book and series examined the phenomenon of fame and how it expanded to international mass media proportions throughout the 20th century. The 8 episodes were divided in roughly 8 decades, from the 1900s to the 1980s. Each episode highlighted world famous people during that part of the century. James delivered interesting and amusing comments about the portrayed celebrities and the various ways they became famous. In the USA, the series were broadcast on PBS.
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I've always been a Clive James fan - his silly TV show "Saturday Night Clive" was appointment viewing in my household when I was a teenager. And his fantastic end of year New Years specials were great as well.
Later I read some of his written works. His book companion to his TV documentary series "Fame in the 20th Century" was by turns wry and thoughtful.
I am not normally a poetry kind of guy, but this is hilarious: https://web.cs.dal.ca/~johnston/poetry/bookofmyenemy.html
On a boat ride in Bruges, Belgium, I heard a boat operator/philosopher expound on why it was so that teachers were paid so little, rockstars like Ozzy Osbourne were rich, and famous composers like Mozart died broke.
He said it was a question of network effects and impact. Mozart died broke because of poor money management and the inability to reach a worldwide audience.
An elementary school teacher is only paid a small amount relative to most celebrities because their impact is small. They cannot reach more 10-30 students at a time.
A baseball player is paid millions because he (through cable TV) can impact/entertain many more anonymous people indirectly.
Is it fair? Probably not but there aren't incentive systems in place to pay good teachers according to their impact.
Clive James had a fascinating BBC documentary a while back, a multi-part series "Fame in the 20th Century". It's pre-Internet but I believe still very relevant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fame_in_the_20th_Century