6. 3AM eternal
Not just because the internet
Here’s one of the big questions of Upskirt Decade: how much responsibility for the tone of celebrity culture in the noughties belongs with the internet? When I first began scoping out my ideas on the period, I had a pretty strong intuition that the pressure towards cruelty was coming from online. Tabloid culture had always been rough, yes, but my memory was that things got really bad when the bloggers (Perez Hilton, Gawker, TMZ) got involved.
In my initial understanding, these upstarts put pressure on print media in two ways: by taking a bite out of their audience, and by commandeering the gossip that tabloids previously relied on. Online outlets could take a more bruising approach, and the print media was forced to follow their lead if they were to have any hope of competing.
That still feels true to me, as far as it goes, but what it misses is how much the print media had already taken up a position of antagonism towards celebrities. And to my great relief, this is a bit of the story that involves Piers Morgan in a prominent role. (Why relief? Because I’m writing Upskirt Decade for both UK and US readers, making Morgan a hugely convenient figure given that he is a rare British tabloid journalist with a genuine US presence. With the best will in the world, I’m not sure my US editor would be thrilled to read 1,000 words about Dan Wootton.)
It’s also a bit of the story that involves 9/11 — contrary to my assertion in issue 2 that the Twin Towers attack seemed to have left little cultural mark. In 2001, Piers Morgan was editor of the Mirror, and after 9/11, he wanted to establish his paper as a place of serious news values. No more puff pieces. No more copy approval for celebrities. The dignity of this position is only slightly undermined by the fact that it emerged out of a ruck with Richard and Judy over the wording of a feature.
9/11, he explained, “empowered us to put celebrities back in their box.” Luckily, he had already established one of his most important weapons in his war on froth: the 3AM Girls. From 2000 to 2016, the 3AM Girls were the Mirror’s gossip section. For a time, they were the paper’s most important brand — hence the outing to Ascot in the picture above wearing their pages’ logo bobbing about on their head. They were so vital to the Mirror’s identity, other hacks’ celebrity scoops were published under their byline.
Why 3AM Girls? Because there were three of them, and because they stayed out late partying with the people they reported on. The memoir of Jessica Callan, one of the original 3AMs, is alarmingly heavy on the hangovers. Boozing it up was part of the job. But the real point of a 3AM Girl was not to have fun. It was to strike terror into the hearts of stars.
“Our brief was to leave celebrities very afraid,” explained Callan. “If someone behaved like a prima donna to us, we were given the green light to name and shame them in the column. Our favourite stories? Celebrities fighting and fucking.” Drama was the most important thing. In the same way that reality TV like Big Brother and Popstars edited footage to create protagonists, antagonists and narrative arcs, the 3am Girls took the raw material of star encounters and gossip titbits, and turned it into something like a soap opera.
The 3AM Girls themselves were characters in that drama. When an on-page spat with Noel Gallagher let to him declaring them ugly from the stage at Wembley (in fact, he said 3AM stood for “three absolute mingers”), it was pure opportunity for the brand. The Mirror ran a phone-in poll so readers could decide who was ugliest — the Girls, inevitably, lost thanks to a dedicated army of Oasis fans.
But this was a rare defeat. Mostly, the Girls came out on top. After all, they were the ones with the power of the press. And though taking on a particularly popular star would lead to a barrage of angry calls to the desk, the Girls always got the last word. However much celebrities despised them (the Spice Girls called them “fucking sluts” at one point), many ended up courting them: Sadie Frost invited them to the launch of her fashion brand in an effort to tame them.
Because the 3AM Girls were not only vicious, they were also unashamedly transactional. If you were nice to them, they’d be nice to you. If you offended them, it was no holds barred. After Daryl Hannah extracted a settlement from the paper over one of their stories, Cullen told an interviewer from Vanity Fair: “I will make it my mission to fuck her up!” And yes, the 3AMs were astonishingly a big enough deal to be profiled in VF.
The one thing that absolutely guaranteed hostility, though, was any suggestion that a star “took themselves seriously” or “couldn’t take a joke”. Everything was in the game, and if a celebrity didn’t grasp that, they’d marked themselves a victim. To their credit, the Girls applied the same rule to themselves. They dished it out for a living: there was nothing they could do but take it, although it often looks like a grim business in retrospect.
So when the bloggers emerged, they weren’t inventing a new style: they were emulating and exaggerating one that the press had already established. The one big difference was that, as independent operators, they were not even minimally restrained by most of the norms and laws that kept the traditional media in check. Each provoked the other to greater unkindness.
What stopped this? It would be nice to believe it was arrested by the moral reckoning forced by Britney’s conservatorship hearings and the insights of the #MeToo moment. Nice, and largely untrue. The reason the media no longer treats celebrities as the enemy is that it can’t afford to. The old rule of “they need us as much as we need them” ended with the advent of social media — celebrities have very limited use for the press now they have a direct line to the public.
And if you offend a star, you won’t just have some unpleasant phonecalls. You’ll get the full force of an entire internet of Barbz or K-Pop fans, some of whom will graphically tell you how they want you to die, and some of whom will track down your home address to make sure you know they mean it.
The 3AM Girls could have gone on forever — Morgan compared them to the Spice Girls when he was recruiting them, but really they were more like the Sugababes in their infinite interchangeability. They ended because the culture they helped to inaugurate consumed itself once the fans could talk back.
Sarah x
I had so many great responses to last week’s newsletter! Thanks to everyone who got in touch. It’s always great to hear from readers, so please do reply or leave a comment.
Gimme, gimme more…
After last week’s mention of the return of hipster jeans, the inevitable is happening: the tramp stamp is also making a comeback! Am I going to get one? Well I’ve just booked in for a Mean Girls-inspired arm tattoo so let’s just say I’m not definitely not going to
Emily Ratajkowski accuses Robin Thicke of sexual assault on the “Blurred Lines” video set. One more tick in the column for “someone singing about sexual assault might not actually be being ironic after all”
Britney is BACK on Insta. She’s thanked the #FreeBritney movement, said she has “a lot of healing to do”, and posted a nude in which, fair play, she looks terrific (although I have my doubts about “the tub curves”)