PISSING ON THE TABLOID PARADE

British documentary maker Chris Atkins made the news last Autumn when he caught tabloid journalists on hidden camera saying they would illegally buy celebrity medical records. He claimed he had a plastic surgeon friend who was willing to sell stories (fictional stories such as Rhys Ifans removing unwanted fat and Guy Ritchie having a chemical peel). The Sunday Mirror and The People both offered him cash. Atkins also had a laugh selling (although he never took the cash) fabricated showbiz stories, such as Amy Winehouse’s hair catching on fire, to tabloids who ran them without compunction.

This all forms part of Atkins’ documentary Starsuckers. Despite its tenuous umbrella concept about the hidden forces that suck us in, deceive us, and rip us off, Starsuckers is nevertheless an effective look at immorality in the media. It’s about people who want to be famous, about people who make that happen, about the lack of journalistic integrity, and about the dangers of celebrity involvement in politics. Atkins has had a slew of legal obstacles and warnings over Starsuckers, but it’s survived unscathed for the DVD, which is out now.

VICE: Did you expect the amount of attention and legal issues you’ve had?
Chris Atkins: Not initially, we initially wanted to make a documentary about the psychology of celebrity culture, but then I realised that that wasn’t enough to draw people in. But the big problem is media, not celebrities. It’s the puppeteers, not the puppets.

You mean the media who tell the people what they want? There’s the guy in the film who talks about that, saying that just because people want something, doesn’t mean it’s good to give it to them.
Yeah. He compares it to Christians being fed to the lions. Just because people want something, it doesn’t mean you should give it to them unfettered. It’s the same with drugs: “Let’s give crack cocaine to kids, if they want it. You want knives, guns? Yeah, let’s give everything to everyone.” That’s not how a liberal society works. You can’t censor the press, of course not, but you can put things in place to make sure that people, especially children, aren’t consuming too much of it. And also to ensure that there’s a certain level of truth in it, that would be nice.

Do you think the public gets what the public deserves?
I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone deserves the British media. I think there’s a certain amount of responsibility the public has to take, but when you see exactly what goes on behind the curtain: press releases becoming news, people printing lies knowingly, people breaking the law for stories, you realise the public doesn’t understand how awful the mainstream media really is. They pretend they’re doing everything in our interest but they’re doing everything in their interest.

And they don’t care too much about potential legal costs for untrue stories, because they’ve already sold all those papers.
They’ve got the scoop. Piers Morgan, for all his disgusting faults, was one of the first people to break cover on all this. He said his morning editorial meeting would be someone coming in and saying they were going to turn over a celebrity, and then he’d ask his circulation people what they were going to make out of it, say an extra quarter of a million sales, then he’d ask the lawyers what it might cost if it’s not true, which might be £100,000, and if he’d still make a profit, he’d run it. So it’s not about what’s true or false or what’s in the public interest, it’s about circulation figures. That attitude seeps from the top down to all the journalists on the ground. These aren’t journalists reporting something that’s happened, these are people making something happen so they can write about it.

Have you had any more interaction with Max Clifford since the whole injunction/non-injunction fiasco?
We weren’t sure if Channel 4 were going to allow all of the Max Clifford scene on the TV version and they did cut a few lines out. So, I thought: “Fuck this, I’ll put it online”, and we cut it into this silly viral and it got 10,000 hits in a few days. And then I heard he got married two days after I released the viral. If it’s possible to feel slightly sorry for Max Clifford, I did, but only very slightly.

Why do you think he let his guard down and spilled stuff to you when he thought the camera wasn’t on? Surely he, of all people, would be savvy enough to not do that.
No. It’s astonishing on so many levels. I think it’s because he’s never been caught-out before and has just got careless. He’s notorious for doing interviews, waiting until the cameras are off and then saying, “Here’s what I didn’t tell you.” And then you ask him if he’ll say it on camera and he says “No, no, no.” It’s like a kid with a big toy and I couldn’t shut him up. He went on and on and on, I couldn’t get out. I was terrified, because I was thinking “I’m fucking wearing an undercover camera at Max Clifford’s house,” I thought he was gonna press a button and the dogs would be unleashed.

Tell me about this letter you got from Bob Geldof the other day.
Oh god. 58 pages. His letter to me is 11 pages, but the total sum of the correspondence he emailed me was 58. We’d given him two weeks to respond to the film before it was broadcast on TV, so we could put a right of reply in at the end of the show, but we didn’t get anything. Then suddenly this tidal wave of anger arrived a day before broadcast. It’s astonishing; there are some absolute gems in there. It’s a hilarious mixture of legal stuff, lists of his achievements, jokes, and swearing. It’s the kind of letter you write then you don’t send. But he sent it.

That sort of goes along with all the different aspects of who he is and what he’s done.
Yeah, I genuinely think he’s doing things with the best intentions. And I was at great pains to communicate that in the film. But anyway here’s how his letter ends: “That’s it I think. Another Sunday gone.” He wrote this to me on a Wednesday. “Thanks pal. Good luck with the show and I hope it’s not too naff. Yours unbelievably bored, Bob Geldof.” At some point I’ll put the whole thing on my blog, but it might crash the internet. And we’re not saying anything new in the film. We allege that the Ethiopian government used some of the Live Aid money for ethnic cleansing. It’s not Bob’s fault, he did it with the best of intentions, but shit happens. We do say that Live 8 distracted from what was happening with Make Poverty History.

A lot of people find the showbiz more appealing than the issue at hand.
Yeah. There’s a very good quote a political activist said to me: “I can’t compete with a rock guitar.” He said “I can have the best arguments in the world, but Bono sweeps in wanting to solve the world’s problems in a minute and it just fucks it up.” And I like U2 by the way. But if Bono said, “I want to perform open heart surgery,” we wouldn’t let him.

ALEX GODFREY