my celebrity lifestyle

It has always seemed to me that being a celebrity must give rise to a kind of semi-benign paranoia in which you think everyone is staring at you - and this is experienced as a good thing, by and large. I was thinking of this while watching Matteo Garrone's excellent film Reality, in which a Neopolitan fishmonger has an audition for the Italian Big Brother and is so convinced he's going to get in that he sells his shop and gives away his possessions, certain that people from the show are studying his behaviour with a view to finding out if he's worthy of being in the house - at one point, he even suspects a cricket in his living room of being an employee of the TV company, sent to spy on him.

No such concerns trouble me, since I live in Brentwood, home of TOWIE, and am thus effectively already in the Big Brother house. The Zeitgeist is all about me. Across from where I live – according to their internet connection – is 'the Brentwood OC', or, to give it its full name, Brentwood Osteopathic Centre, where all the cool kids go to get their back problems sorted, and beneath me is Skin Solutions, a salon in which, so I imagine, young women have their skin removed and replaced with tough orange exoskeletons. One sees the results of this terrifying process in the streets every day.

Further into town I have witnessed (the other Saturday, in the daytime) an enormous queue stretching right down Crown Street and into the High Street. 'So it's true!', I gasped. 'The only way is Essex!' I had to resort to national television to find out what was going on in my own neighbourhood, but Sunday's episode of TOWIE made everything clear: Joey Essex had opened a new shop!

The Brentwood Gazette, however, was less than thrilled. Nightmare On Crown Street was its headline, with Joey presumably cast as Brentwood's own Freddy Krueger, a strangely-dressed man creeping into the dreams of young girls and boys. Well, they have a point there, but it was a surprise to learn that what I saw as a sedate queue (or 'que' as Joey, on Twitter, would have it) was in fact a hysterical mob. But not everyone loves TOWIE. Even ITV2, which shows it, has taken to putting the word 'Plebs' in the corner of the screen while Gemma, Bobby et al are chatting away beneath it. I think that this is an ad for the comedy series that follows it, but I can't help but suspect a little editorialising.