The New Age

The Brentwood OC (Osteopathic Centre) just across from me, is no more! The other day I saw a woman scraping letters off the window. Where the sign used to stand outside, there now remains only the three blue poles that formerly supported it. The building has suddenly become an enigma, like a Rachel Whiteread artwork, presiding over the mysterious migrations of red recycling boxes.

Appropriately enough a shop has opened just below and to the right of me, called The Five Elements. Letters in the window advertise 'buddhas' and 'angels'. Are they selling these, or are they perhaps the staff? I wouldn't know, since I haven't been in, and neither – from what I can tell from the odd casual glance – has anyone else. I'm sure that the owners will take this philosophically. They need only await the bursting of the TOWIE bubble, when everyone will be looking for Answers.

In fact, on the programme the other week, Gemma was trying to 'find herself'. This didn't take long; she isn't hard to find. I almost bumped into her myself the other day, rounding a corner in Roper's Yard. She was standing about with a film crew, outside a shop ('Sui Generis') that was being made over, Brentwood being little more than a set nowadays. Moving on, I encountered a teenage girl who also looked familiar. What docu-soap was she from? Ah yes, the ongoing one that is my life. It was my step-niece, Saskia. She'd just got her first tattoo, from that place near the curry house. She moved on, with her friend Laura, quite possibly to become embroiled in the world of TOWIE herself, leaving me to contemplate the increasingly fragile border between reality and 'reality'.

Once upon a time you had to do something in order to become a celebrity. Now celebrity is more like a waking dream. But isn't that its ultimate tendency? Sure, Liberace could play the piano, but it's all the glitter that you remember. Yes I've seen Steven Soderbergh's Behind The Candelabra. It's witty and well-acted, but a bit like a superior TV biopic – which, since it was made by HBO, I suppose it is. We see some brief bits of grisly plastic surgery and we get Matt Damon (playing Liberace's lover Scott) throwing up in the backroom of a sex shop, but overall I felt that it was all a bit too toned-down and tasteful. Which is hardly appropriate to the subject.

At the end, Scott re-imagines Liberace's funeral as a show, complete with diamond-encrusted hearse and dancing girls, with the resurrected Liberace flying up to rejoin his piano on an upper level of the stage. Meanwhile I was busy re-imagining the whole film along those lines: a kind of Gothic fantasia, with Liberace (Michael Douglas) flying around his mansion like a big sparkling bat. If there's one film that Ken Russell should have risen from the dead to direct, it's this. But I suppose it's all a matter of taste. Here in Brentwood, Liberace would probably seem quite restrained.