Comedienne Jenny Eclair doesn’t crave fame. But some do – and that’s why she co-wrote a play about the famous 15 minutes, writes Sunita Rappai

JENNY Éclair, writer, performer, comedienne – famously the only female winner of the prestigious Perrier award for comedy – refuses to call herself a celebrity.
“I am not famous,” she says. “I am well known in a certain arena but I’m no more a celebrity than some footballer who doesn’t play in the premier league. I see myself as a professional working girl.”
The notion of what constitutes a celebrity these days – and why some crave it – is an interesting one.
Eclair’s hit one-woman play, The Andy Warhol Syndrome, which is coming to the UCL Bloomsbury theatre next Thursday explores this, using Warhol’s famous theory that “in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” as the peg to hang it all on.
Eclair plays Carol Fletcher, an overweight 43-year-old trapped in an unhappy marriage, who finds herself caught up in the fickle world of reality TV stardom when she participates in a sponsored slim on TV.
“She’s a normal, working class woman who works in a fruit and veg stall but she captures the nation’s imagination,” Eclair explains. “The slimmer she gets, the bigger she gets as a celebrity.
“She’s a sort of amalgamation of Jade Goody from Big Brother, Maureen from Driving School and the dinner lady from the Jamie Oliver programme.”
The question the play explores is what happens to these people when their 15 minutes of fame is up? Some like Jade Goody manage to negotiate the trek to a kind of celebrity status, with regular appearances in magazines. Others are less fortunate – relegated to opening supermarkets or working in one.
While many commentators have been outspoken about the relentless onslaught of reality TV programmes Éclair, is more ambiguous.
She says: “In some ways, it’s a progression from the kitchen sink dramas of old, when people were obsessed with getting real people talking. Will it make script writers redundant? No. But some of the most dramatic moments recently haven’t come from drama – they’ve come from reality TV.
“Take Jade Goody naked on the sofa, for example. You couldn’t have scripted that moment. Or in the latest series of Big Brother where some of the contestants were watching the others – it was extraordinary.”
What about her own recent brush with reality TV – her two appearances, before she was unceremoniously booted off, in the last series of Celebrity Fame Academy?
Éclair says she agreed to the programme partly because it was for a good cause – Comic Relief – and partly to conquer her phobia of singing in public. But even she couldn’t have predicted the outcome.
“It has taken me a while to regain my sense of humour,” she says. “I did not cope with it well at all. What I learnt is that my own threshold for that kind of thing is low. I found it more traumatic than I thought because I was completely out of my depth.
“I will never sing in public again so the public can breathe a sigh of relief.”
There is a trend for more and more outrageous scenarios, as the old barriers come tumbling down, that she acknowledges.
“Now and again, to get good TV, they seem to be encouraging the mentally unstable and clinically unwell to participate,” she says. “Human nature is fairly disgusting. We are keen to see others making pratts of themselves. There is this prurient need to see the worst things – the biggest tumour, the fattest woman in the world.”
If there is a message in the play, co-written by Eclair and her best friend Julie Balloo, it is, she says, to be careful what you wish for.
“When I was a child, I wanted to be famous and I’d be lying now if I said that I didn’t enjoy the perks and the money that comes with it.
“But I do worry that it won’t go on. Thirty years ago, if you had done as much as I did, you were almost guaranteed a place for life. There is a greater appetite for celebrity now and it is more fickle. They can chew you up and spit you out.”

• The Andy Warhol Syndrome, May 19, The UCL Bloomsbury Theatre15 Gordon Street, London, WC1H. 020 7388 8822.