Alice Coster: I’ll never forget my first taste of the tawdry underbelly of celebrity

I never expected my first brush with celebrity to be walking in on my housemate bent over the couch with a famous face attending to her, err, needs.

There have been many examples of the bad-man-in-exile finding redemption, but Sam Burgess is trying for redemption before he’s even served his exile.

You always remember your first taste of celebrity.

I wasn’t expecting mine to be on the couch at the Acland St apartment I shared with a self-diagnosed nymphomaniac after arriving home on a Sunday arvo many years ago.

There was my flatmate, bent over the couch with a man attending to her, er, needs. She was excited to see me and rather than stop proceedings she said: “Alice, Alice, this guy is some celebrity. What’s your name again?”

Suddenly the man popped his head up and calmly introduces himself.

I indeed did know who he was.

“You know that song on the chart, sing it, sing it,” my friend ordered.

And off he went with a few lines of a now well-known chorus, a song I can never hear without eyes widening, before I bolted off in horror and left the celebrity and the nymph to do their thing.

It was a fast awakening to the shiny manufactured celebrity image portrayed in headlines (and this was even before Instagram) versus a sometimes rather tawdry underbelly, or in this case rump.

Ironically meeting celebrities then became my job, but none of those experiences beat my first.

This tasty tale came back into my thinking when my eyes widened at one of the names listed on a cast announcement for Channel 7’s SAS Australia.

Sam Burgess.

But the first name which jumped out was Sam Burgess in a what-the-hell way given he must have barely got out of his suit from court before heading to play with special forces in the Blue Mountains.

Clearly the ol’ celebrity bad-man exile recipe is now outdated. The ingredients and method isn’t hard to follow.

You bugger up big time in the public eye; put your head down and pay your penance; then make a comeback, either in the form of a reality show, starting up a charity or foundation of some sort, or a teary tell-all.

This was recently and succinctly put in ABC drama Aftertaste which follows the aftermath of a celebrity chef played by actor Erik Thomson, who has a spectacular fall from grace.

“Guys like you have got to follow the recipe right,” says the niece of the enfant terrible.

“You make your heartfelt apology to the press, then you go into bad-man exile and after all that, then you can make a comeback.”

There have been many examples of bad-man-exile finding redemption. Think, Shane Warne, Brendan Fevola, Garry Lyon and Karl Stefanovic. Some have not.

This jury is still very much out on Wayne Carey.

Fallen TV presenter Andrew O’Keefe has just gone into exile, while former MasterChef judge George Calombaris seems on the precipice of leaving.

Some like Geoffrey Edelsten will hopefully stay in exile for perpetuity.

But usually relevance deprivation disorder takes over and they need to make a comeback in the tried and true form of reality TV just like Edelsten’s former wife Brynne.

Surely a duty of care is needed to be taken by production before we see another Anna Nicole Smith saga play out.

Back to Burgess.

Just this week the beefed up former NRL player who was recently acquitted of intimidation charges was whacked with a drink-driving charge after secondary results allegedly came back with a positive result for cocaine while he was supposedly due to pick up his kids.

Brendan Fevola.

Shane Warne. Picture: Getty

But rather than deal with the serious court matter and keep a low profile, Burgess is being “papped” nude while filming the military-style challenges to play out to a public court of appeal where he gets to write his own script.

“Count on it, Sam will win,” one scrupulous TV insider depressingly told me when I was huffing and puffing this week.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it was written into his contract.”

We all know reality TV isn’t, well, real, but surely it’s too soon to be deifying the badly behaved while they still have matters before the court?

But it makes for good TV. When (correctly) revealing former AFL player Heath Shaw was tipped to join the SAS cast last year, a Seven staffer asked my thoughts on who else to include.

‘We want the most controversial people we can find’ was the brief.

The relentless beast of television is to blame.

Always searching for the next big ratings bonanza, reality TV has transitioned from dating to celebrity confessionals. Before dating, it was renovation and adventure, before that it was weight loss, the list goes on and on.

The insatiable appetite of social media needs constant headlines and the controversial bring it in spades.

The PR spin cycle has clicked into a new format when it comes to airing out the dirty laundry.

Just remember it’s all manufactured.

Which is why we will never hear one of the SAS cast reveal my tasteless story from above in their interrogation.

Alice Coster is Herald Sun Page 13 editor.