Icelandic Saga

 When I’m not working in a bar, I maintain a steady sideline as an investigative journalist. Or at least that’s what I tell women at parties.

 Mostly, I just make stuff up. This is one of those times.

 I had a tip that there was an entertainment industry whistle-blower with a huge story that was looking to talk to someone trustworthy. Luckily, everyone trustworthy was too slow, so I went to meet with him instead. In a darkened back room of a shady pub, I met my contact.

 He was a grey-haired, doughy man who could have been anywhere between thirty five and fifty – whatever weighed on his mind had taken its toll on his body, and he had the fleshy, jowly look of a man gone to seed. In spite of his bulk, his eyes were furtive; the kind of eyes I’d seen most often in skinny, strung out guys. He looked like a thin, nervous man, the weight of whose secrets had been made flesh and trapped him physically as well as psychologically. He lit another cigarette as I switched on my tape recorder.

 “You promise me you won’t use my name?” he asked, quietly.

 “I’ll keep your identity an absolute secret, Dr. Williams,” I said, making a mental note to edit that part out before I publish this. I had a feeling I’d probably forget.

 “What did you want to talk to me about?” I asked.

 He took a breath, looked down at the table, the eyes still darting as he tried to find a way to begin. “…I know what’s happening to Peter Andre,” he said, finally.

 This wasn’t exactly what I’d been expecting. “Go on…” I prodded. He jumped a little, because I actually prodded him. I’m not very good with metaphor.

 “What you need to understand is that this information is sensitive,” he said. “I worked for three years as head of shipping for Iceland. I was one of them.”

 “One of them as in a supermarket employee?” I asked.

 He shook his head, dismissively. “No. No. See, Iceland isn’t really a supermarket. That’s the first part of all this. Sure, they maintain the odd store for appearances sake, but they’re actually much bigger. Much more powerful.”

 “So what are they really?”

 “Iceland is the world’s first anti-fame bureau. They specialise in making peoples’ careers in showbusiness disappear.

 See, to the common man, being famous looks great. You get money and adulation and groupies, but in actual fact, it’s a business like anything else. You know those earnest, creative types you meet who say they just do what they love and aren’t interested in material gain? That’s why they’re never famous. Maybe thirty years ago it worked that way, but now, Big Fame hold all the strings. If you want to be well known, you have to do it through them. Iceland is a subsidiary department.

 See, some celebrities get tired of it. They get over-worked, they burn out. There’s only so many times you can fall out of a limo with your clunge on display before it gets tiring.”

 “Was 'clunge' really the word you wanted to use there?” I said.

“It DID seem out of character for me, I agree, but then I’m not very well drawn-out to begin with,” he said. “Anyway, Big Fame expects a lot from its employees. You’re required to put in an insane number of hours, marry a lot of awful people in succession, and constantly make up outlandish stories to sell to supermarket tabloids. It’s exhausting. A lot of people want out. Some try to do it gracefully, by just slipping quietly away, never working again, but that doesn’t stick. They still can’t walk down the street without being noticed. That’s why the Iceland Protocols were developed.”

 “And this is what’s happening to Peter Andre? He’s tired of being famous?”

 He took another drag on his cigarette. “Look, I haven’t been working for Iceland for a long time. Years, now. But I can see all the signs. What would typically happen is this: Peter Andre doesn’t want to be famous anymore, and he wants everyone to know that. So what does he do? He could release a video on YouTube saying he wants everyone to just ignore him, but that might not work. Shia LaBeouf tried announcing he wasn’t famous anymore and now he’s in the new Brad Pitt movie. It’s not enough. So Peter Andre goes to the people at Iceland and they say ‘Sure, Peter. We’ll put you in a string of adverts for our dummy supermarket that basically announce to everyone that your career is over. They’ll be painful and embarrassing, but it’s two days shooting, max, and then everyone who sees them plastered all over national TV will sit at home and think “Hmm, Peter Andre’s career must be over.” Problem solved.’”

 “That’s exactly what I thought when I saw them,” I nodded.

 “Right. And maybe Peter would have been happy with that. But showbusiness is a cut-throat industry, and Iceland wanted to be the best. They couldn’t have other businesses saying they’d make you even less famous than them. They had to stifle competition. That’s when they came up with the gulags.”

 “Gulags?”

“Yes. You see, famous people aren’t usually very bright. Dolph Lundgren has a masters degree in chemical engineering and tried to work out a way to de-famous himself, and it nearly worked, but then he slipped up in his calculations and ended up in three Expendables movies. And the average celebrity isn’t anywhere near as smart as him. In fact, most of them don’t even have the sense to read what they sign, which is what Iceland banks on. As soon as the shooting is finished on their cringeworthy, career-wrecking ads, they grab the celebrity and ship them to a prison camp in Iceland. It spawned its own phrase. When people asked what ever happened to certain actors or pop stars, they were told ‘Keep mum; he’s gone to Iceland.’ People in the fame game knew what this meant, but they even made a version of it into their corporate slogan as a coded warning to others.”

 “Are you telling me that right now Peter Andre is being transported to a prison camp in Iceland,” I asked. It was a little much to take in.

“He’s not being transported, no. He’s probably been there for months. As soon as they finished shooting the ads he’d have been tranquilised and packed into a crate.”

 “Jesus. Is there any way back?!”

 He sighed. “It’s possible, but difficult. You have to fight your way out and most people don’t make it. You remember mid-nineties TV actors and occasional pop duo Robson & Jerome? They managed to break out a few years ago, working as a team. Jerome improvised some melee weapons and fought his way past the guards, in the process learning the sword skills that would give him a comeback role on Game of Thrones. Once they were free of the camp, they had to hike two hundred miles to civilisation, sustained only by eating whatever fish Robson could catch in the local rivers. It’s why he still gets so excited whenever he catches a fish.”

“Now that you mention it, I did wonder where they’d been for twenty years or so,” I mused.

 He bit his lip. “Others aren’t so lucky. And the penalty for a failed escape attempt is severe. They don’t just punish you. They don’t even make you famous again. They make you infamous. A few years ago, Rolf Harris decided that he wanted out and clobbered a guard with his didgereedoo. He didn’t make it past the fence, and we all know what became of him after he was caught…”

“If all of this is true, why tell me?” I asked. “Why now?”

 He shrugged, sighed. “As you get older, you start to value life a lot more,” he said. “I thought I could live with all the people I shipped to the gulags, but the truth is that it’s not right. I don’t mind exploiting celebrities until they’re bitter, botoxed shells of human beings, all light gone from their eyes and their smiles surgically grafted on because they can no longer experience true joy – I mean, we all do that! But actually knocking them over the head and shipping them to a frozen wasteland? I figure I might finally sleep better if I can give a voice to the people who I deprived of the ability to speak for themselves.” He met my eyes for the first time as he said that, and I believed him.

 “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m going to write this story up and give it every bit of exposure I’m capable of.”

 And I did. I put it on my Facebook AND my Twitter.

 In a lot of ways, I’m a real hero.