Alan Dee – Superinjunctions? How about a ban on super celebrities instead?

As I understand it, if you’re a celebrity at risk of being shamed in the popular prints for being a two-faced toerag, usually in the area of dipping your wick with some bimbo, you can apply to the courts for protection from publicity.

And if you’ve got oodles of cash and a sufficiently slippery legal team, you can get a judge to ban any publication of your peccadiloes.

The arguments that hold most sway, it seems, is the protection of children and the fact that it’s really nobody’s business if your capacity for lying and lust is at odds with your carefully crafted public persona. So that’s set the scene. Now where can we go with this?

Well, I think it should work both ways.

If there’s a legal process which allows individuals to put a block on kiss and tell stories and all the associated excesses of a rat pack feeding frenzy, from inappropriate Twitter and Facebook comments to anguished ‘why oh why’ commentary pieces from hard-faced hacks whose own track record in maintaining their trousers in the correct position may not bear up to much close scrutiny, then that process should also be available to the rest of us.

My proposal is that any representative grouping of the public, and we can soon come up with one of them thanks to social networking, should be able to approach the courts and apply for a superduperinjunction on behalf of the general public.

After suitable monitoring of the mainstream media, we would be in a position to make a carefully argued legal submission that all news about such and such a celebrity should be restricted for a specified period.

We’d argue that any further publication of their diet tips, fashion ranges, opinions on matters of the moment, sundry tales of anguish and winning anecdotes in support of their new film, book or charity venture should be banned because, well, to put it in less than legal terms, we’re all sick of the sight of them and we’d all like a rest from their activities.

This might not go down too well with the celebs, of course, but sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.

There are some, particularly in the Kerry Katona and Katie Price compound reserved for those who spend all their lives in the spotlight for no apparent reason, and whose fame is based mainly on the fact that they are famously fouling up their personal lives, who really need a spell out of the public eye for their own good. It would be for our good as well, of course, but honestly, I am only thinking of them.

And who knows, with a bit of luck six months barred from the chat show sofa, the confessional interview, the new perfume launch and the TV listings and we might have all completely forgotten about them, and have no interest at all in their artificial lives once their spell of publicity purdah had been served.