pare a thought for those tasked with covering the world of showbiz in this unprecedented time of crisis (me). Celebrities have hissed backwards into their bunkers. The nightclubs they used to fall out of have shut. Every possible configuration of social media beef has been replaced with platitudes about staying indoors. They are singing. There is no meat on the bones to make soup from. There is nothing out here on the wastelands to write about. Do you want 1,200 words about Drake’s pictures of his kid? Do you want me to break apart Alex James’s scrumpy recipe (“Orchards are enchanting places”)? Do you want that? Look in the mirror and gaze sternly into your own eyes. Think about this. Do you want that? You don’t want that. The world of celebrity is changing under the dark shadow of ’rona 2020, and it’s important to recognise the hair-sprouting and the clenching bones of this sort of social puberty. What emerges from the burrows once all this has blown over will be very different from what went in. Some will not have enough celebrity credit in the bank to weather this storm (do you think the phrase “Wallace from Love Island” will mean anything by the time September rolls around? It will sound like an alien screaming a dull language into your bones. It will sound like a dog throwing up). Some, without the anchor of a furloughed PR team telling them what to do, will go rogue in lockdown, emerge having done something weird on Instagram Live from their own mansion, like shaving their own head and making soup from their hair (I just keep getting the words “Miley Cyrus”, like an intrusive thought, over and over, about this), their pre-pandemic fame diminished by the actions of their pandemic lifestyle. Some will somehow emerge more famous than ever (Kylie Jenner, after wrangling her cosmetics factories into producing hand sanitiser, will somehow leave this process richer and more beloved. Chrissy Teigen’s bread recipes will sweep her ever closer to an inevitable presidential run). It will be different. We don’t know how, but it will be. So it’s tough to say how the next few months will shake out, basically. But here’s a rough prediction: I still think of the time 12 children got caught in a flooded Thai cave for most of a month and, as the world reacted with anxiety and horror, Elon Musk flew out, took a useless mini-submarine made from repurposed rocket parts, and then bafflingly called one of the cave rescuers “pedo guy” on Twitter. Many people see Musk as an aspirational figure because he specialises in the sort of cutting-edge nerd-tech that gets Reddit moderators frothing at the upvote button and he knows what Rick and Morty is, but for me he is inspiring because he’s exactly who I would be if I had somehow muscled my way up to billionaire status: great flashes of genius undermined by getting Too Online and sinking your own stocks. I don’t like him, but I admire him. He’s a messy bitch who lives for drama. Fun, then, that there is a new global subject of fascination, and Musk is dipping his red little toe right in there. He’s doing something with Tesla and ventilators that I can’t tell whether is innocently benevolent or the start of a 14-week Musk power-move that somehow ends up with him buying Amazon. A new-age thinking sub-Gwyneth will think they have ‘cured corona’ with, like, soup Say what you want about Gwyneth Paltrow – I’ll start: she was horrendously miscast in the Iron Man franchise – but with Goop she has created her own entire category of person, which is someone who believes so strongly that a crystal can replace deodorant that their uneradicated stink somehow becomes a lifestyle choice. A pandemic like this one – no cure on the immediate horizon, scientists in masks still figuring out viral loads and invisible panic enveloping us – is ripe for a celebrity to come out with a semi-complicated coconut-water-and-orzo recipe they swear “reversed their symptoms in two days!” before embarrassing themselves by directly @-ing the WHO to try to tell them about it. Possible contenders for this one: Jessica Alba, Kate Hudson, Cher. A galactic-brained blue-tick conspiracy theorist will emerge If you have been paying attention at all to WhatsApp forwards (or, my personal favourite, “local town Facebook groups”) you will see a pattern of conspiracy minded garbagethink going around completely unchallenged. One of the dominant theories is that coronavirus is somehow being broadcast to us by the Chinese government via 5G towers. I’m still waiting on the peer-review for this. Another I’ve enjoyed is: “inhaling boiling water with an orange in it kills Covid-19, for ever”, with the appropriate video tutorials. Honestly, who needs vaccines when you have someone who still types “Facebook” into Google to get to Facebook giving you scientific advice they made up in a dream. From all this, a celebrity endorser will emerge, and it’s not too much of a stretch to say it’s going to be Lee Ryan from Blue. He has already had to apologise this week for going on Facebook and saying the devil runs the government (Lee Ryan from Blue on a normal one is terrifyingly similar to “me after exactly five pints”, and that’s something I have to make peace with). He has already made sinister allusions to the role 5G is playing in society, and has enough of a platform to whip a full movement together. It’s not hard to picture Ryan pivoting from “fallen singer with an interesting browser history” to “full, Alex Jones-level conspiracy theorist” by the time all this is over. By Christmas, Lee Ryan broadcasting live for three hours in a beret and aviators – undisclosed location, yelling about vaccines, the whole shebang – will be the most-watched thing on TV. Someone will have their entire career cancelled for doing something widely deemed to be ‘inessential’ “Cancel culture” – the one-strike-and-you’re-out boycotting that has emerged in recent years – has gone a little quiet in the wake of corona, because, truly, there are better things to worry about right now. But it’s hibernating, not dead: J-Lo managed to ripple the waters this week after being pictured going to a closed-to-the-public gym, quiet shouts of “was that really necessary, Jennifer Lopez?” ringing out in the distance. Once we’re all six more weeks into this, society will become a tinderbox, and it only takes one mistimed celebrity post to set the whole thing on fire. Possible contenders: Post Malone is pictured hammering on the shutters of a Foot Locker; Ariana Grande gets cancelled for getting a box of Soleros in her otherwise essentials-only food shop; DJ Khaled forces an emergency services rescue after getting stranded on his jet-ski, public forced to cover the million-dollar bill. Guillotines will come back in a really big way Because, well, it’s very hard to care, isn’t it? A pandemic like this really does serve to deepen those furrowed lines that divide us rubes, out here in the warzone, shut in our rented homes, with drawings of rainbows in the windows, and empty supermarket shelves, hoping for the world’s governments to strategise us out of this mess, versus, like, Kirstie Allsopp, who isn’t even that famous in the grand scheme of things but still has a second home in Devon to flee to when all this coronavirus stuff gets a bit too on top. It’s hard to really be bothered about the subtle dynastic moves of the Kardashians when they are merrily sequestered in their various family mansions, economically bulletproofed for all time, while many of us are wondering how to survive on wages cut to 80% while bills stick at 100%. Truly, pandemic culture is showing us the role celebrities actually play. It’s a sort of aspirational fantasy when the sun is shining, but a dark and horrible joke when under cloud, and our patience for them is doomed to run thin. It’s going to be a hell of a lot harder to sell us all charcoal toothpaste on Instagram when this is over, let’s put it that way.