"Thank you David," Big Brother pauses, "and goodbye." "I love this country, for their support and for being so good to me. "I want to tell all the castmates that I love them," he replies, his voice cracking. "Do you have any final words?" Big Brother, God, asks from on high. Before leaving the house citing ill-health, David took some time in the diary room to apologise to Big Brother for his early departure. It's an appearance now endowed with strange sort of morbid significance, yet while most people will likely be distracted by the " David is dead" debacle, there was in fact a far more eerie moment given what we now know. Sadly it wasn't to last, and in January of this year David Gest made his final appearance on British television, this time as a housemate on Celebrity Big Brother. Spinning yarns about Tito Jackson to Myleene Klass, trading blows about Liza Minnelli on Loose Women. He became, in a sense, a raconteur for generation ITV2.
#Liza minelli michael jackson tv#
Gest worked reality TV shows like a stadium band does the summer festival circuit, hopping from Soap Star Superstar to Grease is the Word and stopping off at Come Dine With Me on the way, he appeared regularly enough to keep his profile up but never too often as to become boring. Gest with Matt Willis from Busted after a big night in the jungleįrom this launchpad, the sky was the limit. During that show, which was intended to be a look at the life of the living legend, Gest routinely took centre stage, as perfectly illustrated in this clip where he buys his wife an enormously expensive necklace. David Gest managed to straddle both of these worlds, from the MGM Grand to the Big Brother house.ĭavid Gest's love affair with British television started with Ruby Wax Meets Liza Minnelli. We switched from seeing "stars" as cosmic objects to wanting to see them in their pyjamas arguing with Hollyoaks actors.
In the 21st century, the culture shifted from one of prestige and mystery to one of all-hours documentation and constant voyeurism. The word 'celebrity' means something very different now to what it meant 30 years ago.
Some might think that Gest was ultimately just fame-hungry, and that following his high-profile marriage he found a way to milk this fame, but it's not a simple as that. While he might have been an LA-born producer to begin with, and had Elizabeth Taylor at his wedding, in the final decade of his life he found a new home: in the warm comfortable hospice of British reality TV shows. Now, we're not short of people on television who are famous for less-than-clear reasons but David Gest, during his strange and slightly hard to explain existence on British TV, managed to turn this ambiguity into a mythology. Gest's wedding to Liza Minnelli, where Martine McCutcheon and Michael Jackson were bridesmaid and groomsman.
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