Celebrity culture

With two projects bubbling away towards the boil, Border Crossings has never been busier. It's exciting, but a bit mad! I find myself making silly mistakes, like leaving .html off the links to the Laboratory and Box Office pages in some email shots. Luckily at least some people are keen enough on what we're doing to email us and ask! If I didn't have Kate as Producer for Dilemma, I think I'd be totally out of control by now. She's been doing some of the really tough work, like the Work Permit application and buying air tickets. She only found out at the last moment that Osei is actually Osei Korankye's surname - he uses it first as his stage name. thatw as close to a serious border incident. Booking tickets on Ghana International Airlines is an interesting one too. You reserve online, then phone Ghana to sort out payment. They give you a mobile number of a Uk-based agent, who only takes cash deposited in their account before issuing tickets.... This didn't feel right! Eventually Kate managed to track down a real office and got some real paperwork for our real cheque.

Meanwhile, I've been talking to PR people. It's important we get a good profile for this show, especially with Ama coming. One man depresses me. He's never heard of Ama, which is fine - the job is to make sure people have heard of her. But his argument is that if somebody isn't a "celebrity", then you can't get them any press at all. I begin to wonder how anybody ever becomes a celebrity. I point out that she's won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Nelson Mandela prize and pretty much everything else going bar the Nobel. "Look", he says: "Athol Fugard can't get interviews. The only one the producers of Victory got was by flying a journalist to California at their expense to talk to him in person. We live in a celebrity culure." And Athol Fugard - that great writer and artist - is apparently not a celebrity. But Paris Hilton is.