In Conversation

05 December 2008 04:38 BST

Mark Frith: The world of celebrity's getting darker

In his ten years at the helm of Britain's most famous celebrity magazine, Mark Frith took Heat from the brink of ruin to a circulation of more than 500,000 per week. The magazine had become one of the British publishing world's biggest ever failures after its dismal launch in 2000 but thanks to a combination of an exclusive Victoria Beckham interview and becoming the first media outlet to realise the potential of Big Brother, it soon catapulted to what he admits were "phenomenal" sales figures.

Heat was on the scene through Britney's breakdown, Jade's alleged racism on Celebrity Big Brother and helped take the size zero debate from the gossip pages to London fashion week.

In a 21st century Britain obsessed with the power of celebrity - observe the amount of X Factor hopefuls who mention global fame and fortune yet don't utter a word about making music - Heat has fashioned its own irreverent niche and the way we look at pop culture wouldn't be the same without it.

So why did he step down earlier this year?

"I don't get the sense that celebrity is getting any smaller - it's getting a little darker and that was certainly a factor in me leaving," he told inthenews.co.uk at a south London publishing house.

"With Amy Winehouse and Britney Spears - I was sitting in the office thinking 'I'm supposed to be doing a light-hearted look at the world of celebrity and all I'm getting are pictures of Ms Winehouse with cuts on her upper arm'. It didn't match."

Still, he's not left the world of celebrity journalism without his memories and out today is The Celeb Diaries, Frith's new book charting the rise of the magazine, be it from owing its existence to Posh Spice to infuriating everyone from Jude Law to Jordan.

The 38-year-old, who kicked off his journalistic career at the University of East London before editing Smash Hits and Sky, admits that a tell-all book was initially just a pipe dream, inspired by being given Piers Morgan's The Insider as a birthday present.

"But then, when it was approaching my ten-year mark at Heat and I realised I wasn't going to be able to take the magazine any further, I thought more seriously about the book," he adds.

"I had a chance meeting with Eugenie Furnace, Piers' agent at William Morris and we ended up signing with Ebury, and she gave me the confidence to do it."

Countless desk diaries and cardboard boxes full of emails, faxes and letters helped jog his memory while developing the book and the Heat format proved invaluable.

"If it was doing its job, it had a record of what had happened in the world of celebrity that week.

"So I could go through a copy of the magazine and think 'that picture reminds me of so and so ringing me up and shouting at me down the phone' or 'that picture reminds me of being sued'… really positive stuff!"

Tracking the growth of the magazine - from a 65,000 circulation to more than half a million sold per week - stems back to the "big moment" of David and Victoria Beckham's engagement, Frith believes, and while the "new generation of young celebrities" began to rise through increased papping and reality TV, the forerunner of that most intrusive of genres was central to Heat's popularity.

"Big Brother happened two months after our revamp and… we wanted to be edgy, young and all-seeing and Big Brother was, that was how it was marketed then, and newspapers didn't touch it until the end of series two.

"But we did loads about it. And by the end of the first series - bear in mind this was a magazine that was only selling 60,000 a week - we'd had a sale of over 200,000 with the souvenir end of series issue."

Unsurprisingly, he has kind word for Jade Goody - "She is synonymous with the magazine and I just wish her the best" - and Victoria Beckham - "I tell you something, she's the best fun" - though American celebrities such as Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton don't come off so lightly.

"The whole thing of Paris going to prison was like a really dark reality show," he says over coffee and croissants.

"There's nothing like someone having that kind of amazing life and then being broken down and having to go to prison."

As for Lohan, Frith wistfully exclaims: "I thought she was someone heading for a big career in films, but she seems to prefer being a celebrity over a future Oscar-winner."

Looking back on his time with Heat, there are moments of pride, from capturing the zeitgeist to helping to question the fashion industry's preoccupation that "skinny is everything".

"The whole size zero thing started when began to get pictures in from the States of celebrities who'd undergone dramatic weight loss," he continues.

"For me, they looked ill and we didn't think that extreme weight loss was a good message to convey. Because it isn't. So I think it was very important that we stressed that."

But there have also been clanging mistakes, as he details in the book's opening chapter, a hilarious account of the day on which an award-winning publishing sensation managed to provide an 'exclusive behind-the-scenes' look at the biggest celebrity wedding of the year - between Cheryl Tweedy and Ashley Cole.

Except they'd been duped by OK! and infiltrated "THE WRONG BLOODY WEDDING", publishing nothing more than photographs of anonymous corporate do.

Still, given the soap opera of Cheryl and Ashley's marriage, maybe it wasn't the biggest scoop to miss out on…

The 'Harvey sticker' - a jokey gift making fun of Jordan's disabled son which earned Heat scores of complaints and a ticking off from the Press Complaints Commission - was "a huge mistake", Frith admits, and aside from the industry criticism, he seems sincere in stressing that upsetting Jordan was the last thing on the magazine's mind.

Yet even with the debt he owes to Victoria Beckham - to whom the book is dedicated - he reveals that the alleged David Beckham-Rebecca Loos affair was the biggest scoop he ever missed.

"Though we loved the way Posh and Becks acted up for the camera after it broke," he jokes.

"It's all about people-watching and that was an interesting anthropological time!"

So seeing as it was central to his livelihood for ten years, do does Frith agree that celebrities should expect a certain amount of press attention?

"The law has never been on the side of famous people as much as it is now," he responds.

"You can't take pictures outside someone's house, you can't stand on their driveway, and you are governed by quite strict laws which are getting stricter. It's important that those are upheld.

"In one way, it's never been harder to be a celebrity because of the level of media attention but in others, it's never been better because the law is on their side."

Lewis Bazley

Mark Frith's new book The Celeb Diaries is released on September 4th.