You shouldn’t meet your heroes…

I read this in the newspaper today and I guess I understand it, that the people you admire but don’t actually know are not as they appear in your imagination. What you read about them has been written by someone with their own perception (even if it is the hero writing about themselves!) If you see films or programmes about them, again you are viewing them through someone else’s lens, and by the way it has been edited. Recently we’ve been watching ‘The Great British Bake-Off’ and throughout the series we, the audience had got to ‘know’ the contestants; on social networking sites people were working themselves up into a fine frenzy about the three finalists, one in particular was generally unpopular because of her facial expressions, what she said, how she was always complaining and moaning and being self-critical. One of the others was cheerfully enigmatic, the other was sunny and bold and brave and controlled… but of course this was how they appeared to us through the way the hours and hours of filming had been edited. There must have been hours and hours of ‘film’ lying on the virtual cutting room floor showing the miserable moaner as sunny and bright, the enigmatic one as open and depressed, the sunny one as gloomy and panicking… or maybe not, but we the viewers don’t know.

I had a hero once, a sportsman who was well-respected and admired, and who I adored… but in reality he was an absolute crook and a cheat and a bully… the golden image cracked and what was revealed was not just feet of clay, but a cold heart and a duplicitous soul.

I have another person I really admire, an exceptionally talented man, a singer, a song-writer, a wonderful performer, and I have actually met him, and so have many of my friends… and he actually is as he appears, funny, generous, clever, modest, brilliant… So maybe it isn’t that you shouldn’t meet your heroes, but maybe that you shouldn’t expect your heroes to be as you expect them to be!