Tiffanie Darke - Now We Are 40

What followed was two decades of scrutiny on our politicians that has possibly manacled some of the free-wheeling entrepreneurialism and colour that kept the political populous and discourse lively and diverse. While Generation X was busy ushering in a period of intense cultural change, the establishment failed to find an alternative route. The year 2016, however, saw all that turned on its head. Fed up with the status quo, fed up with a government that effects incremental change that seems only to be in the best interest of the elitist few, the British electorate voted themselves out of the European Union, and the American electorate voted in a man who was the antithesis of what we thought was acceptable in a politician. Dismissing liberalisation and globalisation in a great sweep, America now waits to see what kind of change a Trump presidency will bring. And Britain faces years of legal wrangling and paper-pushing as it attempts to disentangle itself from membership of the EU. Where change should and could happen is through politics – perhaps as we head into the latter years of this decade this is where we will begin to see it again. Because for a long time our attention was diverted from the political to the personal – it was, after all, much more fun. After the Clintons came the Osbournes. MTV’s reality series of life at home with a bonkers rock star began the era of ‘Reality’. Svengali of the series was Ozzy’s wife Sharon; portrayed as the long-suffering partner of a drug-addled, unfaithful star, it soon turned out that truth was stranger than fiction when tales of her defecating into a box and leaving it on people’s desks turned out to be leaked by none other than Sharon herself. She was manipulating a willing audience into believing her pantomime family was as off the scale as it appeared.

Hardly anyone who watched The Osbournes could name a single Ozzy song, but it didn’t matter. This lunatic rock musician, famous mostly for biting the head off a bat, now turned out to have a domestic life that was fascinating in its gross absurdity and yet also its mundanity. Celebrity rockers have marriage problems just like the rest of us, and they also have untidy houses and stroppy teenage children. It was a revelation.

‘The Kardashians have got nothing on the Osbournes,’ says Jamie East, founder of gossip site Holy Moly. ‘ The Osbournes made us realise we didn’t like the gloss of the celebrity world. What we liked instead was watching Sharon call her husband a bastard and crying about his drugs or the time he threatened to shoot her. People could watch The Osbournes and think, “I had a similar argument with my husband. Okay, he didn’t earn a million quid and he’s not on cocaine but he spent our last 50 quid in the bookies and the kids didn’t have sandwiches in school for a week!” All of a sudden we realised celebrities left skid marks in the bowl just like the rest of us.’

East at this time was a lowly mole working at Sky TV. Celebrities and tasty morsels of gossip used to pass by his desk, and he needed somewhere to pass them on. That place was Popbitch. Starting out as an email newsletter of crude and rudimentary – yet dehabilitatingly hilarious – stories, it rode the wave of media from print to digital.

East saw the opportunity to set up a rival website, Holy Moly. ‘We were riding this wave of snark. Nick Denton was doing it overseas with Gawker, but our remit at Holy Moly was that we would always go where no one else would go – we were blunt.’

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