Some years ago, I attended a showbiz awards ceremony and found myself seated at the next table to Mariah Carey. For the entirety of the event, she uttered not a word to her entourage but communicated solely through hand signals, as if speaking was something reserved for mere mortals. When she wanted to use her phone, she mimed waggling her thumbs as if pressing the keys, and a minion would place one reverentially in front of her.
Carey has always leaned into the diva persona, which is part of what makes her so magnificently camp. So I was looking forward to Mariah Meets Rylan (BBC Two), in which superfan Rylan Clark had the chance to interview his idol. And it started promisingly, with Rylan togged up in a monogrammed "MC" bathrobe and sipping a cocktail in what looked to be Carey's garden.
Alas, things didn't continue in this vein. For one thing, it was a house hired for the interview, not Carey's own home. And what we got for the next hour was an uninspired trot through the singer's music career, in a series of questions that smelled as if they had been pre-approved by a team of publicists.
Clark did his best, bless him, despite obvious nerves at being in Mariah's presence. An accomplished presenter, he moved smoothly from one topic to the next, nattering companionably in between. Carey sat as if pinioned to the chair, answering his questions with a polite smile but eyeing him with a mixture of kindness, pity and vague alarm, particularly when he kept mentioning EastEnders or announced that he'd brought her a present. "Maybe, as we talk, I'll open it," she said when Rylan handed her a personalised bar of Toblerone, before shoving it out of sight.
It needed someone like Ruby Wax to ignore the PR diktats and get stuck in with some killer questions, as when Carey mentioned that she and George Michael once had dinner "and talked about all the people we didn't like". Spill the beans and tell us which people!
Towards the end of the allotted time (I'm imagining Mariah's people standing behind the camera, impatiently tapping at their watches), Carey loosened up a little and joked that she'd come to Clark's house in Essex. He said his mum would make her a bacon sandwich. Now that might make a fun show.
(The Telegraph)
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