Who needs US celebs when you've got Paris Milton? TOM SHIELDS ON

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Oct 7, 2007 | by TOM SHIELDS

WALKING down Byres Road, I noticed this blonde girl. As you do. She was a dead ringer for Paris Hilton.

Being a trained reporter, I listened as I passed the young lady for any evidence of a transatlantic accent, in case it really was Ms Hilton.

But the tones were pure Glasgow, the vocabulary and delivery verging on the nedette. It was not so much Paris Hilton as Paris Milton.

Milton is the Glasgow housing scheme out of which you can take the young person but which imparts behavioural traits you cannot take out of said young person.

It was at this point that I concluded that what Scotland could do with is more home-grown celebrities who are famous merely for being famous. It was not difficult to construct a persona for Paris Milton which is similar to that of Ms Hilton.

Oor Paris is the daughter and heir of a wealthy Glasgow "businessman" whose interests range from taxis to tanning parlours. She has done a bit of modelling, and once was the cover girl on the Grattan catalogue.

Paris M was catapulted to fame and the front page of the Daily Record when her sex video appeared on YouTube. The footage is of remarkable quality considering the action took place up a dunny off Sauchiehall Street and was filmed on a mobile phone. Her publicist's choice of a location under a streetlight helped in this respect.

There was further notoriety when Ms Milton was arrested for being over the legal limit for alcohol while travelling on a late-night bus.

But her career has gone from strength to strength. Paris appeared in the STV reality series A Simple Life in which she went to live with a middle-class family in Milngavie. This made for compulsive viewing as Ms Milton failed to engage in their lifestyle, being unable to make small talk at coffee mornings and being unwilling to polish the wheeliebin with Mr Sheen.

Paris was a big hit on the music scene.

Her debut CD, Shite! I've Went And Done It Again, reached the top 10 of items shoplifted from HMV.

To sustain a viable Z-list of Scottish celebs we will need more like Paris Milton. Other personae available include Kate Mosspark, Sienna Millerston, or even Yoker Ono.

Casting the net wider, is there a wee Scottish lassie called Maris Piper who can emulate her namesake Billie in the fields of singing, being Dr Who's assistant and taking her clothes off for a TV series about a Coll-girl. Sorry, that should be call-girl.

I'm all for a cadre of Scottish celebs, no matter how high or low they may figure on the social register. As we become more globalised, it's nice to put a kilt on things from time to time.

In a neat piece of adoption and appropriation, Glasgow City Council has added Scrooge McDuck to its list of famous citizens. The council describes Scrooge McDuck as "the richest duck in the world; Donald Duck's uncle and great uncle to Huey, Dewey and Louie".

The evidence for the duck's Glaswegianship is to be found in a 1996 comic book called The Life And Times Of Scrooge McDuck. It depicts Scrooge as a poor shoeshine boy in Glasgow who stows aboard a ship to the USA to make his fortune.

This is obviously something of a canard. If McDuck really was a Scrooge, he would have been from Paisley. But Shite! I've Went And Digressed.

I have no clue as to the identities of the current batch of the famousfor-being-famous. This is my own fault for deciding some years ago not to accredit any new celebrities.

It was about the same time that I resolved not to read any books or watch any films involving Harry Potter.

Another wise lifestyle decision was not to enquire as to the rules of Deal Or No Deal.

For the purposes of this article I checked out some minor celebs on YouTube. I found a young lady called Charley who, as a consequence of having been on Big Brother, appeared on a special bimbo and big tits edition of The Weakest Link.

Charley was asked by Anne Robinson to venture into mythology and name the term for "a potion which increases sexual desire and is derived from the Greek goddess of love". Charley replied:

"Viagra". I suspect Charley was tightly scripted in this instance since we all know the answer is Cialis.

I also sent my two research assistants, Google and Wikipedia, to trawl the websites of magazines such as Heat, Closer, OK and Celebs Gantin Furrit.

One Kerry Katona featured largely. It appears that Ms Katona is partly famous for shopping in Iceland, the freezer place not the country.

I can empathise with Ms Katona. I was once briefly famous for not shopping in Farmfoods. It was when Pat's Guide to Glasgow's West End had a celebrity spotting section.

One of the posters wrote: "Saw Tom Shields from the Herald Diary on Saturday in Farmfoods in Byres Road buying frozen chicken legs. Hope he enjoyed them." This prompted the response:

"Did you really see Tom Shields of the Herald Diary buying chicken legs? I would have thought that a man of his high moral standings would be a vegetarian. Seriously." I was quite chuffed to be deemed worthy of entry in the celeb-spotting column and moderately pleased to be perceived as a vegetarian of high moral standing.