Anyone who knows anything about showbusiness or X knows Fake Showbiz News. Ryan Meadows (a pseudonym which ‘probably has something to do with Ryan Seacrest ’) has been tweeting the most banal fake British news stories since 2011. ‘It’s a silly diversion to let me run wild,’ says the 41-year-old dad of two, who is a writer for a local broadcaster.
In his day job Ryan works on hard news, but once the clock strikes 5 an online showbiz maverick is born – here to sweep X dwellers off their feet with the best of British humour. Here he imagines Jessie J running an abattoir, Adrian Chiles pondering that every time he has sex a celebrity dies, and Ellie Goulding getting in a state about missing people. A long-time showbiz obsessive, Ryan grew up reading Heat magazine, absorbing all the characteristics of Britain’s perhaps least remarkable celebrities and making them go viral in scenes their publicists could only dream of.
‘I have a weird memory for all the things that have happened in the last 35 years,’ Ryan explains. ‘Things that are long forgotten by people will still live rent free in my head, and they resurface on Fake Showbiz News.’ Of course, Ryan isn’t taking real life events, gossip or rumours and reporting them as fake news on his page.
That would be wrong. And illegal. It’s more that he captures a person’s vibe and subverts it into comedy.
Often, he takes celebrities with serious dispositions and puts them in ridiculous., bizarre, or even incred.
