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	D-list

D-list. A few years ago, a US entertainment journalist called James Ulmer worked out a scale to assess how valuable movie stars were. He called it the Ulmer Scale and it became very popular, a lot of people use it now. And the top movie stars, you know, people like Tom Hanks, are A-list - they are the tops, they are the stars, they are the real ones. Movie stars that are not quite so valuable are B-list. And then ones that are still less valuable are C-list. I mean, obviously, everybody wants to be on the A-list but, inevitably, you get A, B and C. But that's where the list stops. There is no 'D-list'. And, of course, as soon as people realised that, they invented precisely such a word! 'A D-list', in other words, is a celebrity who is so obscure that he or she doesn't even get on to the scale. In other words, 'a D-list' is a bottom-of-the-heap kind of situation.

Well, of course, it immediately attracted some kudos because some people who were really quite well known, didn't get on to the list for whatever reason and made the most of this. There was a 2005 TV show called - by Kathy Griffin - called 'My Life on the D-list' which was very popular - it was a satirical take on the whole business of Hollywood and listings and things like that.

And now, in a kind of inverted-snobbery sort of way, there are all kinds of D-list things. There are D-list celebrity T-shirts, D-list cartoons, D-list blogs. This particular programme is not, however, on the D-list!

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