What is a role model?

Ellen MacArthur sets fire to her yacht

What is a role model? It's a question I find myself asking at least once a week as we are bombarded from all sides by commentators calling this person a good role model and that person a bad role model or telling us that so-and-so is the perfect role model.

I suppose the broad definition of a role model is somebody that you can aspire to but even that seems a bit harsh. Which part of Wayne Rooney would you want to aspire to if you were 11 or 12 living on some sink estate in Liverpool? Well obviously not the granny shagging part but there's not much wrong with earning £100,000 plus a week for playing a game is there. Little girls used to dream of becoming Princesses, but is falling down the stairs to draw attention to your mental plight, having numerous affairs with everybody from an England rugby player to an ex-Army officer before dying in a Paris tunnel with yet another lover something to be aspired to?

When I was young (and we are talking under 12 here), the three people who I looked up to were my Dad, my second cousin Alan and Bobby Moore. My Dad is an obvious choice really as he was the man in our house. Alan was, and still is, ten years older than me. When he was a teenager he had records, girlfriends and he played a high standard of amateur football - he had the things I wanted most in life really as somebody on the brink of adolescence. And then there was Bobby Moore who I have written about before, the local boy made good, very good. Were they role models? I'm not sure.

Anyway I bring this subject up because last weekend Nathalie had to write a piece on her three main role models. Now I'm afraid on one level Nathalie is very much like her mother, completely unimpressed by famous people, yet on another level Nathalie is a teenage girl and everything that involves regarding popular culture. She spent hours thinking who she could choose, she decided that although her Mum, Dad and French teacher were actually her first three choices that wouldn't be cool and was a bit naff. Charming! Anyway she made her choices, wrote a piece on each and on Tuesday presented her piece to class.

Nathalies friend Maisie presented her three people before Nats, she had chosen Mother Theresa, Ellen MacArthur and the Suffragette movement. Then it was Nathalies choice: Gwen Stefani, Hilary Duff and Noel Fielding. (There really ought to be an animated tumbleweed rolling across the screen at this point shouldn't there?) The amazing thing was that out of a class of 20, six other people had chosen Noel Fielding and the teacher hadn't even heard of him. Nathalie said she had chosen him because he can act, sing, writes Mighty Boosh with just one other person, rather than a team like in the States, and that he is normal but at the same time not.

It proves everything is perception. You can save the starving of Calcutta, sail around the world or throw yourself under the King's horse but if you can't come up with a decent series for BBC3 you're stuffed.