Lifestyle 'tyranny' that is all pervading
IT IS difficult for Britons to appreciate the sheer scale of the Martha Stewart phenomenon. She is simply everywhere. She has been compared to Britain's favourite TV chef Delia Smith - but that does not begin to hint at the tyranny of her influence.
Wealthy woman though Delia Smith is, her fortune would add no more than a pinch of salt to the rising soufflé; of power and money that is 'Martha Inc', as her unauthorised biographer Christopher Byron has called her.
She has also been likened, perhaps more accurately, to Barbara Cartland - as the creator of an impossible and unattainable fantasy world in which homemade bread rolls are forever emerging fresh out of the oven and the white paint on the clapboard family home glows in the New England evening sun.
As well as her three magazines, she makes six episodes a week of her 'how to' TV show, produces a daily cable TV programme, has published 34 books, writes a column run in 230 US papers and does an Ask Martha radio show broadcast by 330 stations. Her branded product range runs to 5000 lines.
Her name appears on more than 700,000 websites, many devoted to parodying her. One spoof Martha Stewart Christmas diary satirises her Christmas Day tasks as: 'Bear son. Swaddle. Lay in colour co-ordinated manger scented with homemade potpourri.'
