Internet @ccess Made Easy (Issue 15 - June 1999)

Friel Fervour

Controversy seems to follow former Brookside icon Anna Friel wherever she goes, and now it's stalking her on the Internet. STEVE HILL tracks her to New York

Type the name "Anna Friel" into the Alta Vista search engine and you'll be presented with more than a   thousand pages devoted to the former Brookside star. While this figure may not be quite as impressive as the 60,000 or so pages devoted to ex Baywatch  bombshell Pamela Anderson, it's clear that Anna Friel is the closest us Brits have to a full-on Internet celebrity babe.

So how is it that a 23-year-old from Rochdale has generated so much interest? And what is it about her that leads fans to devote hours of their time to creating unofficial Web Sites in her honour?

After many days and nights of surfing the Net for Anna Friel Web sites (it's a dirty job, but someone has to do it), an answer emerges. Friel's rise to Net celebrity status has as much to do with the controversy that seems to follow her in whatever she does, as I much as her acting ability.

Friel shot to stardom while playing the character of Beth Jordache, a lesbian who murders her abusive father, in Channel 4's Brookside. But since leaving the long-running Scouse soap five years ago, she's deliberately shunned the world of popular TV and elected to appear in a string of obscure or high-brow film and theatre productions.

Anna is currently appearing in a Broadway production of a play called Closer, alongside Natasha Richardson, but her best-known recent role was in The Tribe - an everyday story of nymphomaniac commune dwellers. While many of these roles were critically acclaimed, it's not normally the way that a budding actress stays popular.

Friel's recent rise to Net babe status has more to do with her antics off the stage or screen than on. It seems that she just can't help falling in love with famous people. She had a long-term, highly public relationship with the actor Darren Day. When the relationship ended, Anna was romantically linked to a number of celebrities, including pop star Robbie Williams. She's also regularly photographed with her numerous celebrity pals, including supermodel Kate Moss, and needless to say, these pictures regularly find their way onto the Internet.

Showbiz gossip

Friel has become notorious in the alt.showbiz.gossip newsgroup for her role in Rogue Trader, a troubled biopic of Nick and Lisa Leeson. Ewan 'Trainspotting' MacGregor and Friel play Leeson and his wife, but the movie was panned by US critics and has now suffered the indignity of missing the cinemas altogether. It will be shown only on cable TV. Back in the UK, the creators of Rogue Trader have failed to find a distributor. This is despite 12 months of effort by the film's financial backer, David Frost. Friel's also famous for getting her kit off in films and magazine photo shoots. There are hundreds of snaps culled from the world's glossy magazines which are circulating on the Net and most have Friel wearing little more than a smile. This a sure-fire way of becoming popular on the Net.

It does seem that Friel is aware of her role as the most talked-about British Net babe and has encouraged her celebrity status by creating her own Web site.

"I came up with the idea of putting together an official Site in 1996," she says. "An awful lot of unofficial home pages were appearing and while most of them were really good, I thought I owed it to the fans to communicate with them personally."

Unlike many celebrities, Anna does not seem at all interested in charging membership fees for access to 'exclusive' photos or selling Anna Friel T-shirts, mugs or bed-spreads online.

She explains "The fans are the reason that I'm in this business. The aim was to get information and feedback from fans and give them news about what I'm doing, which comes straight from the horse's mouth."

Originally hailing from Rochdale, she decided to recruit Netshop UK, a local Web design company, to help in the creation of the Site. "I hired Netshop because I know them and they're really into developing new technology, such as Hyperceive sound."

Hyperceive enables users to enjoy high-quality audio without having to download any special software first. This means that people can hear constant speech and music as they look at the photos and read the news on the site. I contribute by co-ordinating what goes on to the Site and offering voice messages, pictures and movie clips. I also help with the occasional links."

In recent months, Anna has been working with Netshop on developing her own e-disk, an innovative piece of software with which celebrities and musicians can record their own multimedia presentations. This is then compressed on to a standard PC floppy disk which can be sent to prospective film directors and producers.

When the site was first launched, The Times ran an article in its Interface supplement under the headline 'Anna's email guarantee'. It stated that the star would send a "personal response" to all the emails that she received. As could have been anticipated, fans throughout the world began emailing in large numbers and the star simply couldn't respond to them all, leading to reports in at least one computing magazine that the 'email guarantee' was no guarantee at all.

Anna takes the opportunity to set the record straight. "I was getting people writing to me regularly and I was doing all these replies, but it became impossible to keep up with the volume. Now whenever I'm on TV in the cinema or have done a magazine interview, I know that the number of emails I will receive will go up."

So when she is not acting, does she get much time to actually use the Internet? "I use it a lot when I'm doing the updates on my Site. Otherwise, I surf for music and movie sites. The most amazing thing about it is the number of people who are using it - from directors and producers, to long-lost childhood friends and cousins."

Friel explains that she has located an old school friend through her online endeavours: "I hope that my site has helped a few others to see how useful the Internet can be."

So does Anna think that there are any bad features of the Internet? "Like every medium, it can be abused," she says. "I have concerns that kids could get access to some of the nastier stuff online. Maybe I've been lucky, but the number of nice email messages that I get sent to me makes communicating far from anti-social".

But she does have a message for any Net addicts who may be reading this. "If you are someone who sits at home all day surfing the Internet, then you probably do need to get out a bit!"

Brookside's Beth phenomenon

We get back to talking about the role that she is most famous for - Beth in Brookside. A spokeswoman for Mersey TV the company behind the Channel 4 soap, told us that audience figures reached 8.5 million during the episodes in which Anna Friel starred. Since then, the soap has failed to gain anywhere near these stellar figures.

"People are naturally very attached to their favourite soaps and to the characters in them. The sheer impact of the 'Beth phenomenon' took a lot of people by surprise, "Anna muses.

But as a sign that she is now trying to bury the memory of Beth under a patio, she adds: "I am Anna and I hope that I will be equally known for my other work. In New York, very few people have heard of Brookside and it's for my work in the TV adaptation of our Our Mutual Friend that I'm better known."

Finally, does the Net babe have any advice for the readers of Internet Access Made Easy? "Tell people not to be afraid of technology," she says. "If used properly, the World Wide Web is a brilliant tool. And keep surfing !"