Fame is a funny thing. Almost everyone seems to want it, but many of those who get it find that it isn’t all it is cracked up to be. In particular, though we often talk about “fame and fortune”, those two by no means always go together.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the young people involved in My Transsexual Summer to see how the show is affecting them. Sarah has blogged about being “homeless and penniless”. Max has been tweeting about needing an apartment and money for rent.

“How the heck did that happen?”, you ask. They are on national TV, with an audience of over 8 million people. The media are after them for interviews. Surely they must be rolling in it?

Well no, as this rather testy blog post from Max explains, they didn’t get paid anything for making the programmes. Max notes, “I also lost my job, in part because of the exposure I received and the amount of time I was required to give to filming.” He and his colleagues were told that they could not be paid because that would affect the integrity of the show.

So now the MTS Seven are the best known trans people in the country. And guess what being openly trans means? As Drew found out in Episode 2, it means it is very difficult to get work.

The Seven are now clearly celebrities, of course. As I understand it, the way celebrities make money is to hire a publicist who will get them gigs opening supermarkets, appearing on chat shows and so on. But who is going to want a trans person to open their store?

Max has launched a petition to try to persuade Channel 4 and the production company, Twenty Twenty, to share some of their profits. He says that Twenty Twenty were paid £180,000 per episode. A lot of that will have gone on making the programmes, but presumably there was some profit. C4 should be doing very well out of the advertising revenue for a programme that has become a surprise hit. I’ve signed it, though I don’t know how much good that will do.