Tom Chatfield
Transfixed by the public eye…
Novelist Maggie Gee, in her essay for this month’s Prospect, takes a long look at an especially knotty social question: just how cruel are the British people today? On the one hand, she explores the “tide of sympathy” that the media seems perpetually primed to unleash over particular kinds of public tragedy—Jade Goody’s untimely death, the prime minister or the leader of the opposition losing a child. On the other hand, she teases out a certain “excessive curiosity tinged with ghoulishness” that can lie behind such outpourings, together with the “appetite in millions of people for having a laugh at someone else’s expense” evidenced by shows like The X Factor or The Apprentice.
Famous people, Gee suggests, occupy a strange zone between adulation and contempt that makes them “the new non-persons in modern lives”: people whose lives we feel free to enjoy and deplore in equal measure because “we have deemed them to be not our own kind.” Enter Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, and the scandal that seemed to channel a bottomless pool of national rage, sympathy and envy touched with guilt. And then, of course, there’s the phenomenon of ordinary folks like Susan Boyle, elevated into sudden super-stardom by their own abilities on Britain’s Got Talent: a channel for public largesse of a peculiarly anti-celebrity kind (as Sam Leith explores elsewhere in the current issue).
Gee goes on to search philosophy, literature, psychoanlysis and evolutionary biology for clues in her wide-ranging survey of what it may mean, today, to be kind as a nation. Where would you turn for answers? Let us know your own thoughts below.
Tim Footman
- Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone…
As far as I know, as I type this, Jade Goody is still alive, black-edged tribute copy of OK magazine notwithstanding. Natasha Richardson, however, is not, having succumbed to a head injury sustained in a skiing accident.
And I’m sad. Sad for the premature loss of a life, of a mother, a wife, a daughter. Of course, the death of Jade Goody will be a cause for glumness too, for the same reasons. But I will be less sad. Why?
Because Natasha Richardson was a talented actress, and Jade Goody wasn’t? Why should that make things any sadder? And, to be honest, when I first heard of Richardson’s accident, my immediate thought was how good she was as Lady Chatterley. Hang on – wasn’t that her sister? And it was a while before I could actually pin down for certain one of her performances. (When I did, it was her role as Mary Shelley in Ken Russell’s deeply flawed but hugely enjoyable Gothic, and I’m not sure that that’s the one thing by which she’d have wanted to be remembered.)
So why am I sad? Maybe because she was one of the Redgraves, the Kennedy clan of acting, a multi-generational soap opera of brilliance, bisexuality and political extremism that offers as much vicarious enjoyment as any of their performances.
Which really means that Richardson’s fame was as much a product of our celebrity culture as Jade Goody’s. Richardson was the scion of a theatrical dynasty, dazzling and beautiful, married to a brooding, Celtic hunk; Goody was spawned from a dysfunctional relationship, which she replicated in her own life, thick, ugly, probably a bit racist. Each owed their fame to circumstance. One could well argue that Jade Goody’s achievement was the greater, because she had more obstacles to overcome.
So maybe my reaction is tied up in my own class and educational background, that I regard winning a Tony as being more commendable than appearing on Celebrity Big Brother. In which case, I’m surely in a minority: Natasha Richardson won’t have an edition of OK magazine devoted to her.
That said, I still feel sadder about Natasha than I will about Jade. Maybe it’s just because I want to piss off Max Clifford.
Tom Chatfield
Let's all toast a golden year for political accessories…
Just before shutting up our online shop for the Christmas period, Prospect has four new pieces for your heterogeneous holiday delight. In books and politics, former spcial advisor to Tony Blair, Patrick Diamond, reviews a new history of the Attlee years, and weighs the consequences of Attlee’s legacy for the modern Labour party. On the other side of the Atlantic, Radio 4 writer Adam Rosenthal takes a lighter look at the golden crop of verbal coinages the US elections have seen this year. In response to last month’s piece by Toby Young on the modern cult of celebrity, historian Jonty Olliff-Cooper tells us all about a Victorian celebrity cult that puts the worst excesses of the present to shame. And, last but not least, writer and critic Hettie Judah takes a look at the world of fashion in Antwerp, and an exhibition celebrating 20 years of perhaps the most influential and innovative designer you’ve never heard of…
All thoughts and comments welcome below. And, although we’ll be blogging from time to time over the festive period, I’ll take this opportunity to wish very best seasonal wishes to all our readers from the whole editorial team.
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