The suicide last week of the Television presenter Caroline Flack, is I admit, not the cheeriest of subjects for a blog, but it's one that bears a bit of thinking about. Not so much the poor woman herself, what went on in her private life was her own affair, as far as I'm concerned, and as to her imminent court appearance, I tend towards the view that it's best not to speculate on these things until after the due course of justice has been run. But what's happened has lain bare a few of the less savoury aspects of British public and private life.
Now, far be it for me to speak indifferently of the dead, but up until her sad end, your correspondent wouldn't have known Caroline Flack from a bite in the leg, I knew the name, I was dimly aware of the upcoming court case, but that was pretty much it. I have, however, found the fallout from her death to be indicative of a peculiar strain of public discourse which is, to my mind, one of the root causes of misery in society today.
It's not a particularly original standpoint to state that the explosion of prurient interest in the lives of celebrities has been one of the less edifying aspects of the last few decades. Not that it's a modern phenomenon, it's more that the tools of dissemination have become more readily available, faster, and more efficient. But interested people are, for whatever reason, and the Flack case was bound to pique interest. It had a variety of heady ingredients, a photogenic protagonist, the gender twist on the domestic violence story, a life carried out in public by a woman with a string of famous boyfriends and, most importantly of all, a death. If that's not catnip for the tabloids, I don't know what is.
But even by their standards, Fleet Street have disgraced themselves thoroughly over this whole affair. The papers have been having a particularly toxic run so far this year, it's as if, with Brexit all over bar the actual working out a deal, they've got a store of spare hatred sloshing around, and nowhere for it to go. The tried the ex-Duchess of Sussex for a bit, but she very sensibly fucked off to Canada, and so now they're reduced to slagging her off from afar. So it's unsurprising that they were all over Flack. Even so, the Sun's volte-face from publishing highly prejudicial photos of her blood-stained bedroom to attempting to pin the blame on the CPS for continuing their prosecution is spectacularly shoddy, even by their own piss-poor standards. Wasn't us, guv. They're still at it now, running leering stories about the deceased being caught in a state of undress on a police bodycam, hinting that it's those pictures that drove her to kill herself. This woman who, lest we forget, had made no secret of the fact that she was in a fragile mental state.
Now, this is the point at which the moral framework of this blog could come a cropper, because I'm acutely aware that what I'm about to criticise is in no small part what I am currently doing. That is to say, using someone's very human and very personal tragedy for my own ends. In my defence, at least it's not for entertainment, I find the whole episode depressing, and no one's ever accused Coastalblog of being entertaining. What upsets me about the Flack case, and the Sussexes, and every other individual subject to trial by tabloid, is the public interest angle. If people didn't buy it, it wouldn't run. So, if there wasn't widespread interest in the death of Caroline Flack,
Yep, an unfashionable opinion though it may be, I don't entirely blame the papers, or the gossip magazines that drool over the details of others lives. I'd rather they didn't exist, of course, but they are, clearly, catering to a need, and it's that which is the most unpleasant thing about the whole affair, that people were lapping this shit up. It's a peculiarly British taste, this fondness for ripping apart the lives of the prominent, for getting off on the details of their sex lives, slagging off their fashion choices, ripping them to shreds for gaining weight / losing weight / not caring about their weight, and it happens, in the main, to women. The celebrity ghouls pore over their "beach ready bodies", cackle with glee at "brave" Coleen each time Wayne's been caught with his dick somewhere it shouldn't be, frottage themselves into a state of ecstatic oblivion if Lily Allen's photographed looking a bit rough. I've no idea why people do this, but do it they do, and it's just awful. This vicarious enjoyment of others misery cannot be good for the mental health of those consuming it. This circling around the details of death, this picking over of corpses, this speaks to something truly rotten in the public psyche.
When Princess Diana died, the tabs all took a vow of probity, promising they'd never do anything like this ever again. And I think they managed it for a couple of months at least, so it could have been argued that at least some good came of it, even if it didn't last. Certainly, it was a shot fired across the bows of both the press and the Monarchy, as each took a kicking at the hands of the public for a while, but people have short memories, and normal service was soon resumed. This time around, the tabs are unapologetic, doubling down, leveraging the death for yet more clicks, even, in the Sun's case, managing to work it into the right-wing press assault on the judiciary which has been so in vogue since the current administration took over. It's been left to people to try and salvage something from the wreckage, and, to be fair, more than a few have tried. Whilst it may sound like a greetings-card sentiment, the hashtag #bekind has been making some headway, and it's heartening the way that people are using the situation to open up about mental health, most pleasing and promising of all has been the decision of a number of beauty salons across the country to stop buying in gossip magazines. It is, of course, a good thing that people are questioning the hold these forms of media have over some sections of the populations, but the question is, why does it have to take someone dying to do it?
Now, far be it for me to speak indifferently of the dead, but up until her sad end, your correspondent wouldn't have known Caroline Flack from a bite in the leg, I knew the name, I was dimly aware of the upcoming court case, but that was pretty much it. I have, however, found the fallout from her death to be indicative of a peculiar strain of public discourse which is, to my mind, one of the root causes of misery in society today.
It's not a particularly original standpoint to state that the explosion of prurient interest in the lives of celebrities has been one of the less edifying aspects of the last few decades. Not that it's a modern phenomenon, it's more that the tools of dissemination have become more readily available, faster, and more efficient. But interested people are, for whatever reason, and the Flack case was bound to pique interest. It had a variety of heady ingredients, a photogenic protagonist, the gender twist on the domestic violence story, a life carried out in public by a woman with a string of famous boyfriends and, most importantly of all, a death. If that's not catnip for the tabloids, I don't know what is.
But even by their standards, Fleet Street have disgraced themselves thoroughly over this whole affair. The papers have been having a particularly toxic run so far this year, it's as if, with Brexit all over bar the actual working out a deal, they've got a store of spare hatred sloshing around, and nowhere for it to go. The tried the ex-Duchess of Sussex for a bit, but she very sensibly fucked off to Canada, and so now they're reduced to slagging her off from afar. So it's unsurprising that they were all over Flack. Even so, the Sun's volte-face from publishing highly prejudicial photos of her blood-stained bedroom to attempting to pin the blame on the CPS for continuing their prosecution is spectacularly shoddy, even by their own piss-poor standards. Wasn't us, guv. They're still at it now, running leering stories about the deceased being caught in a state of undress on a police bodycam, hinting that it's those pictures that drove her to kill herself. This woman who, lest we forget, had made no secret of the fact that she was in a fragile mental state.
Now, this is the point at which the moral framework of this blog could come a cropper, because I'm acutely aware that what I'm about to criticise is in no small part what I am currently doing. That is to say, using someone's very human and very personal tragedy for my own ends. In my defence, at least it's not for entertainment, I find the whole episode depressing, and no one's ever accused Coastalblog of being entertaining. What upsets me about the Flack case, and the Sussexes, and every other individual subject to trial by tabloid, is the public interest angle. If people didn't buy it, it wouldn't run. So, if there wasn't widespread interest in the death of Caroline Flack,
Yep, an unfashionable opinion though it may be, I don't entirely blame the papers, or the gossip magazines that drool over the details of others lives. I'd rather they didn't exist, of course, but they are, clearly, catering to a need, and it's that which is the most unpleasant thing about the whole affair, that people were lapping this shit up. It's a peculiarly British taste, this fondness for ripping apart the lives of the prominent, for getting off on the details of their sex lives, slagging off their fashion choices, ripping them to shreds for gaining weight / losing weight / not caring about their weight, and it happens, in the main, to women. The celebrity ghouls pore over their "beach ready bodies", cackle with glee at "brave" Coleen each time Wayne's been caught with his dick somewhere it shouldn't be, frottage themselves into a state of ecstatic oblivion if Lily Allen's photographed looking a bit rough. I've no idea why people do this, but do it they do, and it's just awful. This vicarious enjoyment of others misery cannot be good for the mental health of those consuming it. This circling around the details of death, this picking over of corpses, this speaks to something truly rotten in the public psyche.
When Princess Diana died, the tabs all took a vow of probity, promising they'd never do anything like this ever again. And I think they managed it for a couple of months at least, so it could have been argued that at least some good came of it, even if it didn't last. Certainly, it was a shot fired across the bows of both the press and the Monarchy, as each took a kicking at the hands of the public for a while, but people have short memories, and normal service was soon resumed. This time around, the tabs are unapologetic, doubling down, leveraging the death for yet more clicks, even, in the Sun's case, managing to work it into the right-wing press assault on the judiciary which has been so in vogue since the current administration took over. It's been left to people to try and salvage something from the wreckage, and, to be fair, more than a few have tried. Whilst it may sound like a greetings-card sentiment, the hashtag #bekind has been making some headway, and it's heartening the way that people are using the situation to open up about mental health, most pleasing and promising of all has been the decision of a number of beauty salons across the country to stop buying in gossip magazines. It is, of course, a good thing that people are questioning the hold these forms of media have over some sections of the populations, but the question is, why does it have to take someone dying to do it?
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