"Di"-monds Are For Heather (Ever) (Forever)

[webofevil]

So, is Heather Mills being treated the same as (the late) Princess Diana? Any legitimate comparisons that might be made—focusing narrowly on media harassment—don't stand a chance of getting an airing, since posing such a sacrilegious question in the first place will mean you’re drowned out by people vociferously, even ferociously, endorsing this sentiment:

“Myabe [sic] cuase [sic] she is trying to tell everyone and more importantly herself that she is the next diana,I DONT THINK SO diana had 100% more class”. [Thanks, Digital Spy forum]

Thing is, you don’t have to hold a torch for either of these women—you could even, for example, have quite a low opinion—to find it grotesque to watch them in the press essentially being continually burned at the stake for our viewing pleasure.

Moreover, I’m watching with some astonishment as this era of Heather-hate gives people the freedom to explore the limits of their disgust for the disfigured. Her loss of a limb is not just a rhetorical weapon that might be drawn as a last resort; it now seems to be compulsory, even if it’s just as a comic aside, to use her leg as a stick to beat her with. [Note to Jimmy Carr: you can have that joke for free. It suits you.] The gags, the taunts; it’s everywhere, and it has an intensity that reminds me of a crowd just before a riot kicks off. Tastes like blood running down the back of your nose.

If you don’t spend much time watching ITV2—and, God love you, why would you?—you may not know that Katie “Jordan” Price and Peter “Twat” Andre are hosting their own chat show on Friday nights. In between their mighty guests last week—the twins off Big Brother and Brian Dowling off Big Brother—they had a moment of topical comedy where a one-legged girl mudwrestled a Paul McCartney “lookalike”. They got her to remove her prosthesis in order to hit him with it, so it was no surprise that she fell over almost immediately.

Okay, so the Prices are subnormal, but surely someone on the production team must have had a conscience and a sense that... some kind of... basic... moral... Oh, all right, I’m just fantasising. I’ve seen what TV production looks like under the wrapping. Still, there are people even outside TV who relish the idea of being able to make jokes like this because it’s a chance to throw off the shackles of “political correctness”. Finally we can all say what we mean, they cry; the guilty pleasures of such exciting transgressions might even shatter some of our preconceptions, etc etc. This is balls, of course; it’s simple bullying and they’re relishing it. “I’ve had six amputee girls crying their eyes out because they’re getting bullied at school because people are joking about the loss of my limb,” said Mills, who then sadly rather eclipsed that point by generally ranting in the manner of a BNP candidate who thinks he’s not being secretly filmed.

Exactly half my life ago I entered a school essay competition with the submission that sick jokes and gallows humour were an unconscious, instinctive attempt to ward off misfortune. I’d like to take this chance to revise that hypothesis in favour of the simpler observation that, while no subject should be sacrosanct and a good, clever joke remains just that in any context, some people really are just utter

—though that would probably have earned me a substantially lower mark.

Comments

[chiller.livejournal.com]

We see this time and again. Amy Winehouse is the new Paula Yates (since the old one died of misery and isn't much fun to play with any more).

Mills isn't so much the new Diana as the new Camilla. Marries a figure who has a certain standing with the public and whose old wife we liked. Had the gall to have had a life prior to this marriage. Ergo is instantly reviled and criticised in a way that wouldn't be out of place in the third form, if the third form were left entirely unsupervised for a month with nothing but a pig, a shell, and a bunch of sharpened sticks.

What gets me isn't the bullying so much. You can shrug that off as the repulsive tat it is. It's the pervasiveness of it. Someone I know phoned me a few weeks ago and said "I hope you don't mind my saying, but this photo of you makes you look a bit like Heather Mills." I didn't mind a bit.
"She's rather lovely looking," I observed, "thanks."
"Yeah, but it's the connotations..."
"What connotations?" (I don't read the sort of news article that contains connotations.)
"Well ... she got where she is today on her back... everyone knows she sold sex to some Arab guys ..."

o_O

Dude, I could be selling sex to George W. Bush. It wouldn't make my face any less pleasant. Nor, indeed, make me less of a nice human being.

People are weird.

[chiller.livejournal.com]

I should add that the caller was not trying to suggest that my own success was due to selling sex to Arabs. It was actually a family member attempting to offer a compliment. Compliments in my family are the sort of thing that require an iron constitution.