It's been a while. It's been a year, actually. I got a bit fed up and couldn't be bothered. Might keep my rants a bit shorter this time. It's not that I'm not interested in current affairs or that I've suddenly become tolerant and placid and entered a Zen state of serenity. Trust me on that one.
It's also not the computer-generated spam comments, notifications of which clutter up my inbox on a regular basis, though they have reminded me that this place exists.
But for whatever reason I thought I'd come back and express my irritation and disquiet at the phenomenon that is the celebrity apology. Or actually any public apology.
We were in the US when the Tiger Woods apology was broadcast, all thirteen grovelling undignified minutes of it. It was trailed extensively: why were questions not to be allowed? Was this an infringement of the public's right to know? TOday I see that Mark Owen of Take That has apologised for being unfaithful to his now wife before their marriage.
Infidelity is a matter to be discussed between a husband and wife, surely. He doesn't have millions of wives; millions of people are not entitled to an interest. Maybe Elin wouldn't welcome her husband's infidelity being flagged up to a prurient audience for twelve minutes. Maybe she would prefer not to be depicted as a victim. If I was her or Mrs Mark Owen I certainly wouldn't. Either way, in both cases it's no one's business apart from hers and his.
Just because people like watching one man play golf and think he's a great sportsman, or enjoy the odd Take That album, why are they entitled to think that the object of their admiration owes them aything other than making the effort to play golf/sing as well as they can. They are not letting us down by being imperfect in their private lives. That has no bearing on their abilily, that which they are known for. In the same way I think that John Terry's loss of the England football captaincy is wrong.
It's invidious and it smacks of hypocrisy and schadenfreude. It also means that there is an expectation that the public can demand of anyone who does anything in the public eye that they be plaster saints. Apply that criterion to great figures of history and you'd lose a lot. We'd have no NHS because Lloyd George was well known as an old goat. We'd have lost a lot of politicians who had dodgy domestic arrangements. Art and literature would go out of the window. In fact we'd end up with the likes of, well, let's see, Cameron, Blair and Brown. Nauseatingly moral to a man, but none of the elan and brilliance of some of their flawed forebears.
So shut up and don't grovel. And the rest of us should stop demanding a pound of flesh for misdeeds which are none of our business.
Rant over.
