Where is the line to be drawn? No one is certain any more. In times gone by, the division between public and private was — or, so it seems to us now — much easier to define. In the age of the Internet, as we all know, everything is in flux. Thanks to FaceBook, blogs and Tweets, more and more of our private life is played out before an audience. As potential employers scan the Web in search of background information on job applicants, we are beginning to learn that every online indiscretion has the potential to follow us through the rest of our days.
And where the Net has gone, television is not too far behind. We spend so much time denouncing the threats — real and imaginary — posed by laptops and webcams that we forget how intrusive TV can be. In the mid-1970s, when I was in my teens, the most talked-about program on the small screen was “The Family,” a fly-on-the-wall documentary series about a dysfunctional working class family from the decidedly un-posh end of Berkshire (the sort of area, in other words, that gave birth to Ricky Gervais.) There were, it appeared, no limits to the curiosity of the camera: domestic squabbles, emotional reconciliations, laughter, rage, tears, nose-picking all became prime-time fodder. Three decades later, and that cult reality show, “Big Brother” has pushed back the boundaries just that little bit further by showing participants — most of them desperate to enjoy a celebrity existence — getting drunk, flirting in a Jacuzzi or screaming at each other.
The show itself may have lost some of its novelty appeal since it was first screened back in 2000, but the furor surrounding the death of Jade Goody is a symbol of the lingering power of the reality format. Miss Goody, as some readers may be aware, was the BB contestant whose lack of intellectual firepower and brassy manners turned her into a national figure. Fame turned to notoriety in 2007. At a time when the term “chav” had come into vogue, the noisy Miss Goody made the word flesh when she indulged into embarrassing bouts of racial bullying during a stint on “Celebrity Big Brother” — the program in which B & C-list VIPs are thrown together for weeks on end in the hope that at least one will assault a fellow-inmate or at the very least suffer a nervous breakdown.
Miss Goody’s loutish behaviour briefly turned her into Britain’s most controversial figure. It didn’t help her cause that the house-guest with whom she clashed, the Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty was a model of old school decorum: the former colonials were giving the Brits a lesson in good manners. In the end, though, the whole affair prompted a largely constructive debate about racial prejudice, and over time Jade managed to rehabilitate herself, even taking part in India’s equivalent of BB. It was there, extraordinarily, that she received the news that she was suffering from cervical cancer. From that point on, she chose to live out what remained of her short life in public, partly as a way of raising money for the care of her two sons, partly to raise awareness of cancer screening programmes. Happy to be filmed on her sick bed, she even invited cameras to her wedding, days before her death. (Just to add a touch more color, her fiance was on curfew after being released from prison where he had been serving a sentence for assault.)
Was it simply a grotesque circus? To be sure, the episode produced some gruesome examples of media exploitation: one celebrity magazine, for example, brought out a memorial edition before Miss Goody had actually passed away. It was a moment worthy of one of my favourite showbiz satires, “The Larry Sanders Show.” There is no question either that the Goody entourage included the kind of unscrupulous media manipulators who have made a lucrative career out of selling lies to the public. But in the end her very public death probably did more harm than good, even though I still wonder how her children will cope with so much public scrutiny.
As with the death of Princess Diana, Miss Goody’s passing illustrated the gulf between what you could call “official” Britain and the soap-watching, tabloid-reading population at large. These are two nations which live side by side but known little of each other. But another case, this time involving the novelist Julie Myerson, demonstrated that even what wags call the polenta-eating classes are grappling with the new meaning of privacy. A writer who had long mined her family life for ideas, Ms. Myerson caused Goody-like uproar when it became known that her latest book, “The Lost Child” was a non-fiction account of her eldest son’s addiction to the extra-strong form of cannabis known as “skunk.” A star pupil, the boy had become increasingly anti-social and violent; daily life had become a series of confrontations until the despairing parents reached the point where, fearing for the welfare of their other children, they decided to eject him from the family home.
Naturally, the case has been mulled over by newspaper columnists — many of them hostile to the book — forcing Ms. Myerson and her husband onto the defensive. As Jonathan Myerson — himself a writer — put it in an impassioned article:
“This is cannabis. It stops you, it rips out normal reactions, normal kindness, normal motivation. It draws a line and you stand patiently behind it. And this is why we have broken one of the most serious prohibitions facing any writer. You Do Not Write About Your Children. Yes, your kids might enter your work now and then in charming disguise but you do not ever lay out their genuine, raw problems on the page. You fictionalise them, you do not present it up-front and true. There is a glass-fronted box in the corner of every writer’s room, protecting the real lives of their children: Smash Only In Case Of Emergency.
“This is an emergency. True, the city is not aflame, plague is not afoot. But there are too many families whose home life has been shattered by a teenage son (it is nearly always boys) who is losing it as a result of cannabis.”
Was Julie Myerson right to publish? Personally, I feel more ambivalent about this case than about Goody’s. So-called “misery memoirs” may be the height of fashion, but should an author’s offspring be dragged into the text? I change my mind about that question almost every time I think about it.
• Clive Davis writes for The Times and Sunday Times and blogs for The Spectator at www.spectator.co.uk/clivedavis.
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