If I’m to place my loyalty with one source of TV news, it has to be BBC Breakfast. Their absurd quest for total impartiality amuses me almost daily, so rightfully it takes the top spot. ITV’s Good Morning Britain I avoid with absolute determination; you can have three guesses as to why and no prizes for the correct answer.
This dedicated avoidance meant that I only caught the shrapnel of the commotion in reaction to Patsy Palmer’s very public logging off. I think it hit the number 2 spot on Twitter trends that morning.
I clicked the hashtag and a timeline of videos appeared. “Patsy Palmer storms out of interview”. It’s not half as dramatic as the title suggests – she doesn’t storm out, she says that she doesn’t think she wants to do the interview, says goodbye and closes her laptop. Patsy quit the interview for a good reason: tagged below her zoom video was “Addict to wellness guru”, a headline she gave no consent to and only became aware of as it unfolded across the screen.
I stayed on Twitter a while longer to scroll through the comments, occasionally refreshing the feed when the little notification popped up alerting me of the new tweets waiting to be released. Many of the tweets in response to Patsy Palmer’s appearance on Good Morning Britain were compassionate towards her past struggle with addiction – “her addiction isn’t a flaw that she should feel necessary to hideaway” one tweet read. Of course, they are correct; we should aim to disentangle shame from addiction, and as kind-hearted as these messages were they miss the point entirely. Patsy was unwittingly confronted with a past she has wanted to close off. Her personal history was opened up for discussion. The headline “Addict to Wellness Guru” assumes total access into her past to which the interviewer can question about unrestrainedly, ultimately reducing the complexity of addiction to a simple, digestible soundbite, done to gather up an audience.
”Those with lesser public renown escaped mostly unfazed”
At what level of notoriety do the personal events of your life no longer belong to you and instead are rolled out for public consumption? The line seems fuzzy and ever-changing. In the early 2000s, the tabloid press only tended to indulge their speculation into the lives of the Hollywood A-List; a six-page spread on Brangelina, the ins and outs of their private life in glossy print. Those with lesser public renown escaped mostly unfazed. Now you need only step onto Love Island to have the entire facts of your life across the Daily Mail the following morning.
The invasiveness of the press is a contentious issue, and there is a tendency for the press to cloak their systematic intrusive behaviour in a half-baked argument for their “inherent rights” into celebrity lives, the phone-hacking scandal spanning the 2000’s being a salient example. I am not equating the phone-hacking scandal with Patsy Palmer’s appearance on Good Morning Britain, but the motivation behind both of these events is formed from the same core belief: that the press, and thus the public, should be cognizant of the personal lives of the famous.
”Themselves and their lifestyle become public property”
In my brief stint as a Law student, I attended a student debate: Do celebrities have a right to privacy? I sat in the audience and listened to the third years in their ill-fitting formal gowns speaking rapidly in a ritualised, abstract manner. Despite passionately disagreeing, I didn’t harbour any ill-feeling towards the side favouring the public exposition of celebrity lives. I am aware of how debating works: it is a kind of performance; you get your topic and your position, and you pretend to be passionate about whichever side of a debate you happen to be on. When the debate ended the question was spread out across the room. To my horror there were large pools of the audience who weren’t play-acting yet agreeing, with total conviction, that celebrity lives should be laid bare for us all to gawk at. One boy aggressively putting forward his belief that “upon choosing fame that person becomes public property, as they rely on the public to build the status they desire. Themselves and their lifestyle become public property, open to scrutiny”. I remember hearing myself mutter “what the hell?” in a midst of utter disbelief. I left wishing I hadn’t gone, ignorant to the knowledge that some people find no immorality in denying a fundamental right on the basis of public renown.
”In the hands of the press, facts become malleable and are reshaped however they please”
When you arrive at celebrity status, one would realise that it would come with many things that aren’t contained within the lives of ordinary people. This realisation, however, should not contain the expectation that one’s personal history may be discussed as if it is a government policy, the facts weighed up and subject to personal opinion. The intimate details of a life are valuable, not simply as news generates profit, but because it empowers whoever has it. In the hands of the press, facts become malleable and are reshaped however they please. Denial of privacy is, by extension, a denial of the individual’s power over their own narrative fidelity.
Patsy Palmer’s appearance on Good Morning Britain brought to light an essential truth: if you live in the public eye, your life is no longer entirely lived by you; it’s a shared existence. A person in the public eye is rendered powerless in curating an image of oneself, instead, power lays in the hands of others: the public and the press. “These are issues that I had many many years ago, talked about many years ago and it’s over” explains Patsy in frustration as, regardless of her wishes to step away from parts of her past, it was dug up without permission, as if it never belonged to her anyway.
Maddie Evans
Featured image courtesy of dole777 via Unsplash. Image license found here. No changes were made to this image.