When we talk about “hiding in plain sight”, we often understand that to mean a celebrity was protected and enabled by others in the industry, because that is easier to swallow than the material we all watched, all enabled. Brand’s 2006 tour Shame, for example, featured a routine about choking someone during oral sex that had no components of humour. It was only “funny” because we were watching: the humour was created by our collusion, in much the same way as his 2007 memoir, My Booky Wook, dressed up audacity – “I just described spitting on a woman and dared you to react” – as inventiveness, and only got away with it because, no, we didn’t dare.
But there are things that newspapers did 15 or 20 years ago that they would no longer do today. In 2002, anonymous people on the internet started a countdown to the 16th birthday of Charlotte Church, which was reported in the Sun and the Mirror, with that cloak of plausible deniability that the online world had so recently gifted the mainstream media: “We didn’t make this – we’re merely telling you it happened.” In 2008, photographers lay on the pavement outside the venue where Emma Watson was celebrating her 18th birthday, to take pictures up her skirt that it would have been illegal to print 24 hours before. It is unlikely that the titles would get away with that now. But, likewise, I find it very hard to imagine newspapers skating that sex-offender tightrope in the 90s, still less the 80s. So what exactly had happened?
Get your...@the Grundian
Western culture has been sliding down this slippery slope for many years but there's no 'Big Bang' to pinpoint exactly when it began. It's more of an incremental descent into the madness we behold these days.
