Actually it is usually a enormous one. A telephoto lens which is a cross between a drainpipe and a garbage bin, mounted on a unipod or humped about at the top of a decorator’s ladder.
These things get everywhere. Any individual can become the latest morsel to be dished up for the media feast that must be placed daily before an ever more salacious and salivating audience.
The slide into the swamp of human failings and unhappiness is such that even news stories which have important straight content are underlaid with any unpleasantness that can be dug up on the subject, whether it concerns the people or the places involved.
It seems that we have all become voyeurs and gossips. The media empires make use of their tabloids to sock us the real dirty stuff and then their broadsheet brothers reprint it in slightly sanitised form so that we can all wallow in the mire. Maybe we have become so sated that only the really well hung meat has any flavour and we need it flyblown and smelly to raise any excitement. It is rather like sousing every meal on the plate with hot pepper sauce destroying every nuance and subtle flavour with one big banger.
Is it our fault? Have we, the public, demanded this diet of individual personal problems. Probably not, although the appetite has always been there under the surface. It has been titillated in many ways. In the past the august Daily Telegraph, a serious broadsheet, was read by the staff in the large houses of the well born, rich and famous and therefore reported the trials of such persons in full lurid detail. These trials would include messy divorces, libel, cheating at cards etc. A relatively recent example of their penchant for the nitty gritty was the mention of Vaseline in the trial of Jeremy Thorpe, who was implicated in the attempted murder of his homosexual friend. No other paper mentioned this detail. This either demonstrates an urge to report every detail to establish a greater truth or a shrewd marketing ploy.
In the same way raw sex on video can be bought in the guise of instruction. Couples coupling can be viewed from all angles with not a wrinkle left unlit. Now we have our prepubescent girls being bombarded with sexual style and methods in their magazines which used to cover vital topics like which shampoo to use for Barbie Doll’s hair.
So if the lid is off and the worms are crawling, it follows that if we individuals come into focus anything in our lives is open to the prying eye of the media. A major middlebrow newspaper is running a feature on the sex life of Howard Hughes, the long time movie mogul and tool maker. So even after his passing the humps and hollows of a weirdo’s life are exposed.
The main feature of today’s Sun, the UK’s highest selling tabloid covers the debts of a ‘bisexual gypsy entertainer’. Are his debts of any interest to any of us other than his creditors and are his sexual orientation and his racial background relevant?
Well the Sun thinks so, and its Editor knows what sells millions of newspapers. So even before the man is taken to court or made bankrupt his fiscal entrails are displayed before us.
But it is not just people in the public eye who get the treatment. Any body that pokes their nose over the parapet gets exposed. ‘Find the Mother’ is an old Fleet Street hunting cry and you can be assured that if anything happens to any ordinary Joe Schmoe, like getting blown up by a bomb, winning the lottery, or helping an old lady on a bus, they and their relatives and friends and acquaintances and workmates and neighbours are in line for a grilling.
It would be nice to feel that we could go back to dressing for dinner, not even kissing on the first date and sleeping in separate rooms, but this is probably no more of an illusion than everybody getting their rocks off five times a night. The boys from Hollywood produced a series of films during the depression set in grand mansions with many servants and finely dressed rich masters. People were occasionally unpleasant in a refined way but the stories always had a happy ending.
All boloney.
So we can’t live the impossible dream of sanitised life, blue birds singing, milkmen whistling, church bells ringing, because it doesn’t exist and it never has. What we can do is vote with our pockets to drive some of life’s more unpleasant intrusions back below the surface.
The rise and rise of Jane Austen can show us the way, in her day people behaved badly but some, and they were amongst the leaders, behaved well. More importantly the privacy of individuals lives was respected and the real values of life, not just cold cash, meant something to everyone.