Moan, moan, moan! Hugh and the paparazzi

03/05/2007 by Andrew John.

I have this thing about press photographers, especially those who get in your face. This was my moan for this week’s Underground Edition, which you can catch by going to the Celtica Radio home page and, well, looking about a bit and clicking. You’ll get the hang of it. Or you can read it here:

So – dashing, delightful, debonair Hugh Grant has been bailed after allegedly chucking a tub of food at a tabloid photographer. Good for him, if he did it.

I just wish that said tub of said food – beans, we’re told – had been first masticated, then ingested, then regurgitated and upchucked all over the bastard. This was near Grant’s home, don’t forget. Near his home. Not at a press launch. Not at a glamorous premiere. But near his home, where he was probably being perfectly legal and buying a newspaper  or a lollipop, or taking the iguana for a walk in the park.

Now don’t get me wrong: we need our press photographers. But this chap was from something called the Daily Star. I mean, is that classed as a newspaper?

I don’t know about you but, frankly, I don’t give a toss what Hugh Grant gets up to and I don’t want to see photographs of him getting into or out of a car, coming out of a brothel, going into a gay sauna, emerging from a mosque, sneaking into a gurdwara or Buddhist temple or disappearing up his own fundament.

I like this star of romantic comedies such as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and About a Boy as an actor. He does a good job. He entertains me. My butcher does a good job. He provides decent meat. But I don’t wish to know whether he’s been seen doing this or that with Mrs O’Tool’s son or daughter or with a juicy sirloin in the back of the shop – as long as he doesn’t serve that one to me!

I can like and even respect someone but not wish to know what they’re doing 24/7, with whom or to whom or at whose behest, in whose garden or in whose bed or whose Jacuzzi.

So let’s hear it for a bit of privacy, shall we?

I’m not what you’d call a royalist, but I still believe that the royals deserve some privacy, along with TV personalities, actors, politicians— Oh, hang on a mo. I’ve got it in for politicians, haven’t I? Had a good old go at them last week, didn’t I?

No, strike that. Politicians deserve all they get – although I might draw the line at a photograph of one of them going down the garden path to the outside lavvy? What? They don’t have those any more? Not even in northern constituencies? My, things have changed.

But people doing very public jobs are still doing jobs. They do them as well, or as badly, as those of us doing non-public jobs, mundane jobs, jobs that no one sees us doing, or, if they do, they don’t take a blind bit of notice of us.

And if they deserve privacy, so do those doing jobs that are a bit high-profile. The royals have even done deals with the paparazzi: ‘Look, old bean, we’ll ponce about a bit and pose for your camera thingies, and then you can bally well bugger orff and leave us to our skiing, what?’ Easy. We all like to see pictures of our royals – well, some people do – but seeing them day after day in every conceivable situation (apart from nipping down the Buck House garden path to the outside lavvy, I assume) is just boring. Don’t you appreciate something all the more for not having seen it for a while?

But, then, I suppose the great unwashed are to blame for buying the rags that print this tosh. I loved it when just about all of Liverpool boycotted the Sun – another one of those frightfully intellectual organs – after it impugned Scouser soccer fans after the Hillsborough disaster.

Enough consumer power, and you could put one of these rags out of business. Now, a country without the Sun and the Star. That’s worth a boycott or two.

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