I can make you hate (5 page)

And the only real wisdom you’ve gained is a fresh understanding of just how ignorant and arrogant you were in the past: a
realisation
that the joke was ultimately on you. Pointing and laughing at your own destiny is futile. The harder you sneer at the old, the more uncomfortable you feel when you age.

And unless you die, you will age. Age and age and age, to a previously unimaginable degree, to the farthest reaches of ‘age space’ and beyond. To the point where, one day, the Shadow Chancellor is younger than you. At which point you experience a subtle, cathartic little death – and thus liberated, finally start to grow up and get on with it.

The funeral of Stephen Gately has not yet taken place. The man hasn’t been buried yet. Nevertheless, Jan Moir of the
Daily Mail
has already managed to dance on his grave. For money.

It has been twenty minutes since I’ve read her now-notorious column, and I’m still struggling to absorb the sheer scope of its
hateful idiocy. It’s like gazing through a horrid little window into an awesome universe of pure blockheaded spite. Spiralling galaxies of ignorance roll majestically against a backdrop of what looks like dark prejudice, dotted hither and thither with winking stars of snide innuendo.

On the
Mail
website, it was headlined: ‘Why there was nothing “natural” about Stephen Gately’s death’. Since the official postmortem clearly ascribed the singer’s death to natural causes, that headline contains a fairly bold claim.

Still, who am I to judge? I’m no expert when it comes to
interpreting
autopsy findings, unlike Moir. Presumably she’s a leading expert in forensic science, paid huge sums of money to fly around the world lecturing coroners on her latest findings. Or maybe she just wants to gay-bash a dead man? Tragically, the only way to find out is to read the rest of her article.

She begins by jabbering a bit about untimely celebrity deaths, especially those whose lives are ‘shadowed by dark appetites or fractured by private vice’. Not just Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson. No: she’s eagerly looking forward to other premature snuffings.

‘Robbie, Amy, Kate, Whitney, Britney; we all know who they are. And we are not being ghoulish to anticipate, or to be mentally braced for, their bad end: a long night, a mysterious stranger, an odd set of circumstances that herald a sudden death.’

Fair enough. I’m sure we all agree there’s nothing ‘ghoulish’ whatsoever about eagerly imagining the hypothetical death of someone you’ve marked out as a potential cadaver on account of your ill-informed presumptions about their lifestyle. All she’s doing is running a detailed celebrity-death sweepstake in her head. That’s not ghoulish, that’s fun. For my part, I’ve just put a tenner on Moir choking to death on her own bile by the year 2012. See? Fun!

Having casually prophesied the death of Robbie Williams and Co., Moir moves on to her main point: that Gately’s death strikes her as a bit fishy … ‘All the official reports point to a natural death, with no suspicious circumstances … But, hang on a minute. Something is terribly wrong with the way this incident has been shaped and spun into nothing more than an unfortunate mishap on a holiday weekend, like a broken teacup in the rented cottage.’

That’s odd. I don’t recall anyone equating the death with ‘an unfortunate mishap on a holiday weekend’. I was only aware of shocked expressions of grief from those who knew or admired him, people who’d probably be moved to tears by Moir likening the tragedy to ‘a broken teacup in the rented cottage’. But never mind that – ‘shaped and spun’ by whom, precisely? The coroner?

Incredibly, yes. Moir genuinely believes the coroner got it wrong: ‘Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again. Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one.’

At this point, I dare to challenge the renowned international forensic pathologist Jan Moir, because I personally know of two other men (one in his twenties, one in his early thirties), who died in precisely this way. According to the charity Cardiac Risk in the Young (c-r-y.org.uk), ‘Twelve apparently fit and healthy young people die in the UK from undiagnosed heart conditions’ every single week. That’s a lot of broken teacups, eh Jan?

Still, if his death wasn’t natural ‘by any yardstick’, what did kill him? Moir knows: it was his lifestyle. Because Gately was, y’know … homosexual. Having lanced this boil, Moir lets the pus drip out all over her fingers as she continues to type: ‘The
circumstances
surrounding his death are more than a little sleazy,’ she declares. ‘Cowles and Gately took a young Bulgarian man back to their apartment. It is not disrespectful to assume that a game of canasta … was not what was on the cards … What happened afterwards is anyone’s guess.’

Don’t hold back, Jan. Have a guess. Draw us a picture. You specialise in celebrity death fantasies, after all.

‘His mother is still insisting that her son died from a previously undetected heart condition that has plagued the family.’ Yes. That poor, blinkered woman, ‘insisting’ in the face of official medical evidence that absolutely agrees with her.

Anyway, having cast aspersions over a tragic death, doubted a coroner and insulted a grieving mother, Moir’s piece builds to its climax: ‘Another real sadness about Gately’s death is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships … Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages … in many cases this may be true. Yet the recent death of Kevin McGee, the former husband of
Little Britain
star Matt Lucas, and now the dubious events of Gately’s last night raise troubling questions about what happened.’

Way to spread the pain around, Jan. Way to link two unrelated tragedies, Jan. Way to gay-bash, Jan.

Jan’s paper, the
Daily Mail
, absolutely adores it when people flock to Ofcom to complain about something offensive, especially when it’s something they’ve only learned about second-hand via an inflammatory article in a newspaper. So it would undoubtedly be delighted if, having read this, you paid a visit to the Press Complaints Commission website to lodge a complaint about Moir’s article on the basis that it breaches sections 1, 5 and 12 of its code of practice.

After this article was written, over 25,000 people did indeed complain to the PCC about Jan Moir’s article, although how many of them did so after reading this is anyone’s guess. The PCC eventually found in favour of the
Daily Mail,
saying that, although it was ‘uncomfortable with the tenor of the columnist’s remarks’, censuring the paper would represent ‘a slide towards censorship’.

Which is fair enough, really. I think columnists should have the right to air offensive views, so I don’t really know why I encouraged readers to lobby the doomed, meaningless PCC; I think I just wanted to use one of the Mail’s own tactics against it – the paper often urges readers to complain to official bodies about things it deems offensive. But that’s not really got anything to do with poor Stephen Gately. By implying Jan Moir had no right to spout her unpleasant bibble, I somehow ended up, to my mind, on the wrong side of a tricky freedom-of-speech debate.

Still, no matter what mistakes I may have made in the above column, and no matter where you stand on the freedom of speech, it’s essential that we all try to learn from everything that happened – as a people, as a society. And ultimately the moral of the story and the single most important thing to remember is this: Jan Moir is a twat.

In which Jedward are born, Dubai is revealed to be a figment of the world’s imagination, and snow falls from the sky to the amazement of Britain’s rolling news networks.

A bit of background, because let’s face it no one remembers this stuff: at the time this article originally appeared, celebrity dance prick Anton Du Beke was in trouble for using the word ‘Paki’ during some ill-advised backstage tomfoolery, Dannii Minogue had upset
X Factor
viewers with a mild gag about a contestant’s sexuality, and following a blackmail attempt, US talk show giant David Letterman had made an on-air apology for having sex with members of his staff. Also, human beings had recently learned to walk on two legs.

The times, they are a-jumpy. Really, when we’re upset by
something
as simple as a man shouting a racially abusive term across a room full of people, or a woman teasing an aspiring pop star about his sexuality in front of 13 million viewers, isn’t it time to wonder whether political correctness and basic human decency have gone too far? Apologies flutter through the airwaves like startled doves. ‘Forgive me,’ plead the transgressors, ‘for I knowed not what I done. It was a joke! Geddit? Upsetting Pakis or poofs was the last thing on my mind. Really! And I’m sorry!’

From Anton Du Beke on
Strictly
to Dannii Minogue on
The X Factor
; at this rate, every show on TV will soon need to incorporate an on-air apology into its opening sequence. Unless, like Letterman, they make directly apologising down the lens a regular ‘format point’ in the programme itself. Christmas is traditionally the time when
Strictly
and
The X Factor
fight to see who can pull off the biggest climax, kicking ratings into the sky with displays of consummate showmanship. Instead, this year they’ll be fighting to see which of their respective foot-
in-mouth
stars can issue the most spectacularly wretched request for forgiveness.

‘Next on BBC1, Anton Du Beke prostrates himself before the cameras, sobbing with remorse while an entire Asian youth orchestra tramples up and down on his back.’

‘Great Yuletide fun on ITV now: hilarious reparations as Dannii Minogue performs a selection of the biblical world’s most hideous acts of penance in front of a panel of witheringly critical bisexual judges.’

Crikey. Unless I’m mistaken, both those shows would actually provide record-breaking Christmas Day viewing figures.

Now, on to business:
The X Factor
. The new format for the early audition shows (berks yelping in front of a massive screaming audience) left me wondering how the production team could
possibly
differentiate those instalments from the established format of the live episodes (berks yelping in front of a massive screaming audience). Saturday brought the answer: extra lighting.

Loads of lighting. They’ve dismantled the entire Las Vegas Strip and glued it round the walls of the studio. Everywhere you look, an impossibly bright neon tube; pulsing, blinking, flashing, strobing, scraping your retina off with its thumbnail …
The X Factor
’s carbon footprint surely now dwarfs China’s. To beat this next year, they’ll have to scoop out the contestants’ eyeballs and replace them with megawatt LED baubles. Then make them perform live in the middle of an exploding firework-and-diamond-factory.

But the galaxy of lightbulbs can’t quite distract you from this year’s thudding truth: there’s no one that astonishing, really. They’ve got Stacey, who comes across as the sort of goonishly endearing comic character Victoria Wood would create (and is correspondingly impossible to dislike), a smattering of prettyboys, and that’s about it. Even this year’s joke act (a pair of twirling, tweeting Cornettos called John and Edward), doesn’t seem massively grating, because we’ve seen it all before. Same difference.

And thanks to the new Sunday night results episode, viewers can now enjoy the same samey show twice in the same weekend.
Still, there are a few differences: last week’s offering debuted with an oddly atonal opening number in which all the acts simultaneously tried to out-flat one another. Fortunately for all concerned, Robbie Williams soon bounded on stage to wipe viewers’ memories by sounding marginally worse, repeatedly breaking off mid-lyric to squeal ‘hello you!’ and ‘ooh!’ and ‘get her!’ at random audience members. This after about two hours of sustained lecturing on the subject of what a world-class showman Mr R. Williams is courtesy of the judges the night before.

But never mind that: check out all that neon in the background! And, ooh, they’ve got a searchlight! Etc., etc. Repeat till Christmas.

Sleep is underrated. According to experts, it is as important to your health as exercise, nutrition and not being set on fire. And it’s the easiest route to self-improvement imaginable, far more straightforward and achievable than 100 squat thrusts. All you have to do is lie around doing nothing for eight hours. So simple, even a corpse could do it.

But not, apparently, a child. Concerned health campaigners want Britain’s schoolchildren to be given ‘sleep lessons’ to teach them the benefits of regular night-long slumber. This is an exciting development, because it raises the prospect of ‘sleep exams’ – practical snoozing assessments that even the thickest kid could pass with their eyes closed.

It’s easy to sleep when you’re a toddler. Your mind and body skitter around all day until they burn themselves out, leaving you blissfully knackered when the sun goes down. You’ve only got two modes: on and off, like a blender. But once you reach adulthood, things are altogether less binary. You’ve got responsibilities and concerns, not to mention an alarm clock with a sarcastically oversized face sitting beside the bed mocking any attempt at
shuteye. Chances are you’ve spent your day mumbling to
co-workers
, bumping into furniture and performing pedestrian chores. Your brain spends the daylight hours in a state of drowsy semi-consciousness, and only decides to spring into life when the lights go out.