Monday, January 11, 2010

Most hated on ice

People really seem to hate Heather Mills: today on FB and various message boards, there are comment streams choking disapproval and spite towards her.

The children wanted to watch Dancing on Ice, which is a new vice for us all. Sigh. The trouble with these sorts of programmes is that they do make for family viewing: someone to root for with the competition aspect, something "everyone's talking about" to discuss at school/bus-stop and something safe and nice to watch, "good clean fun". The worst outcome would possibly being someone having their jugular slit by an ice-skate, I suppose, but that wouldn't make it on screen, while the sarcastic judges comments just meet the Anne Robinson standard. And it is nice to sit as a family post-bathtime and watch something.

I was quite surprised at the level of venom of some of those comments. A very public messy divorce from Paul McCartney and she's evil incarnate. People are criticising her for emphasising 'charity campaigner' as her role, but what do they want? Ex-Beatle ex-wife? Wouldn't she then be milking his fame? Truth is, none of us (as in the great unwashed) know this woman at all. She may be an awful person and all that, or her public image may just have been distorted either through poor choices on her part, agenda by the media or mixture of the two. Her persona seems unsympathetic, but the level of nastiness she seems to excite is preposterous and out of proportion.

I'm glad she made it through to the next round (I didn't watch the results show, as children were then abed, but the FB reactions are all over my friends list). I didn't expect her to, thinking she was beyond unpopular, so it makes me wonder: did people vote to have someone to keep hating, hoping she hurts herself or falls? Or do more people feel inclined to give her a chance to redeem her public image (if that's part of what she hopes to achieve?) and appreciate her grit in trying an ice-skating competition as an amputee?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't like it when my Friends list is full of other people sharing crappy opinions about various celebs on Jesus Christ Superstar Strictly on Ice (ad nauseam) *(you know the kind of programme)*. Charlie Brooker the lovely journalist often decries the amount of random hatred and venom aimed at famous people who are not liked. I don't want to waste my energy caring about celebrities who I will never meet. I think it's a lot more ethical somehow to "hate" someone like Dirty Den, ie a *character from a drama or soap* as opposed to a real life person. But I guess that's old fashioned now, to hate a character rather than a celebrity.

Anonymous said...

PS Abster ^ I keep forgetting I'm anonymous.

Mephitis said...

I suppose it fills a bitchy gossip need, someone to unite in despising. :/