Every so often, and increasingly often these days, I feel a deep revulsion at British news coverage. Last week’s coverage of Kylie Minogue’s diagnosis of breast cancer seemed to me profoundly shocking. Of course it is extremely sad that she has breast cancer; of course it is true that everyone who really loves her is extremely upset; and it is to be hoped that she will recover fully and fast. But it is not news.
At least it is not a major news sensation, though that is the way it was treated. It is not a story that merits front-page photo splashes in most newspapers, or many minutes of prime air time. Nor is it the kind of news that justifies, in any newsworthy sense, pages and pages of analysis in broadsheets and tabloids alike, with endless gossip and reconstruction of the drama, about where Minogue was when she received the terrible news, how rock-like her boyfriend is being, whether she’ll still be able to have babies, and above all with endless wittering about how everybody and anybody might be feeling about it.
Equally depressingly there has been a flurry of anguished personal accounts by other women who have had breast cancer, going into the most intimate details of the experience and discussing how their cases are like, or unlike, Minogue’s and what we can all learn from it. Most of this fuss feeds on idle curiosity — although it’s odd that we call curiosity idle. Curiosity is, in fact, ceaselessly busy — and very profitable, too.
Most of this shameless voyeurism and exhibitionism justifies itself under the banner of “heightened awareness”. What humbug. It is prurience masquerading as public service.
For one thing, we simply do not need any more heightened awareness of breast cancer. People are very aware of it; indeed it is quite impossible to be unaware of it. The country is awash with information; the media discuss it obsessively.
Health pages and health programmes have had the most extraordinary boom in the past two decades and breast cancer is a staple item; it is regularly featured in an intensely educational way on worthy television and radio soap operas.
As a result of this consciousness raising, almost every young woman in the country is terrified of getting breast cancer; and given the trouble most of us have in these innumerate times in understanding statistics and risk, most of these poor women are much more scared than they should be. The Breast Cancer Care helpline said last week that younger women tend to overestimate the risk — which is stating it too mildly.
Then there is the awkward fact that quite a lot of the awareness is just misguided, or worse. For instance, the constant suggestion that people are courageously “battling” with cancer, not merely suffering from it, might be kindly meant but it is depressing and offensive to courageous people who are “losing” the “battle”; it suggests that they are somehow to blame.
Then again, conventional wisdom insists that talking openly about cancer is best; that is highly debatable. People have their own ways of dealing with cancer and some would prefer privacy and stoicism, regardless of conventional pieties. No — heightening awareness will not do as an excuse for all the fuss about Minogue’s cancer: what we actually need is lowered awareness.
It is rather mysterious that we have come so quickly to a point where it seems normal to most people to have such an excessive outpouring about a woman’s illness. Not so long ago, as with sex, it would have been quite impossible to talk about the personal details of any serious illness; people who did so were looked down on or laughed at. It was considered a breach of manners and a breach of privacy — a crossing of boundaries.
Now we seem to be losing our sense of boundaries between all kinds of things — in Minogue’s case between what is news and what is merely titillating infotainment, between sympathy and medical voyeurism, between normal interest in an appealing pop star and a stalker-like mass obsession with her, between a mild interest in a stranger’s illness and a prurient invasion of her hospital bedroom, between what is emotionally real and what is celebrity-fuelled fantasy.
Most obviously we seem to have lost a sense of the proper boundary between what ought to be private and what ought to be public. The examples are legion. There was a very intrusive article last week about Peaches Geldof, the 16-year-old daughter of Bob. Peaches is becoming famous with her own column and television appearances, and a self-styled friend of the family wrote a long piece warning of the dangers of teenage celebrity and at the same time betraying several minor confidences about Peaches, her father and stepmother. I cannot imagine what the point of the article was, but it showed a complete lack of what is due to the confidences of the kitchen, to privacy.
So, too, did an article of Bel Mooney’s about herself. Now separated from Jonathan Dimbleby, her husband of many years, and embarked on a new life, she wrote last week about the kind of things you would only tell a close friend. It might be very interesting for the rest of us to read about her moments of despair and her daughter’s disabilities and I fully understand the temptation to tell — all writers do — but I couldn’t help feeling that she was at times betraying both her family’s privacy and her own, in public.
Privacy is a precious thing. Yet in our society we have less and less sense of it, with more and more people flashing their private lives and their supposedly private parts in public, in pursuit of a little celebrity. But as Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, once wrote: “Private and public are two essentially different worlds and respect for that difference is the indispensable condition for a man to live free . . . When it becomes the custom and the rule to divulge another person ’s private life, we are entering a time when the highest stake is the survival or the disappearance of the individual.”
Kundera was writing in another context, about being spied on in private by a police state. But the point holds in a society where privacy faces different threats, as in ours. And the greatest threat to our privacy is our loss of interest in it. If we don’t defend it, we may sooner or later discover what celebrities already know and what Kundera warned of: without privacy there can be no freedom.
