How taboo it is nowadays to appear unashamed in the face of scandal?
Written for Word Magazine (buy it in your newsagents, it’s wonderful) in March 2011 – this was the first draft.
In between the horror of Japan and the misery of the cuts has been a little ray of celebrity sunshine: Charlie Sheen has been caught using prostitutes, taking stupendous amounts of drugs and best of all bragging about it. This isn’t the script. If you get caught up in a scandal, you’re meant to go: “Sorry! I’m off to rehab!” and then carry on exactly as you were before, but behind closed doors.
The media is (amongst other things) a huge machine for the celeb classes to broadcast the word “sorry” along with the the second unsaid implication: “please don’t kick us out of celeb club, we wish to continue clawing in mountains of cash from the proles.” Although sometimes they manage to append a useful marketing message like, “Two and Half Men, Tuesdays, 9pm.”
A quick search for “apologise” in Google news reveals a plethora of grovelling messages concocted by desperate PR departments who are now punching their own faces in at the idiocy of allowing their clients unmediated access to the public.
Hugh Grant recently tweeted: “I discovered it hurt less if you tackled hard than if you tackled like a queen” and the headline soon spun out “BBC apologises for Hugh Grant’s gay rugby comment.”
Family Guy script monkey Alec Sulkin managed to offend pretty much everyone with the comment: “If you wanna feel better about this earthquake in Japan, google ‘Pearl Harbor death toll,” revealing an ignorance shared by many of Twitter users as Pearl Harbour actually trended, but the contrition swiftly followed.
Even Sarah Ferguson is sorry for her “gigantic error of judgment” in letting Prince Andrew’s paedophile friend pay off £15,000 debt. Yes, Sarah, I’m sure you’re sorry – sorry that you’ve been caught.
The lesson is simple: do what you like, say what you like, but apologise like your career depends on it if you’re rumbled.
And your career does depend on it, as fellow actor Alec Baldwin (no stranger to druggy controversy himself) publicly demanded that the errant Mr Sheen should polish up his act. As Alec says: “Suck it up and apologize or risk losing a winning career.”
Sheen, instead, has been oddly authentic and shouted loud and proud that he loves drugs and hookers. This is against a backdrop of being sacked and having his kids taken off him. But who’s complaining when the story has given us a new set of catchphrases: “winning!” and “tigerblood!”
Sheen reportedly earned $2m per episode of his hit comedy Two and a Half Men, though quite what he does with this money is anybody’s guess. Actually not quite. He uses to the money to fund a hedonistic life of smoking crack and having sex with porn stars. Who wouldn’t if they had the money?
Well the taboo in not saying sorry is exactly that: money. There’s cash, both the celebs’ personal wedge and the millions they make for the corporations that own them. Not saying sorry deals a death blow to both the celeb and their paymaster; it means endorsement deals shot, adverts pulled and worst of all the DVD box sets removed from Wal-Mart.
And who wants to join the list of other celebs that refused to say sorry? Who wants to be Gary Glitter, condemned forever to wander the globe, only to pop up occasionally in the papers as a bogey man. (A round of contrition on the chat circuit and a confessional reality show about paedophile treatment would have paid the shrink’s bills for a bit at the very least.)
Jonathan King never said sorry, meaning we lost his always interesting opinions from contemporary culture. Somewhere he’s probably saying very clever things about Simon Cowell and X Factor but we’ll never get to hear them.
As Elton John once sang, “Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word”. However, not saying sorry is the most expensive thing a celeb can ever do.
