Keep looking at the window

Celebrity: When the shop window doesn't match the stock room

He was all anyone talked about after Jill Scott was crowned Queen of the Jungle on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here on Sunday evening. Former Health Minister and sitting MP for West Suffolk, Matt Hancock completed the full three weeks in camp and came third in the final public vote to decide the winner.

Whatever your personal thoughts, he seems to have persuaded the British public that he is a good guy at heart, down to earth and basically one of them.

ITV released the final results showing that Hancock had received 21.7% of the votes cast as the public chose between the final three.

Online, the talk about him continued well into the following week, his name trending while the actual winner became a side note. I even added to the noise, going on BBC 5Live to talk about his time on the show opposite former MP Lembit Opik. (Starts around 1:20.40) It got quite heated.

It’s exactly what Matt Hancock wanted. He set out his stall, blew on his fingers and started hustling from the second the cameras were trained on his amiable, inoffensive face.

He was there to win us over and he didn’t waste any time. “Oh my god, I love Ed Sheeran,” he yelped at disgraced comedian Seann Walsh seconds after meeting him. You know, like a normal person. He’s just like you.

Matt Hancock’s job for the past three weeks has been to court public favour and make you forget the image of him clamped around his now partner, Gina Coladangelo, while his wife and children were at home during lockdown, unaware of the other life he was leading.

He paid a PR team to run his social media campaign, exactly like an election campaign, producing scores of TikTok videos encouraging support for #teamMatt and showing followers how to vote for him five times on the official I’m A Celebrity phone app. He paid people to campaign for him, that nice guy hunkering down on the jungle floor, helping to empty the chemical toilet, all humble. It must have cost him thousands.

It’s his job to win your vote. It has always been his job. Why are we surprised that he pulled it off so well?

He worked his jungle-issue socks off to make you forget that his children (presumably given no choice in his latest career move) were probably suffering further weeks of bullying and misery so he could advance his own ambitions to be the next Boris Johnson. The cult of celebrity provided the former Etonian with a fast track to political success, so why not Matt Hancock?

Hancock has done his job exceptionally well, arranging all the right things in his shop window to draw the eye away from the things he doesn’t want to be associated with.

While he sat around a campfire, “being a nice normal guy” or stoically taking on challenge after challenge, we found it much harder to connect this chummy chap with the thousands of elderly people who died without family, in care homes, because he sent a deadly infection into their place of safety and then locked them in with it.

During the pandemic, stood on his important podium, he earnestly reassured the country about a “protective ring” around our most vulnerable people while they were literally fighting for breath, hands held by the staff who moved into care homes to look after them as they died. Shop window vs stock room. The two don’t match.

In that sense, Matt Hancock is a celebrity. What they present and what goes on behind the scenes are two different things. We know this, and yet we’re shocked at every new story exposing their off-camera behaviour.

If rumour is to be believed, David Walliams has just resigned as a judge on Britain’s Got Talent after recordings emerged from 2020 featuring the comedian documenting his honest, somewhat cruel feelings towards some of the contestants. Whether he jumped or whether he was pushed by BGT bosses, it would be hard to watch him smile and ingratiate himself with talent show hopefuls now, because we know what he’s really thinking.

James Corden also came under fire recently for his behaviour towards restaurant workers, largely because it was in such stark contrast to the James Corden he presents on screen. On his US chat show, he is friendly, charming and above all, humble. Just grateful for the opportunity to have the amazing job that he has. We don’t want to find out that he’s secretly been a status-crazed, venal bully all this time. The two don’t fit together.

Obviously some people will be delighted to see proof of this because they “never liked him in the first place” and “always knew he was a c*nt”. Those people will always congratulate themselves that the shop window never had them fooled. They could always see the dirty stock room with its shameful secrets. Maybe some of them are right, but a lot of them are just looking for reasons to loath a successful person.

Of course, Walliams isn’t going to sit on his judge’s chair on prime time ITV and tell an old man that he thinks he’s a c*nt, or say to a woman who earns a tiny fraction of his income that he can see she’s desperate for him to sleep with her.

We’re all entitled to our private thoughts. He’s allowed to think those particularly bleak things about the general public. I’m sure he’s incensed that his interior has been exposed so publicly when he works hard on screen to hide his contempt for the people he’s paid to judge.

He’s within his rights to employ a certain amount of artifice to project the version of himself he wants us all to see. That’s showbiz.

But if the difference between the shop window and the stock room is too great, it stops being misdirection and becomes an all out lie. How much do we really want to be lied to by the people we put on these pedestals?

If we’re paying, directly or indirectly, to be entertained and cheered up and given an escape from the bad things in our own lives, do we need those entertainers to be pristine of thought? Altruists to their very core?

I don’t think we do. In fact the redemption narrative is something we love in this country. We’ll willingly buy into it when a celebrity has been caught doing something they shouldn’t, because perhaps we somehow feel we now own a part of their story. They have to say sorry to “us” in order to move forward.

When Ant McPartlin was arrested for drink-driving after a collision with a family’s car, he followed a carefully set out redemption narrative, going to rehab for his addiction issues, apologising unreservedly, making an effort to show he’d learned from his terrible mistake. He only had to stay off-screen for a matter of months before he was welcomed back. Whatever is going on in his real life, his public redemption is complete. It’s a neat story.

Matt Hancock’s campmate, Seann Walsh, also used the jungle-based celebrity game show to rehabilitate his reputation after “that kiss”. While competing in the 2018 series of Strictly Come Dancing, he was photographed kissing his dance partner, Katya Jones. The two appeared contrite on the Strictly spin-off show, apologising for their moment of madness and then his ex, Rebecca Humphries - who had received no such apology in person, the “apology” was for the shop window only - released a statement on Twitter. She said Walsh had emotionally abused her and used gaslighting and controlling behaviour to sustain what turned out to be multiple infidelities.

Read her very good book on toxic relationships if you want to see how those events unfolded from her perspective. She’s a terrific writer.

Ever since, Walsh himself has repeated the “one kiss” narrative, on chat shows, during his own stand-up shows and in several interviews subsequently. He talks about his own mental health following the public revelations, his panic attacks and anxiety, the way his career has ground to a halt because of one kiss, “that kiss”.

Often, reputation managers are called in to rescue a showbiz career under threat. Their job is to swoop in and clean the shop window, removing any items that are harming their client’s reputation. They advise clients to focus on the relatable bits of their scandal to draw focus away from the indefensible bits. Perhaps Walsh was advised to go with the “kiss” narrative because the rest of the story wasn’t as palatable. It was only “sustained emotional abuse” doesn’t have the same sympathetic ring to it.

Where Matt Hancock translated his own public “kiss” shame into romance, repeatedly telling us he “fell in love” as a justification for breaking lockdown rules and destroying his family, Walsh skated over his ex-girlfriend’s statement, referring us back constantly to the kiss. How could all of this suffering (his) be caused by a single kiss? It does sound unreasonable, doesn’t it?

Other people began to repeat it too. From Jonathan Ross to Frankie Boyle, we all talk about “the kiss” now when we talk about Walsh. The strategy has worked.

By luck, fellow campmate Sue Cleaver asked him about it as they sat by the fire one night. She questioned why a simple kiss could end his career the way it seemed to have done. Afterwards, in the room where campmates go to record solo interviews, she said, "He's a lovely lad. He's a sensitive soul, very sensitive soul. He's been through the wringer the last three years but yeah I think he's really brave and I'm glad he's here."

From where she was sat, his shop window looked fine, sympathetic even. He was on camera, on a show he’d signed up for in order to course correct his narrative because it had gotten out of his control. Of course the window display was appealing. He’d taken some pains to arrange it so that it showed him in the best possible light. In a way, wasn’t he the real victim here?

The behaviour described by his ex was safely back in the stock room. Keep looking at the window.

“Bit of a shagger” can stay in the window because we sort of expect it of our male celebrities. He’s a comedian in his late 30s. Of course he’ll have a bit of fun if it’s offered to him on a plate. And it often is because everyone knows women want to sleep with famous men, don’t they?

Isn’t that tacitly what’s promised to men who rise to the top of the entertainment industry anyway? Rock stars, Hollywood actors, soap stars, comedians, even politicians? It’s one of the perks along with money and status and a big house and good tables in restaurants and free swag and preferential treatment. You will be swamped by offers of sex.

Keep it out of your shop window and we’ll turn a blind eye.

But something has changed. Perhaps it’s the internet and its power to spread information in a split second, offering victims of abuse the chance to speak up where before they were unable to.

We couldn’t hear them before. Now we can. Do we listen to what they’re saying, or do we dismiss them because of an existing power dynamic? David Walliams is rich and famous; those talent show contestants aren’t important. Their feelings don’t matter because he sells millions of books.

Matt Hancock can go on any TV show he likes because as Lembit Opik said on BBC 5Live to me this week “he didn’t deliberately kill those people”. I’m not sure he could hear how that sounded.

Matt Hancock tells us what to think about Matt Hancock (along with his PR team), however much a phone vote makes us feel like we’ve made up our own minds.

James Corden can bark at waiters and David Beckham can take money from whomever he wants because they’ve achieved high status. Consequences cease to exist. Indiscretions are a private matter. Mind your own business.

Keep looking at the window.