The roaring twenties, the hungry thirties, the swinging sixties: but what shall we call the nineties? Surely it will come to be known as the weeping decade. For never did so many cry so easily, so openly and so often as in the closing years of the second millennium.
The weeping reached its crescendo with what became known as the National Outpouring of Grief in September 1997. But it didn’t start there. Princess Diana had herself been a weeper (famously, in her confessional Panorama television interview) and, before her, footballers and racing drivers, presidents and prime ministers had all wept publicly. A sign of the damp times ahead came early in the decade, in the summer of 1990, and in an unlikely setting – a football pitch, then still a bastion of dead-‘ard laddism. Paul Gascoigne – Gazza – cried fat tears when he was given a yellow card for a foul against West Germany during the World Cup semi-final. The card, Gazza’s second of the series, would have disqualified him from playing in the final and he was distraught. Blubbing unashamedly, he ran blindly up and down the pitch until pulled from the game by the England manager. England went on to lose and so never actually reached the final. That was fought between West Germany and Argentina, where, incidentally, Argentina’s superstar, Diego Maradona, shed more tears on the pitch when his team lost. But Gazza had turned on a tap that became stuck at open.
The unforgettable image of the stocky Geordie unmanned by tears (as an earlier generation of sports commentators might have said) was replayed over and over on news and sports programmes. Spitting Image, the satirical television show, created a weeping puppet whose geyser eyes spouted with greater force by the week. Like yawning, crying proved contagious.
Hard on Gazza’s heels came the Iron Lady. No one had thought Margaret Thatcher capable of any emotion at all, let alone the wetter kind that she had taunted her fellow party members for displaying. But when in November 1990 one after another, wets and dries alike, filed into the prime ministerial office and told her she had to go, it aroused emotions that had lain dormant for the 11 years in which she had visited unemployment, homelessness and financial misery upon millions. As the car swept her away from No 10 Downing Street for the last time, she wept and the cameras caught it.
Self-pity, like power, is addictive. After one indulgence, even the toughest can make themselves cry again, just by remembering how tragic they felt the first time. Thus it was for Thatcher. The ex-prime minister repeated her tear-soaked performance seven months later, in June 1991, when she decided to end her 32-year Commons career. A few hours after the announcement, she found herself dabbing her eyes in a Channel 4 television studio, heartbroken as she recalled the cruelty and treachery of her colleagues.
It is unlikely that a woman who built her reputation on being intransigent, determined and not for turning would have planned or enjoyed either of these public breakdowns and, to that extent, they were relatively artless events – self-centred rather than genuine public performances. But politicians since have increasingly found that weeping is not at all bad for the reputation. It can, in the right context, upset the perceived notion that politicians are power-hungry cynics and lead the public to believe that they have feelings. Bob Hawke, the former Australian prime minister, used the “I’m only human” breakdown to good effect as early as 1989. He was overcome during a television interview when he admitted infidelity to his wife of 33 years. With tears welling in his eyes, he went on to vow constancy. He has since divorced and remarried (and confesses to having shed a tear or two at how beautiful his new bride looked dressed in white on their wedding day).
Phrases such as “visibly moved” and “overcome with emotion” have become part of the political reporter’s standard vocabulary. (They have several times been used of Tony Blair, although he always stops short of shedding tears.) But even so, the grief photo-opportunity is becoming a taxing moment for those in the public eye. It is a short step for politicians from feeling that they are now allowed to cry to believing that they must cry. Once upon a time, they could have clenched their teeth and nobody would have blamed them for looking glum and awkward. Now they must do more.
Bill Clinton has clearly felt this imperative. He has had much to grieve about in his almost eight years in office, from plane crashes to personal guilt and embarrassment to the dire consequences of his foreign policy. But should the president of the most powerful nation in the history of the world do his grieving so publicly? Great leaders should surely be more resolute and stoical. Clinton’s finger moves so regularly to wipe a tear from one eye that commentators are asking whether he has acquired the skill of monocular weeping.
Despite his “black dog” depressions, Winston Churchill never felt the need to show his feelings. The many photographs of him deliver the same image of obdurate endurance in the face of disaster, other people’s tragedies, his own defeats. And nobody leapt out of the blitz rubble and shouted at him “Show us you care, Winnie” as “Ma’am” was instructed to do during the National Outpouring.
In fact, Ma’am has never cried on duty, any more than she has arrived somewhere drunk, or been seen rushing to the ladies. Weeping, along with drinking and sucking toes, is for the rest of the family.
There is a certain safety in Ma’am’s strategy, though, as politicians are learning. The crying game is complicated. Once tears have been shed at, say, a refugee camp, should more be shed at a natural disaster? Do numbers or nationalities matter? What about personal tragedies? On the face of it, these should come lowest in terms of public display, but does a politician want the reputation of caring more for the world than for his or her own family?
Paddy Ashdown, transformed from Action Man to New Man by the birth of his grandchild, broke down in front of the television cameras when talking to refugees in Kosovo in April 1999. It seemed genuine enough but also puzzling, since the former leader of the Liberal Democrats had made several bustling visits to Kosovo before when his concerns seemed more to do with military tactics and weaponry than mothers and children. Such a change of heart seemed to some to warrant a national debate on whether all military decisions should be made only by recent grandparents.
It is hard to remember that, for most of the century, crying was as private an activity as sex. (But then sex was once as private an activity as weeping.) When the acerbic Gilbert Harding cried on television in 1959, it made headline news. Harding, a television personality who could be brutally rude to members of the public as well as his fellow stars, broke down when John Freeman, a former NS editor, asked how he had felt about the death of his mother.
Freeman was ahead of his time in asking such questions. Now all interviewers seem to feel obliged to push their interviewees into confessional mode, particularly since so many columnists have undertaken it voluntarily. Anthony Clare has reduced several of his “guests” to tears, including Claire Rayner, on his Radio 4 therapy programme In the Psychiatrist’s Chair – the sole premise of which seems to be that the listeners deserve nothing less than for his patients to undergo a public catharsis.
Oliver James, another media psychiatrist, got in touch with one of Peter Mandelson’s hidden emotions in June 1997, when he asked him about the death of his father. But, while Harding’s tears for his mother generated national shock, Mandelson’s provoked a rather petty triumphalism in the press. Making an interviewee cry now seems like a sophisticated but cruel version of the Bruce Forsyth Yes-No game. “Is your name Peter?” It is. “Did you arrive by car?” I did. “Are you a politician?” I am. “How did you feel about your father’s death?” Boing!
Mandelson’s tears were a mere drop in the ocean. It seemed that the crying would never stop, even as the sad death of a beautiful woman was rendered daily more bathetic by disputes about the banal. What would be done with the decomposing tons of flowers the public had strewn? (They would be composted along with the soggy fluffy toys for the royal gardens – phew!) And the tear-stained, rain-soaked gift cards? (They would be entered into a condolences book – a likely story.) Ian Jack, editor of Granta magazine, writing an account of the spontaneous gathering in London the day after Princess Diana’s death, gave the strange scenes he witnessed a memorable label – recreational grief.
Maybe that concept stands as a bridge between the weeping nineties and a more hedonistic millennium ahead. We could not, after all, keep crying for much longer. Nobody who watched the Oscar ceremony in March this year will forget Gwyneth Paltrow receiving the best actress award for her part in Shakespeare in Love. Paltrow positively howled with grief, thanking the entire world for its generosity and her great fortune. The grizzling whine, the distorted face and the blubbering wetness of the spectacle were so preposterous that even the reliably sentimental Oscar audience was frozen with embarrassment.
A recent headline announced that “Sex is no longer sexy”. It may well be that we have discovered that tears are no longer sad.
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