Ryan Giggs’s spectacular plummet in the public estimation is the perfect example of how our celebrity culture works. A couple of years back, he was Sports Personality of the Year, a shining example for youngsters everywhere; now he’s Ryan Giggs, Love Rat.
It’s a familiar narrative arc: The young, talented sportsman comes from nowhere to reach the top of his game; he goes on to accumulate an impressive haul of trophies; he has everything that money can buy; but fails to keep his private life as perfect as everything else. Our cheers turn to boos as the secrets are gaudily splashed over the front pages of the red-tops.
“GIGGS IS THE NEW TIGER WOODS” says today’s Daily Star. And it’s a similar story: the supposedly squeaky-clean bubble punctured by a series of revelations; the kiss-and-tell stories snowballing along as more and more events come to light. Just as with Woods, the tabloids can smell blood – and money.
The Woods stories were dragged out over several weeks, with new affairs coming to light, new people telling their tales of what they got up to, and didn’t get up to, with the world’s second best ever golfer. The women involved were quickly dehumanised, turned into a series of numbers – or rather holes that Woods had played. Because we didn’t really care what they thought, or felt, or did – it was all about the man at the centre of it all. What was he like? What did he say?
The humbling of the alpha-male millionaire was complete; and we could read all about it, and feel a sense of superiority over this super-human ball-hitter, that we hadn’t made the mistakes as him – or if we had, that we weren’t notable or famous enough to have our mistakes inked onto a million paper pages, peered at on a million shimmering screens. We could enjoy his pain, because it wasn’t happening to us; we could revel in his self-inflicted misery, enjoy seeing his hubris turn to shame before our delighted eyes.
So it is with Giggs, although there’s another element to all this, a barely disguised stench of triumphalism among our friends at the tabloids. Look, he was doing this all along! And he tried to hide it with that evil injunction! Well now, the floodgates are open. If anything, the huge interest in Giggs brought about by the injunction gave these stories a value they might not have otherwise had – not that they wouldn’t have been big stories anyway.
It’s hard to find much sympathy for Giggs in all this, and clearly he is the originator of his own downfall through his actions and choices. But I still see these things as very much a private tragedy. No, perhaps we shouldn’t be prevented from knowing about these matters, distasteful though that is; but I still feel a bit grubby reading about them – there’s a slime that rubs off on your fingers when you put the paper down, or leave the keyboard.
We may like to convince ourselves that we’re better than people like Giggs, because we get to see their decline and fall take place in public, but I am not so sure that we are. Our obsession with the sex lives of the rich and famous is a bit mucky, I think; a bit adolescent. Of course, the papers will sell by the palletload on the back of his face being on the front, and so they will have been proved right all along.
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