There is something so chilling about watching Paula Yates on Have I Got News for You, as Ian Hislop and Paul Merton tear into her for her attention-seeking. Then the supposedly sympathetic media wing, the feminists, the satirists, bring up the rear: “You seem like such an intelligent woman, why did you flaunt yourself in this way?” is often the subtext or, in the case of the Jackie Collins interview, the text. Then the voices of the moral majority chime in, the “who does she think she is?” brigade. You and I aren’t buying the papers nobody is: they are merely being sold. Everybody involved is passive, abstracted: the subject isn’t a real person it’s an “it”. Theirs is not to reason why they’re just there to give the people what they want: they talk about this commercial imperative as though it’s a physical force, which becomes the phrase “it sells papers”. These are the neutrals, the white helmets of the operation. There was a news-gathering wing, the 60-plus photographers camped permanently outside her house, rendering normal life, let alone normal parenting, impossible. It was only when Yates left Geldof for Hutchence in 1995 that Fleet Street turned remorselessly against her, and the battle plan was indistinguishable from the treatment you would see, say, the Duchess of Sussex get today, or some other poor schmuck tomorrow. Probably wouldn’t get past the subeditors now. That cocktail of racism and sexism – they acknowledge Trent D’Arby is a star, yet it’s still more important that he’s black than what his name is. But we might still look at the headlines – “Bob’s Paula caught with black star”, in the News of the World – and think some progress has been made in the world, which it has. When she had an affair with Terence Trent D’Arby in the late 80s (she had been with Geldof for 12 years by then they had met in 1976), the disapprobation from the press felt neurotic, as if a collective ego wound had been inflicted. Paula Yates was the tabloids’ darling for a while, when her on-screen flirtatiousness was neutralised by its distinctive Carry On Interviewing vibe and the fact of her rockstar boyfriend, Bob Geldof, of whom surely no woman could ever tire. She wouldn’t want you to pity her she would want you to be furious. This emotion is the only respectful homage to a woman who, with her charisma, biting wit, trashy innuendo – demonic, lithe, ferret-like – redrew the limits of what femininity was supposed to look like. Her life story – tragically cut short in 2000, three years after the death by suicide of Michael Hutchence – is typically characterised as a sad one, but at the end of Paula I didn’t feel sad, I felt really angry. Perhaps neither one would have been as relentlessly surveilled and scrutinised without the counterpoise of the other, but we can never know, because as a direct or indirect result of that surveillance and scrutiny, by the turn of the century both were dead.īilled as a documentary about the rise and fall of Paula Yates, centred on her testimony to the journalist Martin Townsend, which has never been heard before, this is, as is so often the case with rise-and-fall narratives, really a story about the British media.
The People’s Princess turned to Little Miss Hypocrite (I’m selecting two of their tabloid epithets from a smörgåsbord) and said: “I love it when you’re on the front page of the papers because it means I’ve got the day off.” Yates was the Diana of the dark timeline: two epoch-making blondes, one bottle, the other natural one bawdy, the other demure one flirtatious, the other innocent one outspoken, the other reserved a classic whore and madonna dyad. T here’s a story about Paula Yates bumping into Diana, Princess of Wales that Yates’s friend Belinda Brewin recollects in the documentary Paula this week.
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