Sympathy

• Recent celebrity documentaries Beckham and Robbie Williams, and the final season of TV drama The Crown, have painted a portrait of the UK tabloids as cruel, sadistic and predatory of its homegrown celebrities.
• While criticism of the British tabloids – particularly the ethics and methods of the News of the World – is often justified, the specifics offered by all three shows fall flat.
• While these shows all try to claim part of the noughties nostalgia trend, they feel politically and contextually vacant.

The millennium press

• By 1998, only 8% of editorial in The Sun and The Mirror could be classed as “public affairs” – the rest focused on gossip, sports, or both.
• Inevitably, as celebrity culture became news, news also became gossip and both categories disintegrated into what we now call “clickbait”.
• As The Crown dolefully shows, one picture of Princess Diana could sell for millions to print newspapers in 1997.

The Crown

• The final season of The Crown covers the last eight months of Princess Diana’s life.
• Through fictionalised monologues from actors playing real photographers and journalists, the press compare themselves to “hunters” and “killers”.

Beckham and Robbie Williams

• Unlike The Crown, the main characters in the documentaries Beckham and Robbie Williams are not only living subjects but also active participants in the programmes.
• Beckham consults a litany of talking heads – former managers, teammates, Spice Girls and two suitably shame-filled paparazzi – to build a portrait of the footballer and his union with wife Victoria.
• As Williams notes, “[When you become famous] you want to give away the privacy you want to give away.

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Rachel Sykes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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• The UK’s former chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance’s diaries have been a key source of evidence, exposing the chaos within government at the time.
• In my PhD research, I’ve been exploring the COVID diaries of ordinary people, as well as diaries kept during the Great Plague of London in 1665-66.
• I’ve been looking specifically at 13 COVID diaries donated to the Borthwick Institute for Archives and the East Riding Archives, both in Yorkshire.
• I have been reading Pepys’s diaries alongside the modern COVID diaries, and have been struck by the common themes in how people navigated their pandemic experiences.

Recording statistics

• Throughout the COVID pandemic, statistics of cases and deaths were everywhere, and were key to how we judged the impact of the virus.
• All of the modern and historical diaries I have looked at include these statistics – some sparingly, others with meticulous regularity.

The blame game

• As cases rose, restrictions were enforced and the effects of plague and COVID loomed large in the lives of our diarists, narratives shifted to confusion and blame.
• And in spite to well people, would breathe in the faces … of well people going by.
• In the heighth of it, how bold people there were to go in sport to one another’s burials.
• And in spite to well people, would breathe in the faces … of well people going by.

Staying positive

• A more optimistic theme to emerge in the diaries was the ability to find positivity amid the chaos.
• Pepys and modern diarists were thankful for the blessings of health, family and security.
• They praised those who went the extra mile to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on those around them, despite the risk to their own health.
• It must be awful to live ten floors up in a high rise block with two children, and not be allowed out except for once per day.

• But by exploring the innermost thoughts of people with an element of shared experience, we see that fundamental aspects of the human condition endure.
• When faced with uncertainty and upheaval, our instincts are to record, find answers, and reclaim joy.

Mary Rehman receives funding from University of Hull Doctoral College

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