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Roll up, roll up...
Dec. 5th, 2008 01:31 pmOK. I'll admit it. Yesterday I indulged in well over an hour of shameless voyeurism over the Shannon Matthews case. What, I hear you ask yourself - even though Scribbles is normally vociferous in her scorn of those who get drawn in to Freak Show tabloidy gawping and car crash TV - even though she's always banging on about how such things are just exploiting the continued misery of innocent people for the vicarious thrills of a ghoulish General Public?
Erm, yeah. Colour me hypocritical.
It's just that... I can't help but get drawn in. Karen Matthews and the hilariously renamed 'Michael Donovan' (yes folks, he named himself after a 1980s SciFi character) seem to be only be outdone in their godawful unpleasantness by their own knuckle-dragging stupidity. Even if you don't look at the really badly thought-out lies the mum told to try to protect her own back when she realised people were on to her... even if their plan had gone ahead the way they wanted and Donovan had 'found' Shannon and collected the £50K reward, did they not think that people would wonder why it had just so happened to be the mum's boyfriend's uncle who had chanced upon seeing her? How were they going to explain the little girl's month long absence? Did they not think nobody would notice if the mum suddenly had the lion's share of the reward money?
Hopelessly flawed failed criminal masterplans are, by their nature, funny, and so would this if you didn't keep reminding yourself that that poor little girl, while remaining physically unharmed, must be completely fucked by these whole events. Can you imagine - your own mother thinks so little of you that she sends you off to be locked up in the flat of a violent loner for a month to dupe the community out of reward money, and everyone in the country knows it. Either that sort of betrayal is going to mess with a kid's head or she's already got such a low self-regard that it's not going to shock her. Either way, it's horribly, horribly depressing. And I really hate myself for prying so much into such a macabre story. It's like catching a bit of Jeremy Kyle and finding yourself woefully drawn into it - the whole point of it seems to be to reassure yourself that you are, by comparing yourself to abject pondscum, a good person and a good parent... or at least, a better person and a better parent than those twats. I know. I'm lame. Ho hum.
Erm, yeah. Colour me hypocritical.
It's just that... I can't help but get drawn in. Karen Matthews and the hilariously renamed 'Michael Donovan' (yes folks, he named himself after a 1980s SciFi character) seem to be only be outdone in their godawful unpleasantness by their own knuckle-dragging stupidity. Even if you don't look at the really badly thought-out lies the mum told to try to protect her own back when she realised people were on to her... even if their plan had gone ahead the way they wanted and Donovan had 'found' Shannon and collected the £50K reward, did they not think that people would wonder why it had just so happened to be the mum's boyfriend's uncle who had chanced upon seeing her? How were they going to explain the little girl's month long absence? Did they not think nobody would notice if the mum suddenly had the lion's share of the reward money?
Hopelessly flawed failed criminal masterplans are, by their nature, funny, and so would this if you didn't keep reminding yourself that that poor little girl, while remaining physically unharmed, must be completely fucked by these whole events. Can you imagine - your own mother thinks so little of you that she sends you off to be locked up in the flat of a violent loner for a month to dupe the community out of reward money, and everyone in the country knows it. Either that sort of betrayal is going to mess with a kid's head or she's already got such a low self-regard that it's not going to shock her. Either way, it's horribly, horribly depressing. And I really hate myself for prying so much into such a macabre story. It's like catching a bit of Jeremy Kyle and finding yourself woefully drawn into it - the whole point of it seems to be to reassure yourself that you are, by comparing yourself to abject pondscum, a good person and a good parent... or at least, a better person and a better parent than those twats. I know. I'm lame. Ho hum.
