“They may dress it up with fancy words — “tribute” is a favourite — but the cruder truth is that ersatz grief is now the new pornography; like the worst of hard-core, it is stimulus by proxy, voyeuristically piggy-backing upon that which might otherwise be deemed personal and private, for no better reason than frisson and the quickening of an otherwise jaded pulse. The only difference is that with old pornography at least we do our best to keep it away from children. “

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article2402693.ece

A friend pointed me in the direction of this excellent piece in the Times.

It is a phenomenon that has deeply disturbed me since the sickening scenes of mass hysteria over the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, although I also found the mass euphoria over her engagement and wedding, many years before was equally verging on vomitous.

It has become one of those pivotal moments in a nation’s history but sadly not one that marks some great age of enlightenment and illumination. Where were you when Kennedy was shot? No, more important than that, where were you when you heard the news about Diana?

And the galling thing for me is that I can remember precisely where I was. I, who had so carefully avoided being anywhere near a television set when the royal wedding was on, could not escape the televisual spectacle of the reporting of her passing.

I was having a lovely lie-in at the time; I was on holiday in a little self-catering flat with my mother and my two children in Emsworth. And I was cursing my mother’s early morning TV watching - it was on all the channels she was clicking through – because if I had been at home I would have missed being subjected to that endless repetitious reporting of a few simple facts which had to be regurgitated in a hundred different ways to pad out the time slots.

That was at the beginning of our little holiday break and it affected the whole of the rest of it as people everywhere felt unable to carry on as normal. Shops and eating places were so consumed with grief that we struggled to find places to mooch round comfortably and resorted to abandoning civilisation as far as possible to avoid these terrifying demonstrations of unnecessary national anguish and despair.

These scenes of ridiculous and nauseating public hysteria have always made me uneasy in a way that horror films can only do if made really well. The nations gone Psycho. That moment in Fatal Attraction when she rears up and the entire cinema audience I was with screamed in unison, with pulses surging and hearts racing and stomachs churning. The Birds.

But real life shouldn’t be Hitchcockianly disturbing – should it?