PRESENT TENSE:This week's film about Kerry Katona was an exploitation of her children, who did not ask to live their lives in front of the camera, writes SHANE HEGARTY
IF YOU WERE feeling a little chipper on Thursday night and fancied some late-night celebrity fluff on the telly, you may have veered towards the Channel 4 fly-on-the-wall about Kerry Katona. By the time it finished you would have been flatter than a week-old pint.
The clue about the true nature of the programme came with the title: Kerry and Me. The "me" was the programme's maker, Lynn Alleway. She was that fly on the wall, and she buzzed incessantly, talking either to Katona or to the paparazzi outside her house. Or interjecting with some explanatory voiceover of something that needed no explanation; or adding an insight into Katona's personality that she clearly didn't have the gall to say to her face at the time.
This film was as much about Alleway as it was about Katona. But it was also a depressing look at the upbringing of Katona’s children. When it comes to the question of who was exploiting those kids, Alleway can be accused of sharing some of that responsibility, for this week at least. But she doesn’t share it with the children’s parents alone.
Because among the viewers outraged and disgusted and calling for the intervention of social services would have been a great many people who will go to newsagents this week and reach for the publications through which Katona’s story has unravelled, grim chapter by grim chapter.
Among Katona’s addictions is one to the media and to attention. Readers of the gossip mags help her feed that. And being aghast at the state of this addict’s kids shouldn’t separate them from their own responsibilities as dealers of a sort.
The core of the documentary was Katona – vulnerable, damaged and selling the story of her latest marriage break-up to the tabloids. But where it was truly bleak was in the images of the children, at various ages, trapped in the collapse of their parents’ marriage as it took place to the rhythm of snapping cameras. One child traipsed scolded down the stairs while being yelled at by the father, Mark Croft, to find her shoes. The camera looked on as if this was a wildlife documentary, in which nature’s ugliness must take its course.
Katona’s eldest – the daughter of Brian McFadden, who lives in Australia but was this week tweeting from LA – had that tragic maturity that some kids develop. There was a scene in which a hyper-giddy Katona danced around the kitchen while moaning about the children’s reluctance to join in.
“You think you have problems,” said the former Mother of the Year.
“I do,” said the eight-year-old.
The girl also knew the snappers by name, opening the door with learned trepidation as she prepared for school. All the while, that camera hovered at her shoulder.
The cars in the driveway had their licence plates pixelated to avoid identification. They were afforded more anonymity than the children.
In many ways Katona’s actions are predictable. She came from a severely dysfunctional home, so was always more likely to create one herself. She has had drug problems and is bipolar. Did we need a documentary to tell us that Katona flirts with the newspapers and encourages the paparazzi who were seen dancing in the cold in her driveway? We are already familiar with her story. A look at the magazine shelves will give you a variety of narratives from which to choose.
As with Jade Goody and a whole generation of young “celebrities”, Katona’s life comes at whatever price a tabloid happens to believe it is worth at any particular moment (or, at least, how much an agent can get for it).
The documentary pretended to be outside of this. When it suited her, Alleway was a participant, an active cast member; out of sight, perhaps, but often integral. But at the end, when excluded from Katona’s house, Alleway moved into the pack of paparazzi, revealing her true place in the journalistic order of things.
Meanwhile, the children found themselves being exploited by both their mother and the stranger who had been allowed access to their home with a camera.
And every time someone reaches for a magazine that treats such lurid dysfunction as entertainment, they are feeding Katona’s habit for attention as well as their own addiction to other people’s misery. And somewhere behind it is a kid gently opening the front door in the morning, and walking to school through the flashbulbs.