It’s never been easier for a single mistake to define a whole life
Occasionally, as a television presenter, you come across stories that make your blood run cold. The last time it happened, I was live on air and I virtually stopped speaking. I wish I could say the story was about some appalling human rights abuse or a new threat of global recession. But no. It was about a Russian newsreader, Tatyana Limanova, who committed a spectacular act of career self-sabotage by apparently flipping her finger at the camera live on air, immediately after a reference to President Obama. She seemed to have survived, at first, but within days her moment was on YouTube and the world was watching. Limanova had discovered the wrong kind of global celebrity, with the implicit added tease of a Cold War rerun. Amid accusations of anti-Americanism, she was hurried out into the cold.
I remain sympathetic to Limanova’s predicament. It is the kind of thing I have almost done 100 times or more. A gesture of a second, ending a ten-year career. Let’s be honest, very few of us will get through life without one of these moments. The question is not whether a foolish act is committed, but how far and how fast the evidence of it will travel across the world. Ten years ago, these moments of incompetence or madness quietly disappeared. Today, social networking sites mean that while a moment may be gone, it is never forgotten. Ms Limanova has joined an unhappy roster of people who face the prospect of being remembered in the public consciousness for a single brief act. Something which should be a footnote can instead become the headline of a life.
Ask Lars von Trier, the acclaimed director whose recent Nazi joke backfired so badly that he was banned from the Cannes film festival. He has since given up speaking in public, presumably terrified of his own sense of humour. As he puts it, ‘I do not possess the skills to express myself unequivocally.’ Christian Dior’s enfant terrible John Galliano was a feted international celebrity until he got drunk, ranted anti-Semitically at Italians in a bar and claimed he loved Hitler. Worse, he did so in earshot of one of the many recording devices now built into mobile phones. He ended up fired and virtually unwearable. I didn’t shed much of a tear for Galliano, but the chances are pretty high that, had he not been recorded, he would still be at the top of haute couture.
And then there are the politicians: moments such as Neil Kinnock washing up like a bedraggled mollusc after tripping his way down Brighton beach. One could argue that David Miliband’s political aspirations were cut down not by his brother but by a pose he struck, several years earlier, with a banana. Less a moment of madness, more a mid-morning snack captured and digitised for ever. The Tories were so delighted that they still give out free bananas at their party conference. Then there was the Tory councillor who attempted a joke on Twitter that involved calling for the stoning of the left-wing commentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Not only was his career sunk, he was arrested. Try your jokes in private, perhaps, before testing them on the open web.
But perhaps the whole premise is wrong: it’s easy to argue there’s no such thing as a ‘moment of madness’; that they almost always reflect repeated and incremental patterns of behaviour. The ‘moment’ is just the time you get caught. Certainly, some will say that people who show inordinate public stupidity deserve to have their careers cut short. Public life comes with a degree of responsibility. But I prefer to think we all of us have it in us, lurking dangerously close to the surface — a spark that, yes, sometimes shows humanity in all its messy imperfection. At least, that’s what I’ll probably be saying to the bosses when it’s me.