Kerry Katona: Discuss

Well, everyone else is quacking on about her so I thought I’d throw in my column’s worth. You must have been living under a very remote rock not to have noticed The Face Of Iceland (the frozen food pusher, not the country that brought us Björk) mugging our media gaze this week. I’m actually not interested in the whole was she drunk/on prescription meds? debate when she slurred and swayed her way through her couch time with Phil and Fern on Wednesday’s This Morning – it seems like a straight-up case of a tortured soul with a troubled past becoming an attentionholic to deal with those troubles – but what does fascinate me is the media’s reaction to her tabloidese ‘TV meltdown’.

Because while every rent-a-gob commentator keeps talking about how KK (why not add another ‘K’ to really demonise her) needs help, implicitly alluding to her being psychologically unwell, they’re invariably the same people providing a platform for her – euphemism alert – ‘erratic behaviour’. If you genuinely feel someone is ill, is sticking them on TV the responsible thing to do, even if that’s what they want? Of course, it isn’t, but the media doesn’t care. In the age of 24 hour news, all it’s bothered about is getting the scoop, keeping the exclusives rolling in by any means, fair or foul.

Admittedly, the media’s job description doesn’t cover mental health well-being, but the problem is celebrities and civilians alike now treat it as a de facto psychiatrist’s couch to air their grubby-knickered laundry. The ruling dogma of contemporary culture is not unbridled capitalism and it’s certainly not socialism: it’s confessionalism. Showing how you feel has now become our raison d’être. It’s almost become our only way to feel. If you haven’t told others how you feel, then you really haven’t felt it at all. We watch other people’s pain as if it were some sick soap opera and, like chronic bulimics, we gorge on it, spew it out and end up wanting more.

Most worryingly, all this emotional Tourette’s is desensitising and dehumanising us; it blunts our empathy and sympathy. Surely, no matter what you think of Katona – and I’m not fussed, to be honest – the kind thing to do when someone is in that much distress, no matter what the root reason, is to show compassion, to flash a bit of heart.

The old maxim goes a civilised society is judged by how it treats its prisoners. These days, though, maybe we should judge it on how it treats its celebrities.