Mister Brisbane: Back story
How the gossip that writes itself triumphs over real news
One from the Debritz archives, that never actually saw the light of day
I recently discovered a stub of an opinion column in a backup folder. It was written on my long-bricked iPad and never quite completed. I’ve edited it to make sense, but please note that the piece was written well before the separation of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (in fact, it was before they were even married, which was in 2014).
The other day, I was standing idly at the supermarket checkout waiting my turn when, as they are positioned to do, a magazine caught my attention.
My eye was drawn to a line in the top right-hand corner saying “Will Brad leave Ange?” And, in a flash, it occurred to me exactly what is wrong with the world today. Too many of us are obsessed with things that are not real and don’t matter.
It’s not that I’m not interested in celebrity news. After all, I used to edit the arts and entertainment lift-out of a newspaper that caught 1.4 million pairs of eyeballs every week.
But the gossip was a small part of a package that included serious arts news, reviews and interviews, which itself was inserted in a newspaper that dealt with general news, politics, sport, opinion, business news and the like.
And rarely, if ever, was the gossip speculative. It was trivial, perhaps, but it was grounded in truth.
To be honest, I have enough to worry about in my own life than to be concerned about the state of Brad Pitt’s marriage. At the time I was making a phone call to my daughter, who is half a world away, I was hoping my mother’s internet connection would be restored so we could have regular email chats, trying to plan lunch and I tossing up whether to buy a new mobile phone or a bed (so, I bought a washing machine instead). Normally there’d be some work considerations, too, but I was having a week off.
In the wider world, of course, people were being born and dying, and doing other normal stuff.
I didn’t buy the magazine, and I haven’t read the article, but I feel like I have, because I’ve read it before. Maybe Jolie and Pitt’s marriage really is on the rocks, as the supermarket tabloids insisted Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s union was – for at least three years until it came true.
Divorce statistics suggest it’s highly probable that Brad and Ange — we’re so familiar with them we not only refer to them by their first names, but by abbreviations of their first names or the portmanteau name Brangelina — won’t last the distance. But, so what? Will it change our lives?
Why not concentrate on the good work being done in Hollywood – on, say, Michael J Fox’s campaigning to find a cure for Parkinson’s disease, or even Jolie’s work as a Unesco goodwill ambassador? Because they’re the kind of stories that don’t write themselves, and aren’t sexy enough to plug on the front page.