Last night I was working late, but taking a little look around the internet as I tried to work out the best order for some bits of the book. I saw the news item about
Madeleine McCaan's mother appearing on the Oprah Winfrey show, which included the image of how it was imagined Maddy might look now.
For whatever reason the people putting the picture together had decided to put Madeleine in a smart dress, with a pink ribbon or Alice band in her hair and smiling happily. It just seemed odd and faintly sickening for them to go down this route. If they want to give us an idea of what she might look like facially, then that's all right. But to have her smiling, dressed in pretty clothes, her hair done nicely in a sense is quite insulting. I presume they are trying to spare the feelings of the parents, but the truth is we all have a pretty good idea of what Maddy might look like now (indeed by today people were sending each other links that led to a small skeleton), but if by some miracle she is still alive, then it seems doubtful that she'd be dressed up and smiling. It's an outside possibility. And the nicest of the potential explanations, that while Maddie was sleeping, a kindly, but confused old woman mistook her for her grand daughter, took her home and is now looking after her in a nice big house with a perpetually sunny garden.
I thought up a joke that was inappropriate and sick, but which summed up the slight nausea I feel at the way this story is reported and continues to be reported. I thought I'd keep it to myself, but here it is "Maddie's looking very well in the new picture, dressed up smart. Whoever's got her is really looking after her. Better than her parents did, to be honest." Yes, it goes too far (even if it's saying something that a lot of people think and which the papers certainly banged on a lot about at the time, in seriousness rather than jest), but it's a reaction to an underlying unpleasantness to the whole idea of creating this photo.
Because what are the media really trying to achieve here? Let's say their motives are 100% good, and that all they want to do is help us find Maddie. Then how much good is this photo anyway. At best it's a guess, a composite of pictures of her and her parents at that age - maybe it's close, maybe it isn't. But my best guess is that if Maddie is still with us she isn't in a situation where she's out playing in the street every day on public view and I bet she isn't smart and smiling. If the photo is close then whoever has got her will be able to see it too and then (if they're foolish enough to ever allow her outside) will be able to change her appearance. It isn't going to help anyone.
All it does is bring this story back into the spotlight, not out of any sense of wanting to help the poor, tortured parents (and despite my joke I don't think they did anything that anyone else hasn't done at some point with their kids. They've been incredibly and horrifically unlucky). I think most of us would agree that it's probably time for these people to accept the truth of what has happened to their daughter and be allowed to grieve for her. Understandably they don't want to do that. They want to believe. And of course we'd all be delighted if Maddy turned up tomorrow, wearing a pink ribbon in her hair and smiling with an old Portuguese lady apologising for her error.
But we can be 99% certain that that isn't going to happen and for the media to play its part in giving this false hope to the parents is more sickening than my off-colour joke.
I thought the whole campaign was self-defeating from the start because if by some miracle Maddy had survived and was being held by someone, then the amount of publicity about the case left them with only a very few, very dark options.
I don't know what I'd do if I was the parent in this situation and I hope that I would never give up trying to find my child. But I am not sure that this TV campaign and the refusal to accept the most likely possibility (which this new picture perfectly encapsulates) is helping anyone.
I thought about putting my joke on Twitter, but decided against it, but couldn't resist telling people that I had come up with an awful and sick topical gag. Of course dozens of people then tweeted asking me to say what it was.
I don't think that makes them bad people, or me a bad person. For some of us (I hope most of us) the best way to cope with a dark and horrible subject is to joke about it. If we can laugh at it then it helps us carry on.
The next day I noticed that other people were tweeting gags about the photo - not because the story is funny, but because, I suppose, to a lot of us the inherent stupidity and mawkishness of the image is laughable. @DeafSteve put what we were all thinking delicately "I hope not but I fear the image released showing Madeleine McCann as she might look now is slightly optimistic." Whereas the slightly more abrasive @michaellegge went for the jugular, "Just saw that "photo" of Maddie aged six. HA! Looks nothing like her." I decided to share my joke with the Twitter community. I had made it clear I was reticent, but it was also obvious to me that this subject deserved some satire and that you'd have to be over sensitive to take what I, or any of these people had said, seriously.
Nearly everyone was surprised how tame the gag was after my build up and a few people commented something along the lines of "Thank God, when you said that last night the main news story was about Baby P and I thought you'd done something about that."
I found that quite interesting. Firstly because I don't think I would ever joke about the Baby P story, perhaps in this case it's just too horrific but then with a jolt I realised that although we couldn't be sure, the Maddy case involves a tiny child being abused and murdered. Is the only difference that we know for sure what happened to Baby P and this other unthinkable case, whilst we are able to pretend that Maddy might be somewhere with pink ribbons and smart dresses and safe from harm?
Perhaps a little bit.
But I think it's actually more about the fact that people are fed up with this story being dragged out in the way it has, not because they don't have sympathy or empathy because this country has shown we have that in buckets over this story. But because there comes a point where we have to be realistic and accept what's happened. The people who liked my joke, or those others I have mentioned, are laughing at the circus surrounding this tragedy, rather than the tragedy itself. Or at least just confronting the tragedy by saying the worst thing possible (though I will have egg on my face if Michael Legge does turn out to have Maddie in his basement).
I had at least one person who unfollowed me on Twitter as a result and actually messaged me to let me know that he was going. Some people don't think you should joke about these subject and they have that right, though to me it seems a bit high-handed to inform someone that you're leaving in that way. I think we should tell jokes, and genuinely believe they are less offensive than the way the newspapers have dealt with this item, and the lies and rumours they have spread about it. Not for a joke or to allow people to release tension, but to sell newspapers. It's good to discuss these things (and with the Maddie case it's been very difficult for anyone to say what they really think for fear of being shouted down or castigated, which is, I think, another reason why a lot of people laugh at jokes about the subject). A couple of people sent me variations of jokes along the lines of "Do you think they could use the technology to do a picture of how she'll look when she's 18?" Which is undeniably sick, but also undeniably a fitting satire of the way the media is treating the case.
The man who unfollowed told me (who I hope has the sense to never read or listen to anything I say again, because the additional jokes in this article will have upset him again) saying "I don't do the whole tabloid hysteria thing at all, but as a parent I can't bear it".
I am not a parent, but I have nephews and nieces and I know other children and even if I didn't I would still understand how unbearable losing someone so young in such a way is.
But the media are praying on that fear and making a kind of pornography out of it. And if she wasn't a pretty blonde girl they would have lost interest a long time ago.
It's a serious blog to come out of such a stupid joke. But I do think it is better to talk about these things and the inappropriate and nasty things we can think and say and the reasons we do it.
