Caroline Flack, #BeKind and an apology to Victoria Beckham

Like many people, last night I was moved, horrified and really upset by the Channel 4 documentary Caroline Flack: Her Life And Death.

I’d seen her on The X-Factor and Love Island and been aware of her romantic trials and tribulations through the media (whether I wanted to or not) for years and like everyone else, was shocked when she died last year.

I expected the documentary to be a tough watch, and it was. Her brave mother and twin sister along with close friends talked movingly about her life and her death and her struggles with her mental health since she was young.

The role that the media had to play in these was also made very clear with several brutal examples of people (including a couple of national treasures) making light of her setbacks in ways that must have seemed cute and funny to everyone at the time. Apart from Caroline Flack.

It was obvious from what her loved ones said that she didn’t have the thick skin we assume our celebrities must have. Every mean joke, every hate tweet, it all wounded her deeply. And being a young woman in the media spotlight meant that she got a lot of it.

An example that went round on Twitter during the programme was this ‘voodoo doll’ of her that was published in One Direction And Friends magazine while she was commmiting the ‘crime’ of going out with Harry Styles. It’s appalling isn’t it?

But, and be honest, if you’d seen it back in the day (especially if you were a teenage Harry Styles fan) would you have thought that? Or would you have thought it was funny and harmless? Because she was just a celeb, right?

That’s the attitude that still really needs to shift in our world. It was highlighted too in the Britney Spears documentary earlier this year, and the way she was treated by basically everybody from her youngest days through her own mental health battles and even today.

We can look back on how things were done in the dim and distant 90s and 00s and say that it was a different time, but in the last fortnight we’ve seen how far we haven’t come. Yes, I’m talking about Meghan.

The prolonged hate campaign against her by the British media — and Piers Morgan in particular — shows that lessons haven’t been learned. Bear baiting is still a sport that we love to play here in the UK, we’ve just moved on from bears to famous women.

And we’re all culpable. You don’t think you are? Maybe it wasn’t Caroline Flack, or Meghan Markle. Maybe it was Anne Widdecombe, or Theresa May or maybe it’s Priti Patel or Cressida Dick. Can you really say you’ve never tweeted — or said — something about them that you’d be uncomfortable saying to their face?

For me, it’s Victoria Beckham.

Back in 2002 I fulfilled my destiny (or so I thought) by becoming a football journalist, working on two websites that now only exist in the realms of the Wayback Machine. It was amazing.

I particularly enjoyed writing features because it gave me the chance to show off a bit and to be creative and (try to be) funny. One that introduced in 2003 was called BeckhamWatch.

We’d launched it for fairly prosaic reasons. David Beckham was the biggest footballer on the planet and he’d just left Manchester United for Real Madrid. Our website was about the Premier League and we’d lost a major source of traffic so we needed to keep writing about him, hence a weekly column.

Writing straight reports on his activity on and off the pitch in Spain was a bit dull, so I quite quickly shifted the tone to a slightly more satirical one, making fun of the breathless reporting that Beckham received at that point in his fame — and also drawing his wife into it as fair game.

As well as a journalist, I was a Manchester United fan, so at this time it’s worth remembering that Victoria Beckham was basically the Yoko Ono of Old Trafford. By which I mean that she was blamed for two men falling out, in this case Beckham and Sir Alex Ferguson, rather than Lennon and McCartney.

Thankfully we’ve moved on and there’s no example whatsoever in the media right now of a woman being blamed for the deterioration of the relationship between two high profile men…

It was stupid and puerile and misogynistic in the 00s just like it was in the 70s. But I ran with it anyway, because it was funny and, like I said, I was a Man United fan, so on some barely veiled level I did actually blame her for him leaving. Which was pathetic.

Sadly (or perhaps not), the BeckhamWatch columns have been lost to the mists of digital time. But I remember them.

I don’t think they ever reached the levels of vitriol we’ve seen towards the Duchess of Sussex on breakfast TV recently, or the Caroline Flack voodoo doll. I’d like to think that, because I’m a Good Person, I tempered my jibes at her with good-natured tone, because I didn’t actually hate her.

But still…

If I’d thought of Victoria actually reading the ‘hilarious’ things I wrote about her, would I have been comfortable with that? Would I have been proud of it?

I did get told once (I was never sure how true this was) that these columns were popular in the Old Trafford dressing room at the time. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Maybe they enjoyed the banter (sigh), maybe they laughed at my ‘good-natured’ Posh Spice digs, I guess I’ll never know.

And then there’s Rebecca Loos. I don’t even want to think about how I covered that whole story. I’d imagine it was ‘carefully’ for legal reasons, but as with ‘other women’ like Monica Lewinsky, she wasn’t treated kindly by anyone at the time, probably including me.

So while there’s even less chance of Victoria Beckham or Rebecca Loos reading this than there was of them reading BeckhamWatch, I want to say that I’m sorry. Really sorry. You didn’t deserve any of it, no-one does.

I should have known better and done better back then. It’s so easy, especially in a career like journalism, or a forum like social media, to forget that your attempt to be funny can be seen by that person, it’s so easy to disassociate yourself from them because they’re on TV and you’re not.

Of course I don’t want to paint myself as some bitter misogynist. As a football writer the main target of my sarcasm was nearly always men (especially in the 00s when women’s football was still being utterly ignored) and I definitely wrote mean things about men a lot more than women.

This was certainly the case when BeckhamWatch turned into The Three Amigos after Michael Owen and Jonathan Woodgate followed Beckham to Madrid.

Poor perenially-injured Woodgate had his own little bit of the column called WoodyWatch where I ‘humorously’ wrote about his latest injury woes or his ill-fated debut where he scored an own goal and got sent off.

At a time when he was adapting to a foreign culture and trying desperately to prove his worth, I can’t imagine that if he ever saw The Three Amigos, he’d have found it very funny. I know I certainly wouldn’t in his position.

A few years ago my youngest son was obsessed with watching The Chase. I thought it would be amazing for him to watch it and see me on there so I applied to be a contestent.

However, when they contacted me about auditioning, I’d already thought better of it. Going on something like The Chase means opening yourself up to ridicule and hatred on social media and the traditional media if enough people tweet mean things about you.

I knew for a fact that I wasn’t ok with that. I don’t have that kind of thick skin and just one mean tweet would have destroyed me, never mind of social media pile-on. So I turned down the offer. I don’t want to be famous, it sounds horrible.

That’s the experience that Caroline Flack lived through every day on a much bigger scale and it ultimately destroyed her and left a hole in the lives of all the people who loved her.

We can all do better. #BeKind is just a hashtag and a t-shirt sentiment that is all too easily forgotten when a new pariah is dragged in front of us for our judgement.

But it’s also the simplest way to live. Be kind, or live with regrets thinking about what the impact of your words could have been.