I must remain a fascinating enigma to myself
October 20, 2024 11:00 am
In an interview with The Times this week, I was pleased to read that Vanessa Feltz happily admits to being an attention-seeker: “Feltz is tenacious and drawn moth-like to the spotlight even as it occasionally blinds her. When her girls were younger and they used to shop at Marks & Spencer, there was a button on the wall that said ‘press for attention’. ‘The girls always used to say, ‘Go on Mummy, press for attention. You know you love it,’ ” she says, laughing.
I found this very refreshing as I too am an attention-seeker and feel that we who add to the gaiety of nations should stand up and be counted – preferably while wearing a big hat and yelling “Coo-eee – over here!”
Unlike myself, Ms Feltz believes that she turned out this way due to growing up in a “cacophonous, emphatic” household where one had to be noisy in order to get noticed and opinions on her outfits, lipstick and boyfriends were often shared.
“The constant commentary enforced the belief that I was visible, alive and a host of people cared passionately about what I was doing,” she writes in her memoir.
I was an only child from a loving home which was exactly the opposite; a stoic, working-class household which, in common with the English upper classes until recently, believed that a reasonable, decent human being should only appear in a newspaper three times in their life; on being born, marrying and dying.
(The late Diana, Princess of Wales changed all that, and now the young posh have totally colonised both show business and the media; throw a stick in SW3 now and you’ll hit more podcasters than Sloane Rangers.)
I didn’t fancy that one little bit; I wanted to be in the newspapers as much as possible – writing for them, yes, but also being praised and vilified in them. I wasn’t fussy how I made my splash, so long as it made a lot of people look.
When I came to public attention in my teens and twenties as a journalist, my parents were baffled but pleased for me. That stopped when I wrote an eye-wateringly dirty sex and shopping novel and took to the subsequent furore around it like a particularly puffed-up duck to water. My mother in particular was mortified.
“Don’t read it, please, Mum!” I warned her on the phone, “and I’ll pay for you and Dad to go on a lovely holiday to Sitges. You like it there.”
“What’s to stop me reading it and keeping quiet and still taking the holiday?” she queried mulishly.
“Because you won’t be able to look me in the eye,” I answered.
Sure enough, next time I went back to Bristol I was barely through the door before she wailed “O, HOW COULD YOU? Now all the neighbours will think you learned about all that mucky stuff from me and your dad!”
There was worse to come. For a brief period I was a household name, and my mother was horrified when I was the answer to a question on Terry Wogan’s popular radio show. (“Never do that to me again – I felt my heart stop!”) But within weeks my name was cropping up in soap operas (Brookside) and on comedy shows (Alas Smith And Jones) and I was all over the tabloids, broadsheets and glossy magazines talking about sex as if I’d invented it.
I finally had to admit that I probably wasn’t a bookish provincial virgin any more when on saying routinely “I’m quite shy” a friend picked me up with “No. You were standing on a table in a Soho bar singing ‘Hey, Big Spender’ while drinking champagne from the bottle. Shy people don’t do that.”
The fuss was just dying down when in my mid-thirties I abandoned my second family and ran off with a girl 10 years younger than me; so thorough was my addiction to attention by now that when I saw the Daily Mail pap asleep in the car outside her flat, I knocked on the window so he could *surprise* us properly.
When I left her after six months for her younger brother, and this also showed up on the front page of the Daily Mail – IS JULIE BURCHILL THE WORST MOTHER IN BRITAIN? – my parents had had enough and didn’t speak to me for a year. Luckily we made up before they died – and though I was sincerely sad, I couldn’t turn down the chance of getting a BBC documentary and half a dozen newspaper columns from their passing.
I like to think that I’ve calmed down now, at 65 – but when I attracted the attention of the police earlier this year for being a drunken nuisance, I wasn’t half as embarrassed as I probably should have been.
Why do I do it? I think it’s because I like to make people laugh, and shocking them is often very near to that, if one doesn’t mind whether people laugh with one or at one – it’s all giggles.
We’re meant to swallow the old saw that attention-seeking types feel “hollow inside” – but I certainly don’t. Or that they have no talent – but I certainly do. So I must remain a fascinating enigma to myself – the person whose attention I have always sought most of all.
As my hero Clough Williams-Ellis said of his masterpiece Portmeirion, “I would rather be vulgar than boring – especially to myself.” If everyone was like me, yes, the world would be an awful place. But if none were like me, I can’t help thinking it might be the tiniest bit dreary.
