Overexposure by Hugo Rifkind

Author:Hugo Rifkind
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2007-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

I’m meant to be going to some party in Clapham with Lucy tonight, so I call her from downstairs to see if she fancies bunking off a bit early. Initially, she doesn’t. In fact, she’s shocked at the thought. It’s one of my favourite things about her, this wide-eyed marriage of a chirpy tart who’s up for anything and a prim little girl who does everything by the book. I tell her this, and it pleases her so much that she agrees to pretend to feel ill, and meet me in the Whittington in five minutes.

The barman looks like Tosh from The Bill, that podgy moustachioed bloke who died, or got written out, or got stuck behind a Sun Hill desk a few years ago.

‘Whisky, mate,’ I say to him as soon as I arrive, and then knock it back fast and order a pint.

I buy some fags and wander over to a corner booth, snatching Tosh’s copy of the Evening Standard off the bar. It’s a mistake. Honestly, you’d think there was nothing else happening in the world. You’d think that there weren’t bombs pitting the Middle East, and diseases prickling out of Africa. You’d think that Fingers was the only movie in town.

The latest thing is for politicians to chip in, either slyly professing admiration for the thief, or criticising each other for failing to condemn him. Take Ken Livingstone. Late last week, he did an interview in JockySlut or Dazed or Sleazenation or some other such worthy theatre of debate in which he said that the robberies had been great for London’s profile in the world, were thus great for tourism and were thus great for London. Or take Boris Johnson who wrote, quite unequivocally, in the Sunday Telegraph, that Fingers was a true Boy’s Own hero and that he (Boris) was quite insanely jealous of him.

Today, such is the way these things work, is the turn of the worthies. This is why Ruth Kelly was on BBC Breakfast this morning, doing such a good impression of outrage. This is why Norman Tebbit (whose mortal slumber, if the picture by-line is anything to go by, has been deliberately interrupted) popped up in The Times to have a crack at the ‘immoralities’ of New Labour. This is why the main front-page headline of the Standard – a real, reputable newspaper – is ‘WIDDERS WADES IN’.

I’ll tell you what’s odd, though. The papers are full of this stuff, but none of it is actually about Fingers. It’s all about the hubbub surrounding Fingers. In documenting the hubbub, all this is (as the Guardian’s Marina Hyde rather wittily pointed out about herself this morning) in itself contributing to it, so the spiral goes on and on. Nobody is writing about the actual story. Nobody appears to be even trying to track down who this guy is any more. Or if they are they’re rubbish at it. They haven’t even done as well as me. There’s no mention of collectors, no mention of Japan, nothing.

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