Paparazzi

Jeremy Clarkson is quickly sliding down The Cool Wall. The Top Gear host’s epic whinge about a bit of attention from the paparazzi last night certainly falls into the “Way Beyond Seriously Uncool” category.

These days, you can’t be a half-baked star in a reasonably priced bar without having at least three photographers on your tail. So Jeremy Clarkson, who happens to be a walking gold mine of controversial actions and statements, really needs to get over the whole privacy thing. It isn’t going to happen.

Clarkson has made a career out of being unapologetically “in your face”. The man scoffs at political correctness and he sure as hell isn’t polite.

Continue reading "Nothing but a half-baked star in a reasonably priced bar" »

If Wills and Kate want privacy, they should holiday in Tasmania like Princess Mary does, where law reform has blurred the lines between public and private.

Woman’s Day have published the controversial shots of Kate’s baby bump, taken on a beach in Mustique. Kate and Wills were at first outraged last year by a long lenses paparazzi who shot into their secluded villa in Southern France, capturing Kate topless.

As pointed out by the editor of Woman’s Day, Fiona Connolly, who reportedly paid $150,000 for the photos, Kate was on a public beach, albeit one that did cost $30,000 a week and bills itself as ‘the world’s finest private island retreat’.

Continue reading "Where should a privacy-loving Princess go? Tassie" »

At about the same time last week that news broke a French magazine was about to publish some topless photos of the Duchess of Cambridge an American actress of the rising-star variety “accidentally” Tweeted a naked picture of herself.

It probably says a lot about how big a gulf the Atlantic Ocean really is. While the immediate and unanimous reaction to the Kate pictures has been condemnation and disgust that a private holiday with her husband was infiltrated and exploited in such a manner, across the ditch Alison Pill and her boyfriend both laughed off her self-inflicted breach of privacy.

The biggest difference between the two cases, of course, is that the Duchess quite reasonably thought she was alone with her husband, unaware that more than a kilometre away a grub with a giant telephoto lens was crashing their private party.

Continue reading "Is privacy dead? For Kate the answer is sadly yes" »