This week, the makers of Netflix’s The Crown admitted that Claire Foy had been paid less for her portrayal of the Queen than Matt Smith had been for his go as Prince Philip. This is dismal news for a number of reasons, of course, but The Crown’s showrunners would be well-advised to cut as many costs as possible moving forward, because by the time they get to depicting 2003 they’ll need every penny they’ve got for Kate Middleton’s CGI hands.
“Why are Kate’s fingers all the SAME length?” bellowed the front page of Monday’s Daily Mail, with the cute mixture of confusion and fury more routinely reserved for contentious subjects such as human beings generally trying to get on with their lives.
Inside, two full pages (rather than this publication’s dignified one full page) were dedicated to the hot topic. Coverage included the dramatic revelation that bodily development begins in the mother’s womb, photographs of the Queen and Prince Philip holding up their own hands, placed on facing pages so that it looked a bit like they were waving at each other, and an impressive volume of cobblers pertaining to palmistry. This involved Johnny Fincham, who you’ll recognise as being the author of Palmistry: From Apprentice to Pro in 24 Hours, popping up with the not-remotely-alarming claim that Kate’s middle finger should be 2cm longer – which is quite a lot longer, really – than its neighbours.
The Mail website actually ran a similar article six days earlier, which led to pickup the next day from the Sun and Mirror – with the latter reporting the finger-related news in more sombre fashion, noting that Kate’s fingers “are almost all the same length – and some people think that’s unusual”. Less sweeping, certainly, than the Mail’s “Why are Kate’s fingers all the SAME length?”. But before we move on to the Mail’s demand for an explanation (how was this allowed to happen?), Lost in Showbiz must briefly address the central conceit here: that Kate’s fingers are indeed all the same length.
Before the concept of identically lengthed digits sends the nation’s royalists into a mad scramble, some bad news. The Mail’s smoking gun was a recent photo of the duchess holding a black purse, with a handy box drawn around Kate’s hand to show readers how freakishly uniform those fingers really are. Sadly, and this may well have been a coded cry for help by someone on the paper’s art desk, in drawing a straight line across Kate’s fingertips the Mail actually showcased how “all” of Kate’s fingers are obviously not the same length, and that, in fact, they are all very clearly different lengths.
In the 2000s, Heat magazine pioneered the circle of shame as a way of highlighting egregious celeb crimes such as perspiration, but in 2018 there’s a new accusatory simulacrum in town, and it’s the rhombus of wrongness. Sure, rhombus obsessives may wish to point out that all the sides of the Mail’s misinformed quadrilateral weren’t actually equal, but we’re through the looking glass now. Equality is, apparently, subjective; not an absolute, but an optical illusion to be debated. Intriguing.
Whether or not these hand shenanigans fall under the bracket of bodyshaming is a tricky issue as we are in uncharted waters, but with liberal killjoys having taken all the fun out of upskirt photos, perhaps fingers will become the last refuge of the paparazzi. Nature finds a way. And for photographers, a pivot to finger-based news is absolutely perfect.
Historically, celebrities have frequently held up magazines and newspapers to hide their faces – but what if the face is no longer the target? To hide their fingers, A-listers would need to hold magazines backwards, and then you’re into thumb territory. Equally, the classic manoeuvre of holding out a palm to obscure a pap shot will now, ironically, give photographers exactly what they’re after. And photographers know that young, smartphone-addicted celebrities, dismayed as we all are by slow advances in the stylishness of touchscreen-compatible gloves, will do anything they can to avoid covering their fingertips. Maybe famous people will stop using smartphones altogether, inspiring a generation to ditch mobile devices, consume less news and therefore bring about the end of journalism. Perhaps celebrities will wear gloves and carry sausages around. Only time will tell.
Back in the present, let’s celebrate this week’s brave and interesting experiment in redefining the parameters of news reporting. It goes without saying that if all the Duchess of Cambridge’s fingers were indeed identical that would be absolutely incredible and definitely worth two pages in any newspaper (caveat: this would need to include thumbs), but the concept of being able to make a statement while providing clear photographic proof to the contrary opens many journalistic doors. Perhaps we should expect, for instance, stories such as “Why has Jeremy Corbyn’s head fallen RIGHT off?” next to an annotated picture of Jeremy Corbyn’s head not having fallen off, or “Finally Theresa May takes action on Grenfell” next to literally any photograph of Theresa May.
Sure, there’s that old problem of people bellowing “fake news”, but perhaps this is the perfect loophole? How can anyone quibble with your statement when you have included contrary evidence – a sort of pre-emptive apology – in the article itself? If nothing else, this could become a bold test of libel law: it might seem unwise to publish a false claim even if it comes with an instant retraction, but what does it really mean if one publishes a thing, but also the opposite of that thing, at the same time? Does it mean neither, in fact, exists? Does this create some sort of journalistic vortex?
Did Cher get Stephen Hawking to turn back time?
As well as displaying above-average competence vis-a-vis the whole space and time business, Stephen Hawking was very good at being famous and seemed to have a lot of fun with it. The last two days have seen social media flooded with photos of Hawking with the likes of Harry Styles, Barack Obama, the cast of The Big Bang Theory and Peter Stringfellow, but the week’s most intriguing celebrity tribute comes from Cher.
“Will Remember Our luncheon Forever,” she wrote on Twitter. “It was amazing.” She followed this with a praise-hands emoji: understandable in the circumstances. But then comes the revelation that Hawking told the singer over lunch: “Cher, when time travel is perfected, history will [be] obsolete.”
How did the topic come up? There’s only one conclusion to draw from all this: that Cher and Hawking held a lunchtime summit to discuss the real-life ramifications of If I Could Turn Back Time, the triumphant 1989 balladbanger in which Cher blended her quest for love with concepts of time travel and, with the line “If I could reach the stars I’d give ’em all to you”, the redistribution of celestial objects.
One only hopes that Hawking’s comment didn’t put Cher off any hopes of bringing the song to life: time travel’s not ideal because if humanity has ever needed Cher, it’s right now in 2018, but a performance of Believe in outer space would be absolutely ideal.
