Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet has received mixed reviews, but not from his mother, who gave it the thumbs-up to reporters after the performance. “A bloody good Hamlet,” she said. Apparently, a parent expressing unequivocal delight in their child’s achievements is not the done thing. The appraisal has been received with a quiet snigger in the press because it contains its own immediate devaluation, and probably says more about Wanda Ventham and her relationship with sonCumberbatch than it does about Hamlet. Hs mum thought he did well. Of course she did.
Is it wrong for the parent of a celebrity to share their delight in public? In some cases, maybe. Such as when Joe Simpson told GQ magazine in 2004 that his daughter Jessica Simpson “never tries to be sexy. She just is sexy. If you put her in a T-shirt or you put her in a bustier, she’s sexy in both. She’s got double Ds! You can’t cover those suckers up!” But then, the thoughts themselves are the troubling thing here, and the public sharing of them is just another layer of bad.
Sometimes, it is the method chosen to express support that feels wrong, or the fact that the parent is choosing to override their offspring’s customary inaccessibility. When NME reviewed Tom Odell’s Long Way Down in 2013, awarding the album 0/10 and predicting Odell would “be all over 2013 like a virulent dose of musical syphilis”, the comments were too much for Odell’s father. He called NME to complain, and his phone call was promptly tweeted by the magazine’s deputy editor. This probably didn’t cheer up Tom Odell, although maybe it stopped him thinking about syphilis and made him wonder instead why the hell his dad told the magazine who he was. (At least my own mother, moved to telephone the Guardian’s sports desk and register her enjoyment of the new women’s football coverage back in 2001, had the good sense to leave a false name and put on a funny voice.)
The tendency is widespread. Jessie Ware has said that her mother defends her against commenters on YouTube, and James Blunt’s mother once emailed Radio 4’s Today programme after hearing a report about the growing number of musicians who had enjoyed a private education. “My son James Blunt, who is hugely appreciated worldwide, receives harsh criticism here [in the UK] and we have, rather sadly, been aware that it is because of his background,” she told the show. Perhaps she felt responsible for having helped to choose his schooling.
Others have just been a bit too vociferous: Harry Styles’s mother, for instance, declaring: “He’ll make a nice boyfriend when he’s ready.” Or Zayn Malik’s mother Trisha incessantly tweeting how proud she was of her son during One Direction’s heyday.
In a similar vein, after Greg Rutherford became long jump world champion on Tuesday, his mother Tracy tweeted: “YEEESSSSS 8.41M get in my son.”
I love Mrs Rutherford’s tweet. It is a pure punch in the air. Most of all I love her “get in my son” because he is her son. But is there a line that a parent shouldn’t cross? What does Mrs Rutherford think?
“As Greg’s parents we wanted to support and encourage him as much as we could, and still do,” she says. “It doesn’t matter who or how old your child is, I am a very loud and animated mother, much to Greg’s embarrassment on occasions. Even now when we go to watch him, he politely asks me to behave. I will always be a bit loud and I dare any parent to say different.”
Having heard my own voice on the video of my daughter’s school sports day, I think I’ll keep quiet on this one.
