Paula

Paula Yates was an opionated, provacative, sexy but aging woman, hounded to her death by an evil press that doesn't like this kind of person. It's hard to disgree with this verdict. And yet, watching this documentary about her tragically short life, one is also left thinking how capitalism, and celebrity culture, makes metaphorical prostitutes of otherwise honest people. Paula's indepedent living was entirely based on the public appetite for her putting herself out there. Short of finding a new man to look after her (following the suicide of her rock star husband), it's hard to see where the happy ending for her could have been. Paula the person may have craved for release from the press; Paula the person just trying to make a living needed them. This is not to blame her for their cruelty; but it is to wonder, whether in a better world, Paula would still be alive, but also someone the rest of us just didn't need to know about. Sadly, it's hard to conclude that in this respect the world has become a better place over the past 20 years.

An interesting enough documentary about a fascinating, unconventionally, beautiful character. I was a fan of hers during her lifetime, though she didn't have one particular skill set - she dabbled in several things, not always successfully. She had a lot of fans, and that's where this documentary falls down slightly. She was not a victim. Yes, the tabloids did what the tabloids do (and the broadsheets joined in), but she was a popular, admired and envied girl. Some of the footage here does her no favours - her crude, childish double entendres in interviews, especially during the execrable bed interviews on the Big Breakfast, are simply embarrassing and depict her as the airhead the tabloids would have us believe she was. She made a deal with the devil, as anybody with any kind of fame does with the tabloids. Mainly, it's the men in this documentary who come off best - a glaring exception, being the holier than thou, Ian Hislop and Paul Merton on Have I Got News for You who humiliate her in a way that would be unthinkable nowadays, especially for those two self-righteous wokesters.

Robbie Williams speaks sincerely and humbly, The journalist interviewing her on the tapes that form the backbone of the documentary is sympathetic and interesting, Terry Wogan seems to have real chemistry with her, and is genuinely affectionate, and also highly amused by her. Nicky Clark makes a very dignified contribution, and the former Terence Trent D'Arby also speaks well, if slightly eccentrically. Of the women that feature, I honestly don't remember Vanessa Feltz or Grace Dent making such a staunch defence of Paula during her lifetime as they do here, nearly 23 years after her death. The message they seem to want to send is that men, and male journalists, drove Paula to her death whilst the sisterhood tried to rally around her. Dent and Feltz have never been reluctant to stick the knife into celebrities and we know that nobody tears down a woman like another woman. The lady described as a friend of Paula's, who features throughout may well have been a confidante, but seems to me like a dedicated hanger-on. So, a fascinating look at a fascinating and tragic character, and a well made document with plenty of talking points.

The claim is made during this two-part Channel 4 documentary that the late Paula Yates was, at the height of her fame, the most famous woman in Britain after Princess Diana and that, possibly apocryphally, the Princess told her personally she was grateful when usually front-page press stories about Yates afforded her some respite of her own on that score.

From the time she shot to fame as a presenter of the then-new TV channel Channel 4's anarchic pop music show "The Tube", she was rarely out of the public eye, in her time appearing on numerous TV chat shows and fronting other high-profile programmes such as "The Big Breakfast", writing newspaper columns and offbeat books ("Rock Stars In Their Underpants!") marrying a rock star, having affairs with two others and most importantly to her, mothering four children.

Although on-camera she seemed mostly impervious to the slings and arrows of outrage and misfortune, the constant pressure of unrelenting newspaper intrusion and unceasing speculation and criticism of her life-style told perhaps inevitably in the end, leading to alcohol and drug dependencies, the latter of which sadly claimed her life at only 41 years old.

I certainly recall her as the It Girl of that period of music and television. With her pixie-like appearance, provocative behaviour and gobby mouth, she was very different from other TV presenters coming through at the time, being irreverent, flirty and increasingly controversial, her fame hitting its first peak when she married singer Bob Geldof of Boomtown Rats / Live Aid fame and with whom she had three children all with suitably exotic-sounding names.

This documentary made as its centrepiece her final recorded off-camera interview with a long-time journalist friend which proves to be sadly prophetic, as it told of her rise to fame, tangled love life and struggles with celebrity. I don't however agree with this new practice of mocking-up model lookalikes to accompany recorded interviews, which also took place in the recent Marilyn Monroe Tapes documentary. Although supported by interviews with a number of close friends and colleagues, including the now rarely-seen Terence Trent-Darby, it was noticeable that there was no input from any of her family including any of her surviving children (tragically, Peaches one of her daughters, also died of drugs some years later), far less ex-husband Geldof or her best-known TV co-presenters Jools Holland and Chris Evans, none of whom are usually shy in front of a microphone.

The great double tragedy in her life, of course, from which she never really seemed to recover, was the self-inflicted death of her partner INXS singer Michael Hutchence and the almost immediately following revelation that her real father wasn't the cuddly, Wurlitzer-playing religious TV personality Jess Yates but the even-higher profile long-running presenter of "Opportunity Knocks", Hughie Green, despite her mother's initial denials.

Told here in a flashy, sometimes trashy but not altogether unsympathetic way, Yates was tabloid-fodder almost from the minute she stepped into the limelight. While she appeared strong, when you witness the pillorying she took in the papers and especially at the hands of professional TV smart:-alecks like Ian Hislop on "Have I Got News For You", it was impossible not to feel a good degree of sympathy for her.

This then was another cautionary tale about the dangers of living a celebrity lifestyle and one is immediately reminded, watching this ultimately sad story play out to its tragic conclusion, of watching similar shows on the likes of Amy Winehouse and Caroline Flack. Yes, they all courted stardom and all the accoutrements that accompany it, but with no filter or protection from the pressures of that fame, high-profile casualties like these, unnecessarily but inevitably, too often seem to occur.