Not once in recent weeks did I open my laptop but someone had sent me another of those sometimes not-so-funny images on the ‘Iris Robinson Affair’ – most of them in some way based on the theme of the movie The Graduate.

Many of them featured the young Dustin Hoffman in bed with the original ‘Mrs Robinson’ (Anne Bancroft). Indeed, I once went to see a stage performance of that story of a brief tryst between a very young man and an older woman . . . with Jerry Hall doing a more than adequate performance in the role made famous by Bancroft.

There have been other cruder computer images of the unfortunate Robinson affair . . . I say unfortunate because, in this case, a woman is being portrayed on the basis of what we must assume to be the worst moments of her life, and the price has been huge and terrible.
 

This sometimes happens, for instance, in the case of court coverage. Someone with a character which can be pretty much without blemish, or unremarkable, is portrayed solely in newspapers and on radio, on the basis of an incident where they were seen at their absolute worst.
It’s an impossible situation, of course, for people in the media . . . their job is to gather material for publication and they can hardly be expected to put in a few paragraphs pointing out that this was out of character for the person, or that the person had done many good things in their life.

It was one of the reasons why I probably agonised more than most journalists when someone came to me with a plea to keep something out of the newspapers. All the agonising wasn’t worth a damn, of course, but I sometimes must admit that I tried to keep the heading a little more ‘sober’ than it might otherwise have been.

Those are among the reasons why I let the Iris Robinson controversy run for weeks before comment . . . there is a great tragedy in anyone having the worst episode in their life in the public glare. Well, just think of your worst moment . . . and then imagine it published on a wide scale.

To some extent the same can be said of Tiger Woods. What a damned fool he looked in recent weeks in his serial unfaithfulness. As a result, he has become something of an ‘unperson’ in the best traditions of George Orwell’s 1984 . . . meanwhile, the television commentators struggle in the opening of the 2010 season US golf coverage to deal with the fact that we are staring at ‘Hamlet without the prince’.

Based on ‘the worst moments concept’, I can also muster up some sympathy for him. He has lived his life in a media ‘glass bowl’ for years, taken endless adulation . . . and limitless money. It may all have been ‘surface’ and meaningless, but now when he goes out the front door and long before he gets to the relatively controlled environment of a golf tournament, he has to confront the satellite television transmission vans.

The satellite dishes stretch for as far as the eye can see, paparazzi with long lenses hang about in all directions staking-out the neighbourhood, and the concept of a private life, if it ever arose for him, has ceased to exist.

Meanwhile, the advertising pages of the major golf magazines have suddenly become ‘a Tiger free zone’ in a conspiracy of silence imposed by major advertisers withdrawing their support. Among them are finance institutions who have quickly forgotten the embarrassment of the taxpayer having to rescue them. You get a kind of ghostly feeling leafing through the magazines as they fall back on Phil Mickelson, Ernie Els, and even the rather colourful John Daly.

As I said, I have a certain sympathy for both Iris Robinson and Tiger Woods – just as I would have for anyone who was now being ‘judged’ on the worst moments of their lives.

Only the saints amongst us are free of moments we would prefer were at least cloaked in secrecy. One of the wisest men I met over many years in journalism was the late Garda Superintendent Gerry Colleran and I always he thought he put very well the lives of ordinary people who – on occasion – were involved in the most extraordinary things.
Gerry Colleran, who died much too young, had huge experience on any number of major investigations. He always said that he could not think of a single person who could take the full glare of an investigation as carried out by a major team dealing with something such as a murder.

He recalled that, when a group of maybe 40 Gardaí and detectives began looking at any killing, the initial most logical place to start the investigation was amongst the family, relations and friends of the person who had been murdered. This was because it was relatively rare that a murderer and victim did not know each other – unless the crime was some kind of mindless drink-fuelled incident in which a murder was the end result of a row or dispute.

He said the most extraordinary things could be thrown up by an investigation – things long hidden and almost forgotten in a family background, extramarital affairs that had never come to light, problems with drink or drugs, and that very often their starting point in questioning had to be that they had no interest in an affair from years previously, their sole interest now was in the murder investigation.

Of course, something that would not have existed in the era in which he was investigating, would be the entire business of text messaging, which has cropped up so much in recent trials.

God, but they read as stupid and puerile in the light of the passage of time. Now maybe a text saying ‘night, sleep well babes, love Jack X’ may sound full of meaning and deep in the light of the moment, but in the cold light of day in the newspapers months later . . . you’d die from embarrassment.

It’s all a long way from ‘how do I love thee? . . . let me count the ways,’ as written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the 1800s.
Better settle for playing strictly at home!