I had forgotten how brilliant Paula Yates was. I had forgotten, if I’m honest, all about Paula Yates – at least on a day-to-day basis, despite her being an almost constant presence on the television screen and in the tabloids throughout my youth. As the new two-part documentary Paula points out, in her 1980s and 90s heyday she was second only to Diana, Princess of Wales in the world of UK celebrity. “I love it when you are on the front page of the paper,” Diana once told her. “It means I’ve got the day off.”
At first the idea of a documentary about Yates seems somewhere between pointless and exploitative. She was media fodder then – do we have to make her media fodder again now? The documentary is part of Channel 4’s 40th anniversary output, but the peg on which it is hung – the airing of never-before-heard interviews she gave in the two years before she died with the (now) former editor of the Sunday Express and OK! magazine, Martin Townsend – means a slightly grubby pall is cast over proceedings as they begin.
What follows, however, is largely a glorious celebration of her overflowing talent. The first instalment traces her rise from rock journalist and columnist to television star, as the inaugural presenter with Jools Holland of The Tube, which started in 1982; then becoming Bob Geldof’s girlfriend and wife, bearing three children; then infamously leaving Geldof for INXS frontman Michael Hutchence. The hour ends with the looming death of Hutchence – largely considered to be the beginning of Yates’s decline, which (aggravated by tabloid revelations about her biological father) would end in her own death a few years later from an accidental drug overdose.
But first – the talent. The presence. The charisma. The natural flirt and the fierce wit, joyfully playing against each other, with the constant message to all watching that a woman could be both at the same time, and that neither need compromise the other. She swung with ease between the two, mesmerising the lucky interviewee until he or she was ready to answer anything. I was too young to appreciate her fully then, though, like most viewers, I found her as hypnotic as her guests did. But now it is possible to see not just what a force she was, but how rare. There had, as the programme notes several times, been no one like Yates before.
What is more astonishing is that there has been no one like her since. After the implicit insistence that a woman could be two (or even more!) things at once, the most arresting aspect of the contemporary footage of her – as a presenter, as an interviewer or (on Wogan, and – more bizarrely but even more perfectly 80s-ly – with Jackie Collins) as an interviewee is her confidence. Her ability and willingness to speak her mind – not rudely, not domineeringly, but clearly as if she had a perfect right to do so – is conspicuous by its absence on our screens today. Yates opened the way but there has been no enduring progress and if anything we now seem to be in an increasingly regressive era.
It is true that Paula (the documentary) verges on the hagiographic, with its glossing over of who had what affairs and when relationships overlapped with each other, and quite how chaotic things were at home. It offers a simplified narrative and presents tabloid pressures as the single Big Bad affecting a complicated person living a rollercoaster of a life. “I can’t imagine me going out with anyone who couldn’t fill a stadium,” Yates says to Townsend.
That said, there can be no question that the media pursuit that cast her as the scarlet woman (and later “Suicide Blonde” as the advance obituary accidentally sent to her by a redtop after Hutchence’s death was headlined) and Geldof as “Saint Bob” was intolerable. The poisonous standards of the time are most clearly seen in the reporting of her affair with Terence Trent d’Arby (a preternaturally calm and gracious interviewee in the first hour): “Bob’s Paula Caught with Black Star,” screamed one headline. Such overtly racist headlines may be a thing of the past but, as we have seen in films about more recent high-profile women such as Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears and Pamela Anderson, a similar purge of misogyny seems to be taking a lot longer. Townsend himself is asked about his role as a journalist and editor in that era. “I was doing my job … reporting on a story of public interest. I don’t regret anything. I just did what I did at the time for the right reasons,” he says, before adding grudgingly, “I can see it would be too much for someone and that’s not a nice feeling really.” On we go.
• Paula aired on Channel 4 and is now on All 4.
