Emma Raducanu: a tall poppy torn down by the tabloids

The Daily Mail’s website carried an article by Mike Colman (writing for The Daily Mail Australia) last week which led with the headline “Emma Raducanu’s OUTRAGEOUS Generation Z reaction to getting blasted out of Wimbledon by a nobody proves she’s fine with losing”. This being The Daily Mail, even that THICK culture war cudgel of a headline didn’t do enough of a job. They had to append an extra SLUR lest a reader missed their grievance: “Britain’s golden girl gets a free ride no Aussie star would be treated to”.

It was the worst kind of tabloid commentary as the Mail’s antipodean attack dog dripped with snark. “So what if you bowed out with barely a whimper”, asked Colman, “and walked off centre court smiling and waving in your $60,000 worth of Tiffany and Co-sponsored jewellery?”

It was grubby on so many levels (Caroline Garcia’s friends and family won’t consider her “a nobody”) but perhaps apt that it was written by an Australian for a British redtop given it’s also a fine example of what’s known as “tall poppy syndrome”. The phrase is of Australian origin, as the OED notes, first used in 1980 for The Canberra Times. The term has since developed two distinct senses, one of which means to “bring down to size” those talentless celebrities who suddenly get too big for their porcelain smiles. Then there is a second meaning, even more pernicious, which means destroying somebody who you previously lauded. It speaks to the capricious nature of our media and especially our tabloids.

“Tall poppy syndrome” is very different, then, to straight criticism or even a good old-fashioned toxic rant. It involves a sudden volte-face and rank hypocrisy as journalists seek to destroy somebody whose fame they previously exploited. It is also a psychopathology particularly prevalent in Britain where tabloids (and, by extension, their readers) seem to find pleasure in destroying the very people they once elevated. It’s certainly very on-brand for The Mail which had previously pumped up the hysteria around Raducanu.

“Overnight sensation Emma Raducanu is an earthquake in tennis… she’s an incredible competitor and looks here to STAY after contunuing [sic] her dream Wimbledon run”

“Liam Gallagher will be watching the `Les Dennis´ for `celestial´ Emma Raducanu”

“Emma Raducanu has Andy Murray’s steel and the smile of an angel… the Bromley teenager belongs on the game’s biggest stage”

“British tennis is hoping to cash in on the EMMA EFFECT as teenage star Raducanu storms into the US Open semi-finals to ‘show it’s possible’ for the new generation of stars”

Even extensive quotation doesn’t do justice to the number of journalists risking rupture from all the heavy lifting they did on behalf of Raducanu (Boris Becker compared her, at one point, to Muhammad Ali). The paper has fawned over Raducanu since her initial success in Wimbledon, through the Piers Morgan spat when he questioned her panic attack, and to her eventually winning the US Open. Yet now that Raducanu has dared to lose in the first week of Wimbledon they publish a piece of chronic hackery thick with culture war rhetoric and not much else.

So why does this happen so often? Is it something peculiar about Britain that we accept this from our press?

The explanation, perhaps, is found in the nature of our tabloids. The problem is not so much the constant urge to destroy as much as the unhealthy need to elevate in the first place. Why must they make ridiculous claims about every British success? Is it perhaps a symptom of that exceptionalism to which The Daily Mail is no stranger? It’s like they’re constantly seeking some mythic greatness. Individual achievements are always overstated, and, in the moment of victory, any British success must be THE BEST if not more: world-beating, a first in human history, the very apotheosis of human civilisation.

Emma Raducanu is a huge talent. She won the US Open, which was no mean achievement, after a strong showing at Wimbledon, but it was hardly going to be the start of her reign as the new all-conquering world champion. The tennis world was suffering from the first spasm of Covid-19. The field was depleted and her subsequent career coincided with a return to pre-pandemic norms. She is what she is: a young, extraordinarily gifted player still learning her game and suffering periods of good and bad form. If she didn’t seem upset at losing, perhaps that’s because she understands her game better than those that would write epic poems about her or reduce her to some sniffling conceit of liberal “wokery”.

Raducanu is hardly the only victim of this media game. We have seen it too with the sad case of Captain Tom. Is it much of a surprise that the Charity Commission has now opened a statutory enquiry into the handling of the money amassed by his noble fundraising effort? Even as his actions were laudable, there was always something exploitative about the cult surrounding Captain Tom. It was a hysteria which The Mail, of course, was happy to push out.

“’That’s amazing from my super prince!’ Captain Tom is overwhelmed as Prince William and Kate Middleton send him message”

“Holly Willoughby pays tribute to WWII vet Colonel Tom Moore with a stunning poppy-patterned dress as he raises £30 million for the NHS on his 100th birthday”

Makes you proud to be British:’ Duchess of Cornwall wishes ‘that wonderful man’ Colonel Tom Moore a ‘very happy’ 100th birthday”

“Captain Tom’s ‘forgotten war’: £32m NHS fundraising hero who fought on the front lines in Burma in WWII says conscription did him ‘no harm’ and shares bittersweet VE Day memories”

None of this is meant to demean his achievements but losing a sense of proportion lies at the root of “tall poppy syndrome”. Captain Tom was one of the many hundreds of thousands of men and women who served during the Second World War. He then became a contestant on Blankety Blank, memorable because he’d maintained that look of the former soldier that some former soldiers cultivate. He then, aged 100, walked the length of his garden 100 times to raise money for the NHS charities. The way he looked, acted, spoke, and behaved made him uniquely a cypher for bigger cultural movements as his message about the NHS shifted as the commemoration of VE Day approached. His modern-day “heroism” blurred with various kinds of heroism from the Second World War, in that way that tabloids are always happy to exploit.

It is a truism that the more tabloid the paper, the greater the fictions they push out to their readers. In her now-notorious interview with Martin Bashir for the BBC’s Panorama, Princess Diana reflected on her life in the media spotlight. “I seemed to be on the front of a newspaper every single day, which is an isolating experience,” she said, “and the higher the media put you, place you, is the bigger the drop.” The problem she identified was that her marriage was “a fairy story that everybody wanted to work.”

Fairy tales take no account of human nature, which is more correctly the subject of proper journalism. The fairy tale of the young woman conquering the world of tennis was never sustainable, let down by the fact the game is dominated by bigger and more experienced players. The fairy tale of Captain Tom, the centurion elevated to a knighthood, is undermined by the reality of an NHS that needed a 100-year-old veteran to perform stunts to raise money (also conveniently distracting from government mismanagement in the early days of the pandemic). The fairy tale of Diana belied the reality of a sham marriage and the squalid perversion of fame tragically exposed in a Paris underpass.

These realities were not unknowable back then, but the mistake was choosing to ignore reality for momentary illusions. Great nations (and, make no mistake, Britain can claim to be exactly that) should not have to labour their greatness. A properly successful sporting nation should not turn a tennis victory into a semi-religious moment, nor a loss into a thought crime. A strong nation should not be taught the mediocre myth that, like James Bond, “nobody does it better”. On the evidence of The Daily Mail, the only thing they do “do better” is bully a nineteen-year-old.