A very human freak show

A freak show. That probably best describes the public perception of Neil and Christine Hamilton. He was a government minister, a person of consequence. She was his better half, his inspiration, his helpmeet.

Then the wheels came off. The details are fuzzy now. All that lodges in the mind is brown envelopes and the Hamiltons swilling fine wines at the Ritz in Paris. A pother of indignation. Political ignominy.

If the Hamiltons had made themselves scarce in 1997, when he lost his seat at Westminster, people would not remember even that much about them. But, notoriously, they did not make themselves scarce.

They fought for their reputations, giving courts and newspapers alike a chance to give them another pasting. More quixotically still, they basked in the very limelight that had exposed them.

Their faces became part of the furniture of celebrity television. They wrote books, appeared on quiz shows. In their latest stunt, they have posed in the nude, to general derision.

The poses were quite tasteful, certainly by the standards of the bums-and-tits newspapers who have harried the Hamiltons so relentlessly.

But that was not the point. Neil and Christine had prostituted themselves again. That was what right-minded people thought.

At the time, posing in the nude looked like just another step on the road of humiliation - a path that would end only when the Hamiltons realised that their best chance of regaining their sanity and self-respect was to take a vow of silence. Now, having watched When Louis Met The Hamiltons last night, I am not so sure.

The programme offered terrifying insights into what happens when people become the playthings of television; however much one may have loathed the Hamiltons for their compulsive publicity seeking, it was not hard to feel a measure of sympathy for them.

The jackals of television, in full cry, were as obnoxious as their prey. Even victims who have brought things on their own head are victims.

When Louis Theroux proposed the programme, and turned up with his camera crew one day last July for some likely inquisitorial fun, he probably saw the Hamiltons as just another of the weird subjects he has made his speciality - from California's porn industry to white South African separatists via Paul Daniels and his wife Debbie McGee.

In the event, the show was dominated, fortuitously, by the arrest of the Hamiltons in August over allegations of rape. It was a bizarre episode and, looking back, it seems even more bizarre now.

Did anyone take the allegations seriously? Could the police not have disposed of the matter without summoning the Hamiltons to the station? They had an alibi for the night in question.

By handling it as they did, the police set in train a sequence of events which was demeaning to all concerned. The media wanted blood, the Hamiltons wanted martyrdom and neither was overscrupulous how they set about it.

The only person to emerge with any credit was Christine's mother. "You are just seeking publicity," she told her daughter, which was like telling a dog it has four legs. "There was no television in my day."

The whole episode provoked a mixed reaction. On the one hand, there was an element of servesthem-right glee. When people make a public spectacle of themselves, they are putting themselves in the firing-line. Do the Hamiltons expect our sympathy, just because other freaks have decided to join their end-of-the-pier show?

Their crude attempts to turn events to their advantage, to milk public sympathy with cleverly crafted photo-calls, left a nasty taste. Caught up in the media circus, simultaneouslyloving and hating the attention, they were so obsessed with presentation, presentation, presentation, that they had lost touch with their feelings.

"What makes me so annoyed," spluttered Christine, in one very telling scene, "is . . . I've forgotten."

On the other hand, there was horror at what the media frenzy said about us, the public. At some perverse level, people wanted the Hamiltons to be guilty. What a fabulous story that would have been in the dog days of August.

"You have a hold over the public imagination," Theroux told the couple, "and there is a definite sexual dimension to it. Do you mind my asking. . . are you sexually normal?"

It is exactly the sort of naff question television interviewers do ask when you invite them into your house with a camera crew.

As the Hamiltons held hands and looked sorry for themselves and said, yes, of course, they were sexually normal, it was hard to share their indignation. They had put themselves in the dock. They had turned their private lives into public property.

But that does not mean they were wrong in what they said. At some level, perhaps at many levels, the Hamiltons are as normal as you and me.

All right, there was something pretty fetid about the way Christine cosied up to Louis Theroux but a clinging, unguarded kiss is hardly a hanging offence.

The Hamiltons clearly love each other, in their way. They bicker, in their way. She chooses his shirts and tells him not to be so pompous. He pats her on the back and tells her not to be so emotional. Normal stuff.

If the behind-the-scenes glimpses of the Hamilton household had a Kafkaesque horror, the nightmare of a private life which can never be private again, they also had the intimacy of a Dutch interior. Moments of human truth kept peeping through the fog of their publicity-seeking.

Their tragedy, as Louis Theroux discerned, even after they had been cleared of the rape allegations, is that they have let themselves live in the glare of the media, convinced they have no other choice.

They do have other choices and perhaps, when they realise that, they will rise above the self-pity that threatens to engulf them.

But is the stupidity of this weird, masochistic couple, exposing themselves to humiliation time after time, practically begging people to kick them when they are down, any worse than the sadism of the people queuing up to give them one last kick?

This zany, thought-provoking show, simultaneously damning and compassionate, made me realise that there is something worse than being Neil and Christine Hamilton. There is being a Hamilton-hater: letting oneself get stuck in that pious, judgmental rut, where one is blind to their underlying humanity.

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