Imagine my horror when I turned on breakfast television the other morning to find Danielle Lloyd grinning soppily back at me. It’s not a very pleasant way to start the day.
In case you need reminding about who Danielle Lloyd is, she was one of the contestants on Celebrity Big Brother three years ago. Following the usual formula for these types of shows, when she first entered the house, nobody had the first idea who she was. Apparently her career up to that point had included some modelling work and going out with a footballer. As this hardly constitutes celebrity, I presume she was included to provide some eye-candy for the boys and so that we could all laugh at how thick she was.
Obviously, that didn’t go according to plan. 2007 was the year that the almighty shitstorm kicked off around Shilpa Shetty and the racist bullying directed at her from a coven of housemates led by Jade Goody. Effigies were burnt, diplomatic relations with India became strained and it was even debated in Parliament. The whole thing was a national disgrace and right at the middle of it all was Danielle Lloyd.
I remember watching the show at the time and despising Lloyd more than Jade Goody herself – which is saying quite a lot. At least Goody was brutish and straightforward with her bigoted stupidity, you knew where you stood with her. Lloyd however, was exactly like the worst kind of vindictive schoolyard bully, fawning around the bigger, more powerful figurehead, egging them on to go further, telling them how great they are. She was sly, vindictive and loathsome – sniping hatefully behind Shetty’s back at every opportunity then panicking when she finally became aware of the trouble she was in and rushing to toady and apologise in the most desperate and fake way imaginable in order to save her own skin.
Thankfully, since then, she’s been very quiet. Until now.
Her strategy for a comeback is horribly transparent - devised, no doubt, by a shady Machiavellian PR agency of the worst kind. Lie low for a couple of years to give people time to forget how you behaved, then appear on something light and popular where you don’t have to talk too much just to get your name in the public eye again. After that you can relaunch your career properly on the back of some charity – make sure you’re associated heavily with it, bring in some personal trauma, portray yourself as sincere and caring.
That’s precisely what she’s done. Apparently, she was on Celebrity Wipeout over Christmas and donated her prize money to a domestic abuse charity – a charity that she’s now clamped onto firmly in order to repair her image. This is why she was leering at me from the television screen at breakfast, cosying up to Bill Turnbull on the sofa as if she were just a normal, civilised human being. Undoubtedly, there’ll be a BBC3 documentary soon followed by presenting slots and god alone knows what else.
But, hang on. How exactly is she relaunching herself? What career is she coming back to? Modelling? Going out with footballers? No, she’s coming back to a career in the media.
What career in the media is this? As I stated before, when she entered the Big Brother house, nobody knew who she was – the only reason we do now is because of the furore over the racism row. If she hadn’t verbally abused an Indian actress on national television, nobody would know the name Danielle Lloyd. There’d certainly be no way that she’d be there to goad and taunt me through the television because she wouldn’t be well known enough to appear on anything.
This is what I find so offensive. I wouldn’t mind her so much if she’d just had the dignity to slink back into the shadows and allow people to forget about her after Big Brother. Anyone with the slightest shred of shame would have. Instead however, she’s using the fact that her face and name is known in order to establish herself on television. She’s using the fame generated by her racist bullying as a foothold to get into the media and, by doing so, assuming that the public are so dumb and fickle that we’ll have forgotten about what a horrible person she is.
It scares me that she may be proved right. It scares me that we’ll let Danielle Lloyd become famous.
If she’s going to appear on television, there should be a constant reminder of the reason she’s there. For example, when someone appears on a talk show, the host will generally introduce them by telling the audience their name and the nature of their profession: ‘Please welcome, the actor, Bill Roach’, they might say, or: ‘Today on the show, we’ve got Uri Geller, the Spoon-bender’. Therefore, whenever Lloyd appears on anything she should be announced as: ‘The Bully, Danielle Lloyd’. Or, when she appears on one of those ‘I love the 90s’ type programmes where they show old clips followed by a close up of someone vaguely famous talking you through what you’ve just seen, the caption for hers should read: ‘Danielle Lloyd’, then underneath: ‘Nasty Piece of Work’.
That way, whenever we see that vacant, self-satisfied smile of hers on our screens, we might feel a little bit disgusted at ourselves that we’ve allowed it to get there.
