Focus: Life is just a soap opera

Can the nation no longer distinguish between reality and illusion?

LADIES AND gentlemen, we present a drama entitled Six Characters in Search of an Author. They will be familiar enough: the killer, the fraudster, the victim, the celebrity, the millionaire, and the wronged wife. Each has appeared on our national stage in the past week. Like the characters in distinguished Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello's play - in which six fictional characters demand that their life stories be heard - our six live in a world where reality and illusion have become confused.

The first two were, in the same week, described in the press as "Britain's Most Hated Man". Both are in hiding. One is a child-killer, just released from prison but living in a police cell for his own protection. If he goes out on the street without a disguise, people will attack him. The second man should know what that feels like: he has apparently been insulted, threatened and spat at in public, and is now in a secret location, away from those who revile him and the tabloid newspapers who collude in his persecution. His crime? A second-rate financial scam.

The paedophile is Sidney Cooke, a genuine villain, whose search for a new life after serving nine years for manslaughter is rendered less sympathetic by reports that he has shown no remorse for Jason Swift's death. The fraudster, on the other hand, is not one at all. Owen Aaronovitch, a jobbing actor, was drawn into a national phenomenon when he agreed to play Jon Lindsay, lying lover of Deirdre Rachid in Coronation Street.

"I never imagined it would be as bad as this," he seems to have told a reporter who doorstepped him in his Spanish hideaway, and who wrote that with "head shorn and sporting a week's stubble" the actor "could be any one of hundreds of fugitives hiding out on the Costa Del Crime". "I am so glad I am not in England at the moment," was the quote. "I'd probably be lynched."

He's not a villain but an actor on the run, then. But even that version of the truth is an illusion, says his brother David Aaron- ovitch, this newspaper's television critic, who describes as "complete bollocks" the idea that a large number of viewers are so genuinely confused about the difference between soap opera and life that they want to assault the actor. "When my brother said that someone had sworn at him in the supermarket he made it clear that both he and they knew it was a joke."

Owen made the decision to move to Spain, where his partner is a teacher, before he took the part of Lindsay. Which brings us to the third character, whose unjust imprisonment concludes our first act: Deirdre Rachid.

All 19 million people who watched her trial knew Deirdre was a creation of the actress Anne Kirkbride, but you would never guess that to read the Sun, which mounted a campaign to have her freed. It told us about the Cardiff cabbie on hunger strike, the "Free Deirdre" T-shirts on sale, the messages of support from Ronnie Knight and Mad Frankie Fraser and the prisoners at a women's jail who had "wept for Deirdre".

It was all a bit of fun. But not much of a joke, surely, for voiceless victims of genuine injustice to hear Tony Blair and William Hague offering support for the Weatherfield One. And what of the man who faxed the Sun to say: "The legal system in Britain is a joke and the verdict proved it." Maybe he was being ironic.

NOW the scenery changes. We are in a Sussex mansion. If the story of Deirdre Rachid was soap opera masquerading as reality, then our second act is real life masquerading as soap.

Its central character is a former Blue Peter presenter who became the friendly face of the National Lottery. Anthea Turner may be the first or second highest paid woman on television, depending on whose PR you believe. The story of how she left her husband and manager Peter Powell, a former Radio 1 DJ, and then lost her new lover, has been played out on the same pages as the Deirdre saga, without much to distinguish between them.

At first this seemed like Anthea's story: the true-love tale of how a glamorous celebrity fell for a handsome millionaire, Grant Bovey. Instead of scriptwriters, this soap was driven by solicitors and press agents, who issued statements and negotiated exclusive interviews. We could not watch their private lives on television, but enough information was available in print to make readers care about the lovers photographed walking in the park. Soon there was no need for surnames in headlines: "Anthea and Grant" would do.

THEN a third name emerged, the sixth character and the surprise heroine of our second act. Della, the deserted wife of Bovey, was no victim. She knew how to play Anthea at her own game, with the advice of her friend Kerry, who also had been through a rough patch in a marriage to a television presenter, Paul Ross.

Della's first public move was to be seen out shopping for sexy underwear, looking radiant after slimming down. Perhaps the presence of a photographer was connected with that of Kerry, shopping by Della's side.

An interview with Hello! magazine contained no recriminations, as this new celebrity wife simply made it clear that Grant would be welcomed back. Then came the killer blow: when Anthea and Grant appeared together at a party in February, they were upstaged by the surprise presence of Della, looking dazzling in a red dress and dancing to "I Will Survive". Her dancing partner was Kerry Ross. The photographers loved it.

By now there should be something familiar about the plot. Didn't Julia Carling appear to win back husband Will from the Princess of Wales after showing consummate skills as a media manipulator? Come to think of it, wasn't Diana rather good at fighting her husband through the press? And didn't Charles Spencer lose the sympathy of millions when his wife and former mistress ganged up for a photo-call outside the divorce court?

Last week, Della got her husband back. Grant went home, and took down the sign saying "Husband and dog missing . . . reward for dog". Anthea was seen behind dark glasses, looking rattled. Della was skiing but found time to be photographed drinking champagne with her holiday companion, Kerry. A beaming Della made the front page, days after Deirdre. Cue applause, and the review of one critic, who wrote: Mrs Bovey had "the 24-carat solid- gold style I thought went down with the Titanic".

So the curtain falls on our drama, the title of which was itself an illusion. Each character had someone else writing their lines. For the actors, Kirkbride and Aaronovitch, it is easy to tell reality from illusion because someone says "cut". It must be harder for those, like Turner and Cooke, who live with exaggerated public personas. Do they believe what they read? The lucky ones are those, like Grant and Della Bovey, it seems, who take part in the play without losing themselves.