Hounding Barrymore is a national bloodsport

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Barrymore's ITV career is over

This is not a column about the Countryside Alliance – a subject wisdom dictates I stay away from, since I live bang in the heart of the city – but I have been interested to read, this last week, that what those otherwise slow-to-anger, law-abiding country people are marching to protect is nothing less than a "way of life".

I have never attended a hunt, though I did once enjoy the friendship of a rurally inclined person who owned a shotgun and liked shooting at whatever he saw moving in the grass, which most of the time was wind and which most of the time he failed to hit, so I can't speak of the thrill of the kill first hand. I'm sure it must be fun, though, dressing up and blowing horns and watching the dogs getting excited. I'm not a lover of foaming dogs myself. Dogs are fine by me, one at a time and ideally – if they must bark and show their teeth and dribble – muzzled. But I can see why the noise and the steam might stimulate the bloodlust of others. An absorbing hobby, I am sure, riding to hounds and killing foxes. An exhilarating and sociable thing to do on a wintry Sunday afternoon. But a "way of life"? That's what's been intriguing: hearing people admitting without embarrassment that the ritualising of a death – never mind whose – is what they live by, the activity that ultimately identifies and defines them. And without which they cannot be who they are.

Get over the first shock of that confession and there is reason to be grateful for it. It contributes in no small measure to our knowledge of ourselves. At last, you might say, the veil has been lifted on an important and invariably sentimentalised aspect of our national character – our pastoral longings. Although there has always been an answering literature of realism, not to say cynicism about country life, we go on hankering after the idyll, idealising and Elgarising it, convinced that some essential innocence resides there and is forever waiting to take us to its bosom. Now we have it, as it were, from the horse's mouth – in the country they live to kill.

Just as in the city, they are quick to remind us, we live to eat what they kill. Not foxes, but one takes their point. And the analogy doesn't apply to vegetarians either, but still one takes their point. As a species we are steeped in blood, else we wouldn't have made it up off the forest floor. Until he learns to kill the pig, Jude the Obscure is going nowhere.

Only admit that this is the case and we are in a position, paradoxically, to be more humane to one another. Bloodier by far than your averagely murderous, hallooing Sunday in the country has been the hunting down by journalists this week of the comedian Michael Barrymore. If you've read an article that starts by calling Barrymore a despicable egotist and takes more than half a paragraph to progress to squalid and depraved, you've read one of the sweeter ones. I'm not going to feign surprise at this. Extremity of censure is another of our national bloodsports. And even by the usual standards of famous people deranged by their fame, Barrymore has gone spectacularly awry. One man's debauch is another man's singalong, one man's depravity another man's good time, but bodies in pools silence all relativism. Still and all – for it is hurt that lies behind the violence of the criticism, a sense of betrayed affection – what are we doing expecting anything very much different of anyone of flesh and blood, let alone an entertainer who teetered on the brink of violence not to say violation every time he appeared?

Myself, I watched Barrymore on television with admiration and alarm. Wild horses would not have dragged me to see him live, partly because he was not verbal enough to entertain me for long – I am not a great lover of acrobatic clowns and face-pullers – but mainly because I would have dreaded his coming off the stage and grabbing me. Why people ever allow themselves to be manhandled by comedians I do not understand. Perhaps they think a little of the celebrity will rub off, or perhaps they have been brought up in a culture that attaches value to being a "good sport", or perhaps they are just depraved themselves – there is depravity everywhere, mark my words – and enjoy the public humiliation. I, for whatever reason, would rather be dead than have it happen to me, let the humiliation consist of nothing more than being asked my name by a pantomime dame and having bags of sweeties thrown into my lap.

But Barrymore – to have Barrymore loosing his demons on you! What did we ever think we were watching? Much of that sense of betrayed affection of which I've spoken is based on a fantasy. That of Barrymore as beloved family entertainer. Whatever a family entertainer is, Barrymore wasn't it. In body he was always suggestive, and more often than not lewd. Fine by me, but not, I would have thought, by the family. That he had a knees-up way with senior citizens, especially old ladies, I don't deny; but you could never breathe easy when he had an old lady in his arms, or over his shoulder, or in the missionary position on the floor beneath him. Liberating, boundary-crossing stuff, I quite agree. Funny, so long as you remember how close funny is to fear. And better that than the My Kind of People part of his act, with all its menacingly insincere South London schmaltz.

Close to fear, his funny. And liberating precisely because it took us out of our rickety, pretend respectable selves. If we valued that riskiness in Barrymore the demonic clown, we should at least understand and pity it in Barrymore the demonic man. As for our moral outrage, it is worthless. The dogs bark and show their teeth, the fox sweats, and we are all hot for the kill. It's our way of life.