I feel for you
I never thought I would see her crying like that...look at her crying, it hurts. Terri is a wonderful woman, loving, strong, enthusiastic, beautiful, wise...she is an amazing woman and her being with Steve made them look like the perfect couple that they were. She looks so broken...drained..lost..
Terri Irwin taught us all a lesson when she turned to a familiar medium to talk through her tragedy.
Jim Schembri
October 5, 2006
THE first few minutes of Ray Martin's exclusive interview with Terri Irwin seemed to confirm the worst fears about how badly Nine would handle such a delicate subject. With the world still recoiling from Steve Irwin's untimely death and his televised memorial service - watched by 300 million people - still fresh in our minds, an in-depth, hour-long, commercial-laden interview with his grieving widow seemed, well, wrong. It was wildly inappropriate, voyeuristic, way too soon.
The Nine promotions seemed to give away much of the story. Still deeply in shock, Terri Irwin would sit sobbing, distraught, her eyes red, teetering on the brink of collapse. All it would take would be for Ray Martin to punch in certain key words - love, loss, Steve, the kids - and she'd give the camera precisely what it wanted to see: a woman in pain, suffering, crying.
The opening minutes seemed to harden the impression. It was like watching somebody being tortured. To use an American term coined to describe the worst excesses of tabloid media, the interview seemed a prime example of "emotional pornography" where the camera and the reporter are like vultures feeding off the misery of a defenceless person in distress.
This is how the show had been promoted. Tune in and watch Terri Irwin lose it. And people did. The interview pulled an audience of 2.9 million, the clear winner on the night and the fifth-biggest TV show of the year.
But she didn't lose it. She broke down several times, her anguish was manifest, yet something else was coming through. This was not an endurance test Terri Irwin was putting herself through to satiate her husband's legion of fans. This was not a woman who had been cajoled into fronting the camera. This was somebody who wanted to be there. Who needed to be there.
Initially it was tough viewing, but the more you watched the more you understood what was going on. TV had been so much a part of the way the Irwins related to the world that to turn to it now, in such a horrific circumstance, was not only sensible but somehow natural.
Thus the hour offered many moments of eloquent reflection. Terri spoke of Irwin's larrikin nature, his boundless energy, of his love of animals and passion for conservation. On living with him, it wasn't so much her declaration that she knew she was living a fairytale that moved us, but her classic use of understatement. "He was not boring," she said drolly, rolling her eyes.
She put paid to the questionable concept of "closure". She'd never get over the loss. "This is what walking through fire is . . . It's a mountain I have to climb on my own . . . I don't have a choice, I have to cope".
"Life is like a book and this is the next chapter," she had explained to daughter Bindi. As she vowed to make their zoo bigger and better, the message to herself and to the public was clear and powerful: it's not what ends that matters so much as what continues.
Most moving of all was her account of dinner time. Fearing it would be the most distressing, a daily reminder of the man she had lost, she was surprised, instead, "to feel this immense peace". It was powerful television.
And Martin, to his credit, was more restrained than usual. There were fewer reaction shots of him than we are used to, and we only once saw him give Terri a consoling touch on the knee. When he took her outside the zoo to show her the masses of flowers and cards of condolence, putting his arm around her seemed totally appropriate.
Using the television medium as emotional catharsis is a phenomenon we have seen before. In 1997 the son of American comedy legend Bill Cosby, Ennis, was murdered in California. Soon afterwards, Cosby appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman and simply said "Can I tell some Ennis stories?"
Letterman gave him the go-ahead and for the next 15 minutes Cosby had the audience in stitches with humorous tales of his slain son's childhood.
Terri Irwin was using the medium in the same way. Despite her pain she clearly needed to get these things out. The process was, in essence, a heightened version of how people best cope with such tragedies. You don't shut yourself off, you talk it through, you communicate, you connect with the people who have been part of your life. For Terri Irwin that circle included several hundred million people. And that's what she did. Superbly.
I never thought I would see her crying like that...look at her crying, it hurts. Terri is a wonderful woman, loving, strong, enthusiastic, beautiful, wise...she is an amazing woman and her being with Steve made them look like the perfect couple that they were. She looks so broken...drained..lost.. Terri Irwin taught us all a lesson when she turned to a familiar medium to talk through her tragedy.
Jim Schembri
October 5, 2006
THE first few minutes of Ray Martin's exclusive interview with Terri Irwin seemed to confirm the worst fears about how badly Nine would handle such a delicate subject. With the world still recoiling from Steve Irwin's untimely death and his televised memorial service - watched by 300 million people - still fresh in our minds, an in-depth, hour-long, commercial-laden interview with his grieving widow seemed, well, wrong. It was wildly inappropriate, voyeuristic, way too soon.
The Nine promotions seemed to give away much of the story. Still deeply in shock, Terri Irwin would sit sobbing, distraught, her eyes red, teetering on the brink of collapse. All it would take would be for Ray Martin to punch in certain key words - love, loss, Steve, the kids - and she'd give the camera precisely what it wanted to see: a woman in pain, suffering, crying.
The opening minutes seemed to harden the impression. It was like watching somebody being tortured. To use an American term coined to describe the worst excesses of tabloid media, the interview seemed a prime example of "emotional pornography" where the camera and the reporter are like vultures feeding off the misery of a defenceless person in distress.
This is how the show had been promoted. Tune in and watch Terri Irwin lose it. And people did. The interview pulled an audience of 2.9 million, the clear winner on the night and the fifth-biggest TV show of the year.
But she didn't lose it. She broke down several times, her anguish was manifest, yet something else was coming through. This was not an endurance test Terri Irwin was putting herself through to satiate her husband's legion of fans. This was not a woman who had been cajoled into fronting the camera. This was somebody who wanted to be there. Who needed to be there.
Initially it was tough viewing, but the more you watched the more you understood what was going on. TV had been so much a part of the way the Irwins related to the world that to turn to it now, in such a horrific circumstance, was not only sensible but somehow natural.
Thus the hour offered many moments of eloquent reflection. Terri spoke of Irwin's larrikin nature, his boundless energy, of his love of animals and passion for conservation. On living with him, it wasn't so much her declaration that she knew she was living a fairytale that moved us, but her classic use of understatement. "He was not boring," she said drolly, rolling her eyes.
She put paid to the questionable concept of "closure". She'd never get over the loss. "This is what walking through fire is . . . It's a mountain I have to climb on my own . . . I don't have a choice, I have to cope".
"Life is like a book and this is the next chapter," she had explained to daughter Bindi. As she vowed to make their zoo bigger and better, the message to herself and to the public was clear and powerful: it's not what ends that matters so much as what continues.
Most moving of all was her account of dinner time. Fearing it would be the most distressing, a daily reminder of the man she had lost, she was surprised, instead, "to feel this immense peace". It was powerful television.
And Martin, to his credit, was more restrained than usual. There were fewer reaction shots of him than we are used to, and we only once saw him give Terri a consoling touch on the knee. When he took her outside the zoo to show her the masses of flowers and cards of condolence, putting his arm around her seemed totally appropriate.
Using the television medium as emotional catharsis is a phenomenon we have seen before. In 1997 the son of American comedy legend Bill Cosby, Ennis, was murdered in California. Soon afterwards, Cosby appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman and simply said "Can I tell some Ennis stories?"
Letterman gave him the go-ahead and for the next 15 minutes Cosby had the audience in stitches with humorous tales of his slain son's childhood.
Terri Irwin was using the medium in the same way. Despite her pain she clearly needed to get these things out. The process was, in essence, a heightened version of how people best cope with such tragedies. You don't shut yourself off, you talk it through, you communicate, you connect with the people who have been part of your life. For Terri Irwin that circle included several hundred million people. And that's what she did. Superbly.
