Framing Britney Spears, Sky Documentaries, Tuesday
Tiger, Sky Documentaries on demand
Unbridled adulation can have enormous effects on the human brain and at their hearts these two documentaries set out to explore this phenomenon.
Framing Britney Spears had its first showing in the UK and Ireland on Tuesday after a significant impact in the US last week.
Made in conjunction with the New York Times, it retraced the widely documented descent of Britney from worldwide fame to serious mental health issues, but also investigated the less well-known story of the ‘conservatorship’ of the still working pop star.
The catalyst for the documentary appears to have been the social media campaign by her fans - #FreeBritney.
This began in early 2019 when Britney pulled out of a highly lucrative second Las Vegas residency and entered full time medical care. This appears to have happened around the same time as a deterioration in the relationship with her father, Jamie, who has significant control over her life and finances through the conservatorship.
Britney was placed in the court ordered conservatorship in October 2008 after severe mental health problems. It meant that a court had decided that she lacked the capacity to make decisions in her own life and appointed a group of people to take control.
Most of us will probably remember the head shaving and the unusual and troubling interviews around this time, but her difficulties also involved losing custody of her two children and later being prevented by a court from seeing them at all.
But there was a recovery and Britney resumed her pop career to a highpoint in 2014/15 where she performed 50 shows in a Las Vegas residency said to be worth around a $1 million dollars a week.
Questions were then, understandably, being asked as to why this woman who was capable of consistently wowing audiences over such a gruelling period was deemed incapable of making decisions about her finances or her friends.
Some contributions to the documentary questioned the appropriateness of placing her father in a position of authority. Early in her career, it was suggested that Jamie had alcohol problems and was not very involved in her life.
Not long after Britney’s troubles, the life of one of the world’s most famous sports starts - Tiger Woods - literally crashed outside his Florida home.
Over the course of a couple of months in 2009, it emerged that Woods, who at that stage was an unstoppable golfing force, had been a serial adulterer. His marriage was destroyed, sponsors dropped him, he spent time in residential sex therapy treatment and he was forced into a humiliating public apology in front of a live audience including his mother.
Not surprisingly his body and his golf game also fell apart.
Tiger too had a troubling relationship with his father Earl, although some suggest that his infidelity, which he witnessed in his own father, began with the death of Earl in 2006.
Their complex relationship, one in which Earl groomed his son for stardom from nappies and told the world that he was the “chosen one” who would “do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity,” is explored in a new two-part, three-hour, HBO documentary.
‘Tiger’ debuted in the US last month, but is now available on Sky Documentaries.
What neither documentary was able to answer, however, was to what extent fame was responsible for their psychological breakdowns.
Both were harried and harassed by the media, the public and the paparazzi and have been unable to live anything like normal lives.
The probable truth is that both had internal issues which were more than likely exacerbated by the claustrophobic nature of modern fame.
