DO the names Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot mean anything to you? Maybe not. But they will if I say they were that couple caught on camera at a Coldplay concert as they were hugging each other. And when they realised the TV camera was showing a giant close-up of them, they quickly parted and looked very guilty. They were married, but not to each other, so a bad moment for both.
It's strange, really. Some people would swim through a lake of snot to be seen on TV. When a celeb is being interviewed live, you’ll see them jump and wave and blow kisses – anything to make the airwaves. Whereas poor Andy and Kristin must curse the day a camera picked them out and beamed them to the world.
They could have avoided it, of course – steered clear of a place where hundreds of cameras were hungry for material.
If you watched the All-Ireland final on Sunday you may have noticed this in action. When nothing much is happening on the field of play, the camera heads for the crowd and tries to find a good-looking young woman or a cute child. Alternatively, they’ll zero in on a bunch of lads jumping and screaming in ecstasy because their team has just scored.
Immediately after a match is also a chance for the camera to pick out grown men hugging each other, or during a game for a player who has scored to point his fingers skywards – presumably thanking God – before being buried under his delighted team-mates. Even picking out one of the defeated team can yield good viewing material – there’s no sight so grief-drenched as a defeated player hunkered low, looking down, crushed for ever. Despair or euphoria: that’s what the punters love.
It's all an invasion of privacy, of course – that was something private Andy and Byron were sharing. In a similar manner, movies will have the camera climb into bed with the couple and invites us to admire the flash of a thigh or a face distorted in passion.
We often feel a little bit guilty as we check out the clinch – amorous embraces are for two, not three. I don’t know who Peeping Tom was, but I do know what he did and we all realise that watching scenes of high intimacy between a couple is a guilty pleasure.
Grace Springer was the person who filmed Andy and Kirstin getting close: word is, Grace has been paying off her college loan on the back of having shown the world two guilty lovers.
Yes, many people would walk a mile over hot coals to be on TV for even three seconds, but there are people who are truly shy and who’ll do anything to avoid the camera’s stare. Their hands will dart to cover their face, or they’ll twist away at speed so only the back of their head is visible. Weird or what? Half the country mad hungry to let the world know they exist, the other half truly detesting the possibility of a close-up.
Violence also draws the camera to be its witness. Think how we get a replay of that lunge, a slo-mo of that elbow to the face – horrible but highly watchable. And real life is even better: think of the number of people who’ll risk crashing their own car just so they can get a glimpse of a real-life car-collision.
Few of us knew either Andy or Kristin before last week. Now we all know them; and whether it was their own fault for going to a gig where cameras would be on the prowl, or whether the amateur paparazzi are to blame for their shameless intrusion, in the end doesn’t really matter. Their secret is out.
First rule for the naturally shy or guilty lovers: avoid crowds. Nowadays everyone has a camera in their pocket and they have no scruples about using it to devour lives.
