The currency of cruelty never undergoes devaluation

SO THIS woman gets into the lift and presses the button for the floor she wants.

The elevator hums into action, but about halfway to her destination, its lights begin to flicker. Then they fail, plunging her into total darkness. Although she can see nothing, viewers watching through night-sensitive lenses, can see her through a greenish haze. She’s groping along the wall of the lift to find the emergency phone.

At the same time, a panel in the wall of the lift on the side opposite to her slides silently to one side to allow ingress of someone else. The someone else is a small girl clutching a teddy bear. The little girl is skinny, with a ghost-pale face and skull-like depressions around her eyes. She positions herself opposite the woman, who spots her the minute the lights flicker back on and is rooted to the ground because this apparition has — as far as she’s concerned — appeared out of nowhere.

She tries to get as far away from the poltergeist as she can within the confines of the lift. The waif watches her fixedly and then emits a terrifying scream. The lights flicker again and go out. Night vision presents a blurry green shot of the child slithering out the side wall of the lift so that when the interior lights up again, the woman is on her own. The lift starts up and takes her to her destination, considerably the worse for emotional wear.

It’s all part of a Candid Camera-style series some seven million viewers have seen. Some of the victims are men trying to be brave in the face of the undersized ghostly figure. Two are women who end up huddled on the floor of the elevator, clutching each other in hysterics. It’s a global ho, ho ho. Two sets of people enjoyed it as it was happening; those behind the camera and the little girl who got the rare experience of terrifying people three times her age and size.

The victims of the prank may also have found it funny, post-factum. Relief of acute anxiety often brings on the giggles and, sure, what harm, especially if you get to semi-star in a viral video? Even Gay Byrne, in the oft-played clip where a disguised Mike Murphy interrupts filming often enough to provoke the Maestro into telling him to eff off, gave permission for it to be broadcast because he didn’t believe it did him any lasting damage.

Foodstuffs often figure in practical jokes, particularly, in modern times, pizza, which had a starring role in a trick played a few days ago on an independent Dáil TD by colleagues insufficiently entertained by their day job. But, long before pizza became the preferred prank option, the American stage legend, Helen Hayes, employed jelly in a cross between a practical joke and a moral lesson, when her husband, playwright Charles MacArthur, was delivered to her once too often in a state of comatose inebriation. She ordered the two men carrying him to dump him in the bath, which she then filled with warm water into which she distilled gelatine powder, knowing it would set around him before he woke, and left a spoon on the side of the bath, together with a note reading “Eat your way out”.

While Hayes was mildly and opportunistically cruel, at around the same time, an American painter living in Paris created a practical joke of rather more strategic malice. The painter gave the concierge of his apartment building a turtle, of which she became inordinately fond. After a couple of weeks, he swapped her turtle for a slightly bigger one, continuing the swapping until what she thought was her own turtle was large enough to convince her that the was thriving in her care. Then cruelty came into play. The painter reversed the process, so the turtle got smaller and smaller and its owner more and more worried. (Roald Dahl, himself an almost equal mix of humour and cruelty, subsequently wrote a children’s book based on the saga.)

Just as mimicry played a part in the Leinster House prank, so it did in the trick played by two Australian radio presenters, who telephoned the hospital to which Kate Midleton had been admitted with uncontrollable morning sickness. Imitating the voices of the Queen and Prince Philip, the radio personalities talked to a nurse at the hospital, requiring information about the condition of their young daughter-in-law. This flustered the recipient of the call enough to persuade her to put it through to the patient’s room, where another nurse divvied up the information. Ho, ho, ho, went the broadcasters, transmitting the resultant audio clip. It went global. Instantly. All the better to laugh at, given that the accents adopted by the two broadcasters were somewhere between woefully bad and ludicrous. Oh, how we laughed.

Except that Jacintha Saldanha, the woman who first took the call, wasn’t laughing. The fact that she was Indian-born and living in Britain for only nine years may have made it easier to fool her with a bad impersonation of members of the Royal family. We don’t know whether she was ashamed or humiliated or frightened for her career. All we know is that she was desperately upset over the episode and that she took her own life.

This, clearly, was not the intention of the two Oz presenters, currently under suspension from their station and likely to be linked forever with the incident: “Oh, YOU were one of the two who telephoned the King Edward V11 Hospital?” It can also be argued that such a response could not have been anticipated and that other factors may have contributed to Ms Saldanha’s death. Clearly, neither of the two planned to be cruel to a nameless stranger who was largely irrelevant to their purpose.

IT’S THE purpose itself that’s worth questioning, on a number of fronts. First of all, the radio station involved, together with all other stations which engage in broadcast confidence tricks, should not include hospitals, fire stations and other foci of life-saving activity when they decide to do this kind of thing. Wasting police time is bad enough. Wasting the time of healthcare workers and endangering the careers of two of them in order to breach the privacy of a patient is a lot worse.

The humour in the episode, transient and tacky though that humour was, lay in the ridiculing of the royals. Marilyn Monroe once remarked that one of the consequences of world fame was total strangers feeling they had the right to be obnoxious to the famous individual. That feeling may derive from a dehumanising of the celebrity and is undoubtedly reinforced by the illusion of closeness delivered by mass and social media.

The Royal Family inevitably qualifies for such mockery, although setting out to find fun in the hospitalisation of a young woman suffering a potentially lethal complication of pregnancy is a bit of a reach.

2DayFM have been swamped with messages of condemnation from all over the world, which may represent punishment but which almost certainly will not serve to prevent similar forays in future. The currency of cruelty never undergoes devaluation.