Self-styled domestic goddess Anthea Turner made her name in the public eye, springing onto screens in the 80s presenting Top of the Pops before cementing her stardom with gigs including Blue Peter, GMTV, 2006’s Perfect Housewife and Dinner Party Wars in 2010. Having since popped up as a contestant in things like Dancing on Ice, The Jump and Celebrity SAS, Anthea’s career had been ticking along into gentle obscurity for some time – then suddenly, she’s trending on Twitter and everyone’s shouting. So what happened?
Last night, Anthea posted a cartoon depicting an overweight woman in a wheelchair, clutching a MacDonald’s paper bag and berating a passerby for endangering her by not wearing a mask; the joke, not a very funny one, hinged on the supposed hypocrisy of wanting to stay healthy while making unhealthy lifestyle choices. The internet didn’t take kindly to Anthea’s tweet, especially when she doubled down by elaborating on the illustration’s themes in a thread: “If the government put half the amount of money into health as they have in locking us up we wouldn’t be in this mess. Keep McDonald’s open and close gyms many council run and open air - Great”, wrote Anthea.
As you can imagine, the backlash came from far and wide, with many people describing the tweets – which coincided with the release of statistics that 6 out of 10 covid deaths last year had been in disabled people – as ableist as well as fat-shaming. Labour MP Jess Phillips tweeted “The Anthea Turner thing this morning has just about done me in. I just wish the idiots would just admit that the wind on their face is more important than my sister in laws life while she has chemo. Stop with the god damn hierarchy of whose life matters!!!”; Piers Morgan, meanwhile, called the post “despicable”.
With the original source of the furore bravely deleted, its originator issued an apology. “Totally apologies that the cartoon is clumsy - I’ll take the rollicking on the chin But this was never directed at people clinically ill who need our support. My passion is sincere though Covid has to give us a bloody big health wakeup call & we’d be nuts not to try & fix it”, wrote Anthea – before retweeting an article about the links between about obesity and coronavirus.
Over the last year, scientists around the world have been sprinting to understand the virus which has shut down the world. Certainly, it’s a bug that doesn’t play fair – while we know that age and some underlying conditions increase mortality risk, other reports have suggested that everything from race to blood type, socioeconomic status to gender, can affect an individual’s chances of becoming seriously ill or dying with covid. To begin blaming people for their existing health problems is a very slippery slope indeed, fusing morality with a virus which couldn’t care less how well you’ve been behaving recently. We’ll save our ears for the doctors, thanks Anthea.