The Hairy Truth

Stop the presses everyone! Splashed over the news last night and this morning is the incredible revelation that David Beckham has grown a beard. Yes, you heard me right – Beckham has joined the fuzzy face brigade. Good for him, I say. It matures his look somewhat and if Victoria has no qualms with stubble rash then all the better for it.

But why on earth is it making the front page of some papers? One billion people worldwide live in poverty, the ice caps are melting, people are being blown up all over the shop and nuclear missiles are most likely being squirreled away by someone as I type. Yet on my way home last night, I opened my free (thanks, advertisers) paper to be greeted with a double page spread on Beckham’s newly grown facial hair and various comments on the matter that a junior writer had undoubtedly had to plead with people on the street to provide that afternoon.

Now this morning the leading story on the UK Yahoo! Homepage is whether he did it as a fashion/attention seeking statement, or if in fact, as Beckham himself insisted, ‘(he) just couldn’t be bothered to shave.’ I’m not saying that some people won’t be interested in the developments of the hair follicles of one of the world’s most famous sportsmen. I just don’t understand how something so trivial can be mentioned in the same realm as the stories that it shares a page with. In my opinion, a suicide bomber killing ten people in Pakistan, the possible collapse of worldwide peace talks and two teenagers held over a homophobic murder is far more worthy of our attention and concern than someone’s facial hair.

I'm sure some of you will be thinking that I am nothing but hypocritical in taking the time to write about a subject I am being so critical of being written about in the first place. But this is a blog, not the front page of an internationally read newspaper or website. There’s a time and place for coverage such as this in national press and it’s most commonly known as the celebrity pages. Yes, the world is tough and it’s nice to have a light-hearted break sometimes from all the heavy stories that swamp the newswires. But to give this Beckham ‘story’ such significance undermines the importance of other stories in the news today that undeniably hold much greater implications. It’s rather alarming that society has become so superficial in recent years that stories such as this are given such gravitas. Attitudes are not going to be changing anytime soon however, so I can do little but steel myself for the hullabaloo that will surely ensue when Beckham decides to pick up his razor again.