Stacey Dooley has tweeted a response to those ‘Strictly curse’ rumours

Stacey Dooley

Credit: Matthew Shave

People


Stacey Dooley has tweeted a response to those ‘Strictly curse’ rumours

By Kayleigh Dray

6 years ago

“Anyone with any adult life experience knows there are two sides to every story,” she tweeted.

There are two kinds of people when it comes to celebrity gossip: those who consider themselves slightly above that kind of nonsense, and those who can’t resist buying a stack of tabloid magazines for a long journey and regularly fall into a Sidebar of Shame spiral at work.

Whichever category you fall into, though, you’ll no doubt have seen this morning’s screaming headlines about Stacey Dooley.

“Stacey Dooley’s boyfriend reveals she has DUMPED him after five years and waltzed off with her dance partner Kevin Clifton,” insists the Mail Online.

The Metro, meanwhile, has opted to run with “Stacey Dooley romance with Kevin Clifton was an ‘open secret’ on Strictly Come Dancing tour”.

And the Irish Mirror, keen to stick its two pence in, adds: “Stacey Dooley DATING Strictly’s Kevin Clifton as her ex finds ‘secret texts’.”

All of these headlines are based on a single interview, obtained by The Sun, with Dooley’s ex-boyfriend Sam Tucknott, in which he claims that their relationship ended when she fell for her Strictly dance partner, Kevin Clifton. 

The piece does not include a response from Dooley, nor does it allow her to offer her perspective: it is entirely told from Tucknott’s point of view.

Is it any wonder, then, that Dooley – an investigative journalist herself – has felt the need to issue a short and sharp statement via her own social media feeds.

“Anyone with any adult life experience knows there are two sides to every story,” she tweeted.

“I haven’t got the time or energy to correct some of the utter nonsense I’ve read on here.”

Referring to the ex who felt the need to splash their personal story all over the papers, Dooley added: “Re Sam, I loved him very much and only wish him happiness and success going forward.”

It’s an undeniably classy response, considering the expletive-laden quotes Tucknott has given to the press about her and Clifton. And it’s one worth bearing in mind when it comes to engaging with these stories – no matter how difficult that may be. And it may be very difficult, especially when you consider why we prefer to engage with celebrity scandals in the first place.

As revealed in his book The Moral Animal, Robert Wright observes that the themes of the tales we’re most gripped by – “who is sleeping with whom, who is angry at whom, who cheated whom”, and so on – tend to line up “with the sorts of information conducive to fitness”.

And psychologist Dr Hamira Riaz, who specialises in the concept of success, agrees. “We learn lessons about the human condition through storytelling, and [Jolie and Pitt’s] is one of the biggest stories of our time,” she previously told Stylist. “It has all the elements of myth-making, of a fairy tale: the most beautiful man marrying the most beautiful woman.”

Consultant psychologist Nadine Field has also determined that some people find it reassuring when celebrities ‘fail’, as it reminds us that nobody’s life is perfect – despite how it might have been presented in the press. When a celebrity relationship comes to an end, then, it almost functions as a “de-mystifier… [It provides] a frame of reference for when things go wrong. People think, ‘Well, that can happen even to people like that’.”

This is all well and good, we suppose, but we have the likes of EastEnders, Game of Thrones and Big Little Lies for that. Can’t we focus our attention on fictional scandals rather than the semi-fictional scandals dreamed up by the tabloids about actual people?

Image: Matthew Shave

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