Seann laughs but it’ll never be funny
WHEN Seann Walsh first laid eyes on the other late arrival he’d be walking into the I’m A Celebrity camp with, he burst out laughing.
He laughed and laughed and laughed, bending over double at one point. He laughed until there were tears in his eyes even as he recalled the moment later in the Bush Telegraph.
I’ll bet he wasn’t laughing because he found it funny though. He was laughing with relief. With Matt Hancock there, Seannn wouldn’t be the most hated man in the jungle after all!
He wouldn’t be voted to do every trial! He was going to get away with it! And lo, that has basically come to pass.
Finally – Matt Hancock having a positive impact on someone’s life. There’s something quite perfect about the only person he actually put a protective ring around being a lying, cheating, narcissist.
Later, when Corrie’s Sue Cleaver admitted she didn’t know his story, Seannnn stopped and started a few times before launching into it, muttering, “Which… version?”
It was a very telling moment. Because which version of the story he gives very much depends on who he thinks is listening.
The version he went with this time led to domestic abuse charity Women’s Aid releasing a spot-on statement, saying, “Imagine experiencing gaslighting by a partner, undergoing therapy, and then watching that person garner sympathy on national TV? We ask ITV’s I’m A Celebrity to consider in their edit not platforming alleged abusers minimising their actions on screen. Solidarity with survivors.”
Unless he’s making jokes about it in his stand-up shows, Seannnnn’s defence of the photos of him snogging his Strictly partner Katya on his then-girlfriend Rebecca Humphries’ birthday is that it was “just a kiss.” What he still chooses not to understand, even four years later, is that his infidelity – though clearly far from ideal – isn’t why so many people were and are utterly appalled by him.
The technical definition of gaslighting is psychological manipulation and emotional abuse where someone is made to doubt their own sanity.
In lay-woman’s terms – Rebecca Humphries to be precise – after she told her boyfriend she suspected something was going between him and Katya, “He aggressively, and repeatedly, called me a psycho/nuts/mental. It’s more than lying. It’s controlling.”
Rebecca recalls Seannnnnn insisting , “I just feel like if you saw the two of us together you would see we’re just friends, and you’d be able to see what a psychopath you are.”
Five days later he admitted the truth, because photos of it were going to be on the front page of a newspaper the next morning.
Incredibly, Walsh sees himself as the victim, telling Sue, “My girlfriend at the time posted a statement, and that was the end of me.”
He wearily recounted how he’d said sorry, on the Jonathan Ross Show, sitting next to Samuel L Jackson, no less, and it was probably the worst moment of his life.
He forgot to mention his comedy tour a year later, a review of which describes how he, “dismisses with a joke his ex-girlfriend’s accusations of gaslighting and dwells on the Twitter abuse and panic attacks he suffered as the ruckus raged”.
He opened his next show by saying, “It’s been three years since Strictly Come Dancing, three of the worst years of my life. Three years. Three years, and I think I can say it now. I think you overreacted.”
Couldn’t disagree more. Still, self-awareness isn’t Seannnnnnn’s strong point, is it?
If it was, he might have noticed that if the only person who can take the heat off you is someone who resigned in disgrace after his incompetence contributed to the deaths of 200,000 people, it isn’t really a laughing matter.
The story he gives depends on who he thinks is listening