Madeleine McCann: No Change, A Tourist Site And Entertainment
MADDIE WATCH - Anorak’s at-a-glance guide to press coverage of Madeleine McCann
THE GUARDIAN: “Last night’s TV: Madeleine, One Year On: Campaign for Change”
It’s difficult to keep the visuals stimulating, too. We saw the McCanns at home in Leicestershire; Kate and Jerry talking on the sofa. But you can’t have two hours of sofa, so we joined them in a lot of taxis - in Portugal, London, Washington. And there were plenty of lingering tree shots - leafless, winter trees (this is a sad story, after all). And a flying heron … eh, what’s that about? Maybe the heron is an aguido, too. Does Sir Trevor know?
DAILY MAIL: “Madeleine holiday apartment becomes ’sick tourist attraction’ one year on from her disappearance”
Coachloads of journalists arrive every day. It’s sick.
DAILY MIRROR: “Tourists posing for pictures at McCann tragedy spots”
Pensioner Pamela Fenn, who lives above the McCanns’ holiday apartment, said: “It’s sick.
“They stand outside and then have photographs taken with their children.”
A source close to the McCanns said yesterday: “It’s disgraceful.”
It’s not as if the disappearance of a missing child is entertaining.
The floodlights at Premiership club Everton will be switched on this Saturday to mark the anniversary in a campaign called Light The Way Home.
LIVERPOOL ECHO: “Madeleine McCann: Family prepare for first anniversary of her disappearance”
People around the world are being urged to light a candle, shine a torch or turn on a porch lamp on Saturday night as a gesture of support for Madeleine’s family and friends.
A lighter held in the air?
Robert Murat, the third arguido in the case, is intending to maintain a low profile and will probably stay away from Praia da Luz on Saturday.
He said: “The anniversary is for a little girl who went missing - Madeleine.
“The anniversary is not about us, the McCanns, the PJ (Portuguese detectives) or anything else but a little girl going missing.”
THE TIMES: “Madeleine, One Year On: Campaign for Change; Escape from Alcatraz: The True Story”
Stefanie Marsh: Why must television do compassion? Why, when faced with a captive audience, a prime-time slot and a story that could, if they’d let it, tell itself, must television turn to mush and mutate into a series of treacly Hallmark bereavement cards?…
At one point Gerry McCann admits that his “wife is carrying on in a quasi-real existence”. What she is really doing is falling apart, but too much gloop from the director turned the McCanns’ terrible situation into a guilt trip that made me want to watch The Apprentice instead.
THE INDEPENDENT: “Last Night’s TV: Madeleine, One Year On: Campaign for Change ITV1″
“You can’t always blame the parents,” says Thomas Stucliffe:
They still get a lot of letters, the McCanns, sorting them out into boxes marked “well-wishers”, “ideas”, “psychics” and “nutty”. Incredibly, they also need a box marked “nasty” for messages such as the one that Gerry read out at the beginning of the film. “How can you use money given by poor people in good faith to pay your mortgage on your mansion? You fucking thieving bastards. Your brat is dead because of your drunken arrogance. Shame on you. I curse you and your family to suffer forever. Cursed Christmas. If you had any shame, you would accept full responsibility for your daughter’s disappearance and give all the money back. You are scum.” This heart-warming expression of support had been written inside a Christmas card. The Daily Express, by contrast, chose to print its hate mail on its own front page, confident that there were enough readers out there who would prefer infanticide to unresolved mystery – or to no McCann story at all. And all the time, the McCanns themselves live a life horribly suspended between what might have been and what could happen next, between “if only” and “maybe”.
Posted: 1st, May 2008 | In: Broadsheets, Madeleine McCann, Tabloids Comments (715) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Comments
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May 2nd, 2008 at 9:28 am
673
whoops Says:
May 1st, 2008 at 9:35 pm
666-Well what were you suggesting we bet on and anorak be the stake-holder-I am very sorry if I have misinterpreted anything.
************
You join the ranks of the few who make misleading, offensive remarks but, when confronted, retract and maintain that was not the intention.
May 2nd, 2008 at 2:24 am
so what’s this about then?! http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/05_01/tortureDM0105_800×599.jpg
Daily Mail at yer service, ma’am
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:59 am
CHENIER
Thank you
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:27 am
711 Jass
Missed the first word of my post, Jass?
Typical carelessness and inaccuracy of those who automatically convict the Mcs even before the police have charged them!
Good night.
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:25 am
It’s late, and I really must get some sleep.
Good night, all!
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:20 am
At last Maria acknowledges that the McCanns are up to no good and should be charged.
What took so long, Maria?
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:18 am
709
Pilimary Says:
May 1st, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Well, lets see… At least, Im not going to go to my sleeping bag that much bored (I forgot to mention, before, my TV set. It is one of the 4 pieces of my furniture tonight, together with my laptop, a high lamp and the sleeping bag.
——————————————————-
Well, I hope that the floor isn’t too hard.
Years ago I would have suggested that you were camping out; nowadays that’s got a rather different meaning.
So I’ll just say goodnight, and hope you get one last good night’s sleep in your old home, prior to many good night’s sleep in your new home!
May 1st, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Uauuu!!!
My TV set was off. Then I switch it on , and… Surprise!!! The McCann documentary, plus a live debate, is starting in that very moment… antena 3 has bought the documentary and has invited some “experts” (the journalist of El Mundo who reproduced Amaral’s statements, among them)…
Well, lets see… At least, Im not going to go to my sleeping bag that much bored (I forgot to mention, before, my TV set. It is one of the 4 pieces of my furniture tonight, together with my laptop, a high lamp and the sleeping bag.
May 1st, 2008 at 11:48 pm
Continue your semantic argument as long as you like, but I’d wager also that chenier didn’t have to consult a dictionary to be sure of the meaning of disingenuous. If she used the word, she chose it and if she chose it, she knew what it meant. G’night.
May 1st, 2008 at 11:34 pm
706 Gloria Smudd
Exactly! Difficult therefore not to be deliberate.
“Deliberately disingenuous” is tautologous.
May 1st, 2008 at 11:22 pm
It means not open, not frank, crafty. Gold star to Ciara.
May 1st, 2008 at 11:18 pm
Go to new thread guys
May 1st, 2008 at 11:16 pm
Gloria Smudd
It means not straightforward, not sincere…calculating almost. False??
May 1st, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Come on then - what does disingenuous mean?
May 1st, 2008 at 11:07 pm
699
If the Mcs are child-killers or disposed of their child’s body after an accident, set up a false abduction scenario, instigated a worldwide financial scam to obtain money fraudulently, not to mention seriously wasting police time……how on earth could the PJ “appear as a bunch of sordid revengers” by charging them.
IMO, it’s shocking to suggest the PJ will not charge them if there is evidence that that they did any or all of these things. I don’t believe it. And as for all those books, interviews etc…either people will know they are just money-making rubbish OR the police will look appallingly negligent or incompetent for not arresting and charging them and securing a conviction which would get them put away for a very long time.
May 1st, 2008 at 11:03 pm
From a hotel near Marble Arch, they gave countless media interviews to broadcasters and newspapers from all over the world to mark the anniversary of her disappearance, urging anyone who has spoken to the Portuguese police to contact them via a new hotline. In effect, with their May Day for Madeleine campaign, they were launching their own investigation.
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”This is a last chance to capture a lot of information which has gone into the investigation and we are not privy to,” Gerry McCann said. ”Clearly, we need to know that everything has been done. What we are asking people to do is, if you have given information to the police, Crimestoppers, the Portuguese police, we are asking you to give it to us as well.”
Looks like the new number is to help them find out what was said to the Police ?
May 1st, 2008 at 11:00 pm
M&A
They seem a troup of candidats in a casting of OC nannies (organised by F.Marco)
May 1st, 2008 at 10:52 pm
since right now, I would bet that PJ is planning to charge them only with neglect (not to appear as a bunch of sordid revengers and to avoid diplomatic turbulencies… but they will manage for the whole truth to be known and proved (books, documentaries, extraofficial interviews, etc.) from north to south and from east to west in the planet
May 1st, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Clouseau
“… giving interviews”
Intensively, exhaustingly… the poor morons holding tight their planetary fame
May 1st, 2008 at 10:43 pm
ate McCann ‘Madeleine just feels very close’
Last Updated: 12:02am BST 02/05/2008
Yesterday, the McCanns launched a new appeal to find their daughter. Richard Edwards, who spent four months in Praia da Luz, looks back on their year of torment As her parents use the first anniversary of her disappearance to promote a desperate, last-ditch attempt to find her
One year ago, I watched Kate and Gerry McCann as they stood shivering in the dark in front of the apartment in Praia da Luz from where their daughter Madeleine had disappeared.
Kate McCann
Kate McCann: ‘Kate sought relief from the pain through exercise, on punishing runs on the beach and up mountains’
Their anguish was so raw that it was painful to watch them. They blinked at the flashbulbs. Kate could not speak; whenever she tried, she wept. She clung on to Gerry, whose eyes were red and tear-filled as he stumbled through the statement written on a notepad, using a cycle light to read the words.
“Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister,” he said.
Yesterday, the McCanns were back in front of the cameras as they embarked on what they see as the “last chance” to raise their daughter’s profile again internationally.
From a hotel near Marble Arch, they gave countless media interviews to broadcasters and newspapers from all over the world to mark the anniversary of her disappearance, urging anyone who has spoken to the Portuguese police to contact them via a new hotline. In effect, with their May Day for Madeleine campaign, they were launching their own investigation.
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Click to learn more…
”This is a last chance to capture a lot of information which has gone into the investigation and we are not privy to,” Gerry McCann said. ”Clearly, we need to know that everything has been done. What we are asking people to do is, if you have given information to the police, Crimestoppers, the Portuguese police, we are asking you to give it to us as well.”
Kate and Gerry are slick media operators now but they battle daily with the trauma of not knowing what happened on the evening of May 3, 2007. There have been almost 8,000 articles in British newspapers mentioning Madeleine’s name in the past 12 months.
Detectives, reporters, commentators, politicians, the public - everyone has had an opinion, and yet there is just one incontrovertible fact: a four-year-old girl is missing.
Kate, 40, said yesterday that she “senses” that Madeleine is alive. She still looks frail and seems permanently on the verge of tears. ”Madeleine just feels very close. It’s more of a kind of sensation that she’s there. You try to be objective and you think it is because I am her Mum and I want to believe, but it has not changed.”
Gerry was as personable as ever and, as ever, more pragmatic in his comments. ”Today is about Madeleine and today is about us stating our absolute categoric belief that there’s no evidence Madeleine has been seriously harmed.”
He said he and his wife were taking advice from experts. ”They are saying there is a strong chance Madeleine is out there. We need to address the situation of who took her.”
He added: ”People want to help. They must want to help. She’s a completely innocent four-year- old girl. Surely we can find her if everyone pulls together…”
Asked again whether they felt guilty for leaving Madeleine and the twins alone that night, Kate sighed “yes” and added: “We have said the same thing over and over. We can’t change it. We have to live with that.”
Critics accuse them of enjoying the limelight, but Kate, last year’s most photographed woman, hated it from the start and still does. While privately Gerry, 39, is approachable and chatty with reporters, Kate is shy, quiet and cannot bear the fact that while her daughter is missing, the story has focused so intently on her and her feelings.
“It is like walking a tightrope,” she told me once. “I do not like talking about this publicly but you’ve got to put your own feelings aside. I think in my head if we can be strong, strong for Madeleine, that will help get her back.”
When I interviewed Gerry last August, before he and his wife were named suspects (”arguidos”) we had argued about the press coverage.
“We didn’t ask for the media attention,” he said then. “When we came back from the police station on day one there must have been 150 journalists there. That was without us doing anything.
“We were faced with a decision, an instantaneous decision, that we could either interact, or hide away. The gut reaction was that I did not want to face any of this. But it came back to ‘What can we do to help find Madeleine?’. We chose to speak to the media, but what were our options?”
In the four months I spent in Praia da Luz last summer, I came to have the greatest respect for the way Kate and Gerry handled themselves and the media. They gave themselves totally to the campaign to find Madeleine.
I have spent enough time with them to know that any suggestion that they had any role in Madeleine’s disappearance is preposterous. The emotion was too real, the pain too much. I have looked again at the interviews they gave in the first desperate days and every word they spoke then is as true now.
At first we saw little of them, hidden away in an apartment, but soon we got to know them. Gerry sought to include journalists, even describing us all as being on this journey with them. In the early days, he said he hated waking up, because it meant that there had been no call in the middle of the night telling them the good news.
“At first it was as though Madeleine had died,” he told me. “It was anguish, despair, guilt, helplessness, all falling into one.
“But then you realise it is different from a death, where you can grieve and try to move on. We were thrown into an ongoing trauma, an ongoing crisis of the unknown.”
The couple took strength from Kate’s strong Catholic faith. She said a prayer every morning as she got up - it was sometimes the only way she could face getting out of bed. The priest at the local church taught them three words which became their mantra: “esperança, força, coragem” - “hope, strength, courage”. Meanwhile they clung to their close family and to the twins, Sean and Amelie.
I think that without them it would have been so much harder to bear.
Gerry, a consultant cardiologist at a hospital in Leicester, immersed himself in the launch of a campaign to find Madeleine, so much so that it became his day job, his way of coping. He would sit in an improvised office, tapping away at a laptop and drawing charts of action plans.
His language changed, and he started to use soundbite phrases. He praised the Portuguese police despite his private fears that their initial blunders had jeopardised chances of finding Madeleine.
Kate, however, wore her heart on her sleeve. She was always more direct and less diplomatic. During a series of hoax tip-offs she demanded that the perpetrators should be found and jailed for hindering the search.
At other times, Kate McCann demonstrated an inner strength when her husband seemed to falter. During their meeting with the Pope at the Vatican in May, nerves almost overcame Gerry. Kate took over, talking in a quiet, determined manner to the Pontiff, asking him for his prayers and blessing.
She sought relief from torment through exercise, on punishing runs on the beach and up mountains. One day she was sitting on a rock looking out to sea. She said she felt like jumping in and just wanted to “swim and swim and swim”, until the pain went away.
There were also lighter moments, when she would tease her husband for his constant organising and control - his “McCann” characteristics - and joke with him about the Scottish, more extrovert side of the family.
She was only truly animated when talking about Madeleine, the twins and her love for them. But always eating away at her was the guilt of not being there for her daughter. “Whenever I laugh with the twins or eat something nice, it’s always there in the back of my mind - ‘Madeleine would love this’,” she told me.
Yesterday, Gerry said that Sean and Amelie still miss and talk about their big sister endlessly.
“They say heart-breaking things like ‘I’m going to find Madeleine and bring her home’,” he said. If only someone could.
• The new hotline number for anyone with information on where Madeleine might be is 0845 838 4699
May 1st, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Posting from a 100% empty flat (my ex-apartment, where Im going to sleep by the last time (last time in this apartment, I hope). Just my laptop, my ADSL, my sleeping bag and me.
I think that charges won’t delays, will them?
May 1st, 2008 at 10:39 pm
M&A-Still don’t get it-is Chenier saying that they do have financial expertise-it’s either cryptic or I just don’t get it and I’m thick, or disingenious..
May 1st, 2008 at 10:38 pm
#
687
Maria Says:
May 1st, 2008 at 10:13 pm
chenier
Is it possible to be disingenuous in any way other than deliberately?
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May 1st, 2008 at 10:37 pm
M&A
I don’t understand the sense of the picture (in this thread) ¿A group of girls in a concert, by the time of the ballads???
Some piromaniac females willing to burn the Clarrie sticky balls?
M and A
There is meant to be a chain of light on Saturday night along the N Wales coast for Madeleine.
Its Anorak being Anorak
May 1st, 2008 at 10:30 pm
mods & admin
i am on the fence
May 1st, 2008 at 10:28 pm
M&A-I genuinely haven’t got the foggiest what she was saying.
M and a
read her original post again
May 1st, 2008 at 10:23 pm
hi ciara
Im hopping between threads
May 1st, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Hello.
Wtf…how are you?
May 1st, 2008 at 10:15 pm
without this site they wouldn’t know what to say in their documetary’s
May 1st, 2008 at 10:13 pm
chenier
Is it possible to be disingenuous in any way other than deliberately?
May 1st, 2008 at 10:13 pm
682-Can you enlighten me-i am genuinely mystified aand I mean that. Who else have I ‘deliberately’ misinterpreted?
I am beginning to think that unless you show absolute hatred for the McCanns you are not welcome on this site, and if you try to show reason, logic or just don’t believe what you are told to or even question it, you are pro McCann and brainwashed.
And as for disingeneous-haven’t a clue what it means-I hope it is not intended as an insult.
Shouldn’t think anyone is worried about the Mccanns lawyers looking at this site as nobody has said anything thatcould be considered rash have they?
Mods and Admin
I have been following this, and feel you just do not/or will not understand what Chenier was saying.
No one has made you unwelcome, and actually last night I defended you heavily against Dr Watson, or didn’t you notice?
But what the McC lawyers have to do with any of this, please enlighten us.
Rather bizarrely whilst you are accsuing us of being anti MCC, the anti’s are accusing us of being pro
We do try to keep a balance of views.