who blame bad parents for their woes (especially when they can't answer back)

who blame bad parents for their woes (especially when they can't answer back)

Elton John's father was a bit of a pig - according to the famous musician. He never once went to see his son play; never once gave him 'that Billy Elliot moment'. Moreover: 'He was a tough, unemotional man. Hard. He was dismissive, disappointed and finally absent.'

Goldie, he of the blinging teeth, has his inept mother in his sights: 'I had so much anger towards my mother, it was ruining me,' he revealed.

Davina McCall resents her mother for sending her to live with her grandmother when she was four: 'She said she was going on holiday, but I didn't see her for three months

Ruby Wax bad-mouths both parents during interviews promoting her new 'comedy' show about, er, her depression. Her father, she says, subjected her to 'an abusive relationship', while her mother perfectly represented 'a generation who drove their offspring insane'.

Blaming the parents? I suppose you might as well if you've got tickets to sell. All four of these blame bunnies went public on the same day (last Sunday, to be exact), but they are just hopping on the bandwagon of celebrities who are trashing their dead or aged parents for all to see.

Oprah Winfrey, Gordon Ramsay, Christina Aguilera and Sharon Osbourne have all let it be known that their fathers weren't up to scratch. Janet Street-Porter wrote a book about her detestation of her mother; a detestation apparently based on the woman's fondness for Welsh-speaking budgies.

Best-selling writer Lynn Barber went further: she took down both parents for An Education - the book that became an Oscar-nominated movie. So, well worth it then.

Even if it did mean that two frail people in their 90s were humiliated. The world got to know all about her father's facial boils and 'intelligent but socially untrained' personality, and her mother's 'betaminus brain'.

I know why they do it. Too many celebrities are in thrall to the kind of shrink-talk that always seeks to get to the bottom of things (which always means childhood), if only because it's yet another way of talking incessantly about me-me-me. And from there it is but a hoppity-skip to 'share' the muck and misery.

A peculiarity of the famous is that there is no such thing as enough fame. If there might be an extra shot of attention, spiced with a smattering of revenge and lots of sympathy, then they go for it.

But it isn't sympathy I feel: it's distaste, scorn and revulsion. You don't wash your dirty linen in public, and it's a poor show to speak ill of the dead. More than that, though, I hate the unfairness of it all.

Given that the cowardly beanspiller tends to wait until the accused is deceased, demented or too decrepit to answer back, we only hear one side of the story. Even if the gist of it is true, might there have been mitigation?

Is it possible that Stanley Dwight didn't see Elton play for fear of, maybe, embarrassing his son? Is it possible that serving as a Flight Lieutenant in World War II damaged, somehow, his soul?

In neither case would he have been the first. It's also unfair because the conflict is so imbalanced. In every case, the parents who now take such a bashing were ordinary, often poor and ill-educated people, who were probably as tongue-tied and mystified by the flamboyant cuckoo in their nest as the cuckoo became articulate and contemptuous of them.

Furthermore, precisely because their babies grew up to be so rich, so famous, so lucky - isn't it reasonable that the parents, no matter their follies, might be owed a smidgen of gratitude for bringing their children into a world they would grow to conquer?

Mustn't there have been some sacrifice, some nurture, some support, some love?

Of course, I know there are monster parents. Some. A few. But time and again, as I read these vituperative accounts, I wonder whether I'm not really just reading about the usual rough and tumble of family life, blown sky-high for dramatic effect - regardless of the cost, either to parents still alive or to their memories, as held dear by friends and other family.

Most of us had our ups and downs with our parents; most of us go on to repeat them with our children. Still, I wouldn't dream of launching a revenge attack against my late mother and father, picking out the blacker days for special effect.

For one thing, I'd have to give a nod to the rule of pots and kettles: if they were, sometimes, too strict for my liking, it is also true that I could be a mouthy, tyrannical little madam. Maybe that's just me because, after all, it is hard to imagine Elton John or Janet Street-Porter or Ruby Wax ever being a brattish teenager, isn't it?

By the same token, I'll bet you an early grave that my daughter isn't waiting for me to turn up my toes so that she can dish the dirt on the days when she had to fit around my job, rather than the other way round (which she did).

Neither of us would do it because we are both mothers now, and this we know: parenthood is not an exact science, it's a perpetual work in progress that no more deserves relentless brickbats than it deserves unlimited medals. Mercifully, even within the red-carpet crowd, there are some stars who manage to understand this.

High on my list of the graceful is the singer Lorna Luft, who rises above what - in her case - could be genuine childhood grievance. As the daughter of the troubled Judy Garland, she had an uncommonly wobbly upbringing.

Nevertheless, when asked about it, she carefully and caringly replied: 'Judy was the best mother that she knew how to be.'

Words that put Elton, Ruby and the gang to shame.

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Posted in: celeb lifestyle