Wit & Attitude Quote by Mark Roberts

There is a special kind of grime that clings to celebrity culture at its most predatory, and Mark Roberts names it with the bluntness of someone who’s seen the machinery up close. The anecdote is almost cartoonish: a freelance journalist urging an actor to literally “jump in front” of Princess Diana’s funeral, as if grief were just another camera-ready backdrop. Roberts’ “How pathetic is that?” isn’t just moral disgust; it’s a status report on an industry where access is scarce, competition is desperate, and the incentives quietly reward humiliation.

The phrasing does two things at once. By specifying “freelance journalist,” Roberts points to a rung of media labor where the pressure to deliver a sensational angle is acute and institutional guardrails are thin. This isn’t an abstract critique of “the press” so much as a snapshot of precarious hustling colliding with public mourning. And by calling it “the stupidest thing on the planet,” he rejects the premise that notoriety is automatically valuable. In a world that often treats any attention as currency, Roberts insists there’s still a line where the exchange rate collapses: you don’t convert a national funeral into a personal stunt without paying in dignity.

The context matters because Diana’s death was a cultural fever dream of paparazzi guilt, mediated grief, and spectacle. Roberts’ refusal reads as a small act of decency, but also as a critique of the way the media ecosystem recruits people to help it profane the moment. The real target isn’t only the freelancer. It’s the logic that made the request feel, to someone, like a reasonable career move.