In the cold light of play — concert couple caught by a kiss cam playing God, relished by a salacious public

What is it about The Affair that so fascinates us? We turn on those who fall from grace – adulterers (from the Latin meaning to corrupt or make impure) – with ghoulish prurience, rubbing our hands with glee.

Nobody with a phone or access to social media will have missed the images of a horrified couple caught canoodling at a Coldplay concert (of all places). A roving “kiss cam” captured them uncoupling from an embrace, a moment that was replayed over and over as a salacious public gobbled up their discomfort.

We have an insatiable appetite for adultery, apparently. The hype around the publicly announced infidelity refused to die down, lasting many news cycles – so much so that Coldplay frontman Chris Martin issued a warning at a subsequent concert: there will be roving cameras, so if you’re in the audience, you are likely to be seen on our big screens.

One of the big issues discussed by university professors and legal experts covers the question of our right to privacy – of which we have none in a public place, apparently.

That the man captured in the video resigned was debated. He was the CEO of the company at which the woman was the HR head. Was it necessary for him to leave? Yes, was the general consensus, as company morale had been dented and his respected status sullied. The woman subsequently resigned as well.

The couple were speedily identified on social media and their indiscretion quickly went viral. Jokes, memes, TikTok videos, talk shows, radio stations, TV news and newspaper articles reported the incident – even the globally respected New York Times published several stories.

Though I scoured the news and social media, I could not find a single occasion where morality, the breaking of sacred vows or the hurt, pain and suffering caused to family was mentioned. I have to assume that religious leaders did not weigh in on the “scandal”.

Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot seemed to have achieved notoriety, but of the celebrity kind rather than being made into social pariahs for unacceptable behaviour.

Did times change without my noticing? I could not help but wonder what my mother’s reaction would be. It has to be said that my mother was a pious woman. She spent a large portion of her uneventful life on her knees, in prayer. She was a novena virtuoso – that nine-day Catholic prayer that is undertaken to seek special favours or blessings (begun, apparently, when the apostles prayed for nine days between the ascension of Jesus and Pentecost – when the Holy Spirit descended upon them.)

I inherited her rosary, a string of small wooden beads passed between fingers so often the beads wore down to a chestnut patina.

She said the nine-day prayer when someone was sick, when she needed money for school uniforms, that I’d find a good husband (sadly, that didn’t work).

But mostly novenas came before our exams, which obviously worked as all four of us – my brothers, sister and I – excelled at school. She credited God for our success, discounting the astonishing early start she and my lovely dad gave us: reading to us every night when we were little, which segued into setting aside reading time for us every afternoon.

After the allotted reading time, we spent time analysing what we’d read – be it Snow White and the Seven Dwarves or that Herman Melville classic, Moby Dick (the main important themes being, according to my lovely dad, perseverance and solidarity; we four thought the entire thing a huge waste of time and energy spent seeking revenge on a poor white whale!)

We had structured dinnertime chat in which we were encouraged to think about the world around us, and further afield, and proffer opinions.

But my mother chalked it up to her endless novenas and so the blessings bestowed on us came from on high, from her direct hotline to Himself up there.

My mother was unwavering: there was good, and there was bad (often referred to as evil). No greys existed in her rigid moral code. The joke in our family was that my father had, to all intents and purposes, married a nun.

It wasn’t an entirely unfair summation. My mother had spent her childhood at a quite (I thought) miserable convent boarding school, Little Flower School in Ixopo in then Natal.

It was opened the year she was born, 1923, set up by Missionary Sisters of the Precious Blood for the daughters of indigent coloured people in the province.

Mom was shipped off as a tiny six- or seven-year-old, part of a contingent of little coloured girls from the area, by train, from her home in Dundee. It was said (exaggerated, likely) that my barefoot Granny Ali (short for Alexandra – my middle name) carried my mom’s trunk to the station on her head.

And so began her education, steeped in the quite cruel nuns’ traditions, which taught of a wrathful God, not the benevolent, loving God I believe in. Poor mom.

It followed that moral turpitude was up there with the most reviled crimes committed by humans. Behaviour that was deemed inherently base and depraved, and conduct that went against the accepted rules of morality were, to my mother, cardinal sins.

You can imagine her Victorian view of “fallen women”.

When, more than half a century ago, a distant cousin had an affair with a married man – an open secret in our small, conservative town – it was rumour mill gossip. Of course, my mother was tongue-clickingly ashamed, tutt-tutting her way through it all. Another novena.

But here’s the kicker: the small-town couple’s peccadilloes were contained among those members of the community who gave a damn. It was the 1970s; there were no posts on social media (social media meant word of mouth!), no public platform where she could be shamed.

Yes, (mostly) her and his punishment included closed-circle public humiliation that came in the form of being talked about behind hands in the general dealer store, the butcher shop, the green grocer. But it was limited to those who knew, or cared.

Not so the Coldplay concert incident that sparked an astonishing number of social media hours, serving as a stark reminder of how quickly things can spread and how we rarely have any privacy, surrounded by cameras as we are.

Here’s a mind-boggling fact: the video of the couple’s indiscretion was posted by a concertgoer to her small TikTok following on a Wednesday. Within 48 hours it had more than 120 million views.

Smiling emojis with the most commonly used word “outed” could be found in what was called “Coldplaygate”.

Unlike my dear mother, I have no strong views on adultery. Individual choice and personal accountability for those moral choices are what I believe in.

What’s changed since I grew up in that small Natal town?  We now live in a world where we are being watched all the time. Behave indiscreetly in public and you will be caught on camera and outed.

My mother would thoroughly have approved of this new policing method. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.