And, in that context, it’s been interesting to see the character of press comment on Britney’s bikini pictures over the past couple of weeks. It tells us a lot about the nature of the whole celebrity commentary business.

It’s becoming obvious that gossip columnists don’t really look at a picture of a celebrity and write a remark based on their observations; nor do they construct a “story” based on a consecutive series of such observations. What they do is create - in advance - a storyline for the soap opera of a celebrity’s life, then interpret all available facts and pictures in ways that fit and support the storyline.

In other times, the media would have jumped all over the pictures showing an apparently very obviously pregnant Britney smoking out back of her house. There would have been a lot of adverse comment on her unfailingly fertility and seeming ignorance of birth-control, the lunacy of having another baby at this crucial time of her life, the sluttiness implied by the fact that we don’t know which of various men the daddy would turn out to be, the irresponsibility of having another child when she’d already lost custody of two... and much more.

In the not-so-distant past the gossipers wouldn’t have hesitated, or held back till they were sure that she WAS pregnant. They’d have gone for the jugular in a second because all of this would have fitted perfectly with their expectations and asssumptions and would have been the natural continuation of the storyline they’d been writing for her for so long.

But in fact, the predominant media reaction was doubt and caution. The tabloids went so far as to talk about a “suspicious-looking bump” and wondered with an almost endearing bewilderment if it could possibly be that she was pregnant again. Nobody seemed to want to believe it.

Similarly, the recent pictures of Britney on the beach in Costa Rica would in the past have provoked a great deal of ridicule concerning her “flabby” tummy, her fat bottom, her thunder-thighs, etc. etc. But in fact, all of the media comment I’ve seen has been almost perversely positive, and has concentrated on how healthy she looks, how she’s steadily improving, and how her body looks “great”.

It has rarely been more obvious that the interpretation of, and commentary on, celebrity pictures is “in the eye of the beholder”. Paparazzi pictures aren’t just pictures in a vacuum. They have to be invested with meaning, and the meaning is taken from the current consensus on the state-of-play in a celebrity’s life.

Gossip writers have a strong moralistic streak and their present mindset is to reward Britney’s genuinely strenuous efforts to get her life back to where they think it should be. What we have to watch for now is what happens if Britney shows signs of deviating from the script they have already written for her. It will tell us a lot more about gossip writers and about the script than about Britney herself.

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