A new documentary reveals how the tabloids turned on their one-time darling – for daring to be a woman who didn’t shun the spotlight

There’s a story about Paula Yates bumping into Diana, Princess of Wales that Yates’s friend Belinda Brewin recollects in the documentary Paula this week. The People’s Princess turned to Little Miss Hypocrite (I’m selecting two of their tabloid epithets from a smörgåsbord) and said: “I love it when you’re on the front page of the papers because it means I’ve got the day off.” Yates was the Diana of the dark timeline: two epoch-making blondes, one bottle, the other natural; one bawdy, the other demure; one flirtatious, the other innocent; one outspoken, the other reserved; a classic whore and madonna dyad. Perhaps neither one would have been as relentlessly surveilled and scrutinised without the counterpoise of the other, but we can never know, because as a direct or indirect result of that surveillance and scrutiny, by the turn of the century both were dead.

Billed as a documentary about the rise and fall of Paula Yates, centred on her testimony to the journalist Martin Townsend, which has never been heard before, this is, as is so often the case with rise-and-fall narratives, really a story about the British media. Her life story – tragically cut short in 2000, three years after the death by suicide of Michael Hutchence – is typically characterised as a sad one, but at the end of Paula I didn’t feel sad, I felt really angry. This emotion is the only respectful homage to a woman who, with her charisma, biting wit, trashy innuendo – demonic, lithe, ferret-like – redrew the limits of what femininity was supposed to look like. She wouldn’t want you to pity her; she would want you to be furious.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email [email protected] or [email protected]. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 988 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org