Suzanne Harrington: In an awful world, we need Liam and Pamela's love to last

Irish Examiner

4 days ago

At last! Some good news. These days we'll take anything. Kitten rescued from tree. Seagull befriends traffic warden. Tenner found down back of sofa. Anything at all.
Anything that isn't going to trigger our adrenals, send our cortisol into orbit, or traumatise our eyeballs as we struggle towards sleep after a long day of trying to avoid the news.
It is therefore with unreasonable and disproportionate levels of joy that we greet the news about Pammy and Liamo.
Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson — is this the best, most straightforwardly glorious piece of news to reach our overstimulated central nervous systems since Johnny Logan won the Eurovision in 1980? I'd say yes.
A surge of genuine happiness — actual endorphins — course through us as we watch them being cute together.
Seeing them double-entendre-ing about her home-made muffin was a special moment in the recent media hellscape. At last.
Some genuine loveliness has made the news. Not the kind of promotional power-couple fakery concocted by Turkey-teethed PRs, not some staged Instagram nobodies desperate for likes; nope.
Pammy and Liamo are too old for that. And they are not nobodies.
Not going to lie — when she first popped into our consciousness, slo-moing across our screens in that red swimming costume, a Glamazonian Farrah Fawcett for the '90s, my initial reaction was… meh. A human Barbie, decades before Greta Gerwig made Barbie great again.
Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson in The Naked Gun
Amid the acid house fliers wall-papering the side of the fridge in our shared house, a boyfriend had blu-tacked a glittery picture of Pammy, incongruous amid the Beatrice Dalle, the Riot Grrls and Tank Girls. He was being ironic, he said — Baywatch was as naff as Michael Hasselhoff's pants.
The reality was that every straight male with a pulse would have crawled through broken glass for a glimpse of her. When that sex tape happened in 1996, the misogyny was off the charts.
I fell in love with Pammy for a different reason; turns out she was a massive animal rights advocate.
An animal lover beyond dogs and cats. My kinda lady. Then came the 2022 miniseries, Pammy & Tommy, which she hated, but which increased our respect for her even more, as we got an idea of what she'd been though.
There were the friendships with Vivienne Westwood and Julian Assange. Not your average starlet.
We now find ourselves in full blown Pammy Renaissance — outdoing herself in The Last Showgirl, the chic makeup-less elegance, the idyllic non-Hollywood life in Canada.
The refusal to be anyone but herself. The sons she adores, who adore her back.
And now Liam. As a generic car-chase movie type with a growly voice, he was never on my radar — he's not as flashy as Colin Farrell, or as actorly as Brendan Gleeson, or as Bondy as Pierce Brosnan — but then Derry Girls happened.
Turns out he's funny. To meet on the set of a Naked Gun remake is adorable and hilarious and just a little bit ludicrous, which makes them all the sweeter.
So thanks for brightening our day, Pammy and Liamo. Thanks for putting old school romance front and centre.
The only thing I'm worried about is that she's my age and he's 73. Let's hope he's up to his tonsils in green juice and vegan Omegas — because as a symbol of love in a world full of awful, we need them to last.