Hypocritical adulation-junkie superstars - the easy route to sainthood

I’ve long wondered why actors, rock stars and TV personalities feel they have a right to lecture the rest of us on subjects which fall outside their areas of expertise. Jeremy irons is the latest addle-pated thespian to sound off about the environment. There’s too many of us, apparently, and nature has ways of righting itself, so we’ll probably all die of a horrible disease. Or war. Or something. Anyway, we all have to start living sustainably, and that’s all there is to it. See?

Well, Jezza, I sort of do see that people who maintain no less than seven homes might be accused of ludicrously selfish, planet-harming behaviour, and have obviously forfeited the right to lecture anyone else about splurging the planet’s resources (thanks to James Delingpole for these facts).

What possesses these fools to take the moral high ground without bothering to examine their own lives to see if they’ve earned the right to lecture Mr. and Mrs. Ordinary? 

Three reasons, I think.

First, because they’re famous members of the entertainment industry, they get interviewed a lot, and that means they have many more opportunities to make fools of themselves than those of us living in no doubt deserved obscurity: we can spout sanctimonious twaddle safe in the knowledge that only our family, friends or work colleagues will hear it – and we know they’ll dismiss it instantly.

Second, because the famous (rather than the merely rich) genuinely aredifferent, they inevitably tend to mix with their own kind, and, as I’ve pointed out before, successful actors, rock musicians and TV personalities know that were they to voice opinions at variance with those of their fellow professionals, their career opportunities would be adversely affected (the conservative writer and actor Julian Fellowes claims to have been thrown off a BBC production by its left-wing star because of his “non-progressive” political views). Rock stars and actors are 99% touchie-feelie, tree-hugging, big government left-wingers. Banging on about the environment – being liberal in general – is by far the easiest option: swimming against the tide by espousing anti-warmist, pro-free market, right-wing views would be the brave option. Which is why so few of these air-heads ever choose it.

Third, and possibly the most important factor, is that being a successful actor or rock star probably means you regularly experience fantastic highs accompanied by masses of public adulation: standing in front of a 50,000 strong audience baying their love for you in some enormo-dome must be a highly addictive experience. The same with a packed theatre doing its nut after you’ve knocked off the definitive Lear of your era. Or your agent phoning to inform you that, since the last movie you directed has won an Oscar, you have a host of studios fighting to finance that Little Jimmy Osmond biopic you’ve waited twenty years to film. 

Imagine how incredibly good you’d feel about yourself in the unlikely event that “success so huge and wholly farcical” were to come your way in such a highly public setting. You might begin to suspect it was yours by right. Unfortunately, after experiencing it a few times, it probably starts to pall. People have got used to you being a winner. You’ve got used to you being a winner. And you begin to ask – is that all there is? Certainly, you’ve proved you can act your socks off, or front an Irish stadium band, but it’s no longer enough: look at the praise and love heaped on Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela. How great would that make you feel? 

So, you cast about for a cause to help you leap from the Everest of entertainment industry superstardom to the Olympus of beatified do-goodery. Free trade? Leave the EU? Scrap ID cards? Support for the whaling industry? Control the deficit? Cut immigration? Prevent Iran developing nuclear weapons? Let’s face it – these just aren’t the sort of topics that cut it. They have little emotional resonance for anyone under 30, and their proponents generally get a bad press. 

The cause has to be something that makes you feel good about yourself, and makes other people feel good about you when you espouse it while accepting an Oscar, or hosting the Comedy Awards, or giving an on-set interview, or opening a week of sell-out concerts at the 02 Arena: supporting Trident won’t cut the mustard. Neither will alleviating some truly horrible but relatively minor disease which chooses victims indiscriminately. It has to attack certain types of easily identifiable victims ripe for sympathy, i.e. they have to be victims of prejudice or capitalism as well: muscular dystrophy just won’t do.

It has to be something easy to grasp, emotionally charged… noble! But it also has to be mega, so you can talk to world leaders and get invited to the UN and get on the cover of Time. 

Well, there are only three real candidates: Climate Change (including Rain Forests, of course), Famine and AIDS (in Africa, of course). In time, Global Warming will be shown to be a non-existent phenomenon. Western intervention in African famines will have been revealed to cause more misery than it prevented. African AIDS will have been shown not to be the fault of Catholicism, but of the African male’s penchant for unprotected sex.

But don’t worry: by then, you’ll have been canonized and taken your place in the pantheon of “those who made a difference”. And, of course, you won’t need to change your fabulously comfortable lifestyle.

Result!