The 10:10 Climate Change Campaign (whoever they might be) have just released a video scripted by comedy screenwriter, Richard Curtis. Schoolchildren, company employees and a number of celebrities who all admit they won’t be doing anything to reduce carbon emissions are hilariously blown to smithereens when an eco-enthusiast presses a button.
You can see it here on James Delingpole’s Telegraph blog. (Delingpole does a better hatchet job on this repellent little spec of video excrement than I ever could.)
They really loathe human beings, these tree huggers.
Watching the offending item, I pondered, not for the first time, the disappointment of discovering that someone who has written something you really enjoyed is, in real life, an absolute blister.
For example, I eventually caught up with Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections two years ago and surprised myself by thoroughly enjoying it – I don’t normally appreciate 600-page novels about dysfunctional Middle American families, especially when a key character is suffering, painfully and humiliatingly, from dementia. Maybe it wasn’t the Great American Novel many critics dubbed it, but it was a damned fine book nonetheless: sensitive, engrossing, funny, and extremely well-written.
And then Franzen had to spoil it all by doing a publicity tour for his latest novel, and revealing himself in several interviews as a prickly, self-important, awkward jerk you really wouldn’t want to meet. It was when he reported, obliquely, no doubt experiencing a self-congratulatory frisson, that erstwhile Liberal God-King, Barack Obama, had requested a pre-publication copy of the new book, and had deemed it “terrific”, that I decided it was time for me and Franny to part company: if I were to read another of his books, my new-found knowledge of the author’s rather unattractive personality and his silly political views would make it difficult to suspend disbelief.
I really wish I hadn’t read that article. (Just to make sure, I read another one in case the first interviewer had snapped a heel or been issued a parking ticket just before meeting the man – but, no, Franzen’s a genuine jerk.)
Unfortunately, this happens with writers all the time. I know that my reaction is irrational, as I believe works of art should be judged entirely on their own merits, entirely divorced from their creator. If Hitler had been a talented painter, dragging the world into war and slaughtering millions of innocents wouldn’t have altered the quality of his paintings one iota. (It’s nevertheless a relief to discover that he couldn’t paint for toffee.)
From Hitler back to Richard Curtis (not such a big leap, if Curtis’s eco-Nazi video is anything to go by), it’s not that I didn’t know he had feet of clay (I’m talking about Curtis here, should there be any doubt) - The Vicar of Dibley and some of his more emetic rom-coms revealed that much – but to actually believe that you’re so overwhelmingly right about any issue that it justifies inviting the rest of us to laugh at the depiction of schoolchildren being murdered for not wholeheartedly committing to your modish obsession reveals an alarming level of misanthropy.
What a turd.
Once upon a time, Curtis – along with another odious twerp, Ben Elton – wrote the scripts for Blackadder, one of the greatest comedies British Television has produced (up there with Fawlty Towers, Porridge and Dad’s Army). And that’s worrying, because when someone has made you laugh so consistently and so often over the course of many years, you tend to develop a sort of fondness for them, based on gratitude. You don’t expect them to be wonderful human beings, or to share many of your views, but you do assume you share a basic view of humanity – there’s nothing quite like comedy for bringing the nation together by revealing the things we all find funny.
It was bad enough when Ben Elton went on to create stultifyingly witless celebrations of 1970s’ pop idols for the West End coach party audience - we already knew, from his cringe-inducingly unfunny stand-up comedy routines, that we didn’t much care for the cut of the chap’s jib. We always assumed Curtis was the genuinely funny one. And for the writer who created the tremendously moving final episode of Blackadder Goes Forthto have had anything to do with the vicious slice of ecomaniacal bile which James Delingpole has brought to our attention is quite shocking.
Does all that money and success and adulation simply render these people semi-autistic, no longer able to understand the rest of us?
The only good thing about the video, by the way, is that anyone unsure of where to stand on the issue of Global Warming before seeing it will be guaranteed to join us skeptics after one viewing.
Maybe Curtis is actually a climate change denier who’s come up with a cunning plan?
Or maybe he really is just a self-regarding, sanctimonious turd.
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