The Academy Awards were held nearly two weeks ago in Los Angeles. Didn’t watch – looking for meatier entertainment these days: if it doesn’t include a voodoo ceremony featuring arguing, gesticulating black priests that could result in the live sacrifice of a pop starlet, I’d rather just link up with a local progressive boomer inquisition, bear witness to some Sunday torture.
So contrived and redundant is this event that even the British version – the naff Baftas – outdid the Oscars this year, but for reasons of a different kind of quality. 2025’s I Swear had been nominated for Best Actor or whatever they call it nowadays; as it was based on the life of a (real) Tourette’s Syndrome sufferer – a Scot called John Davidson – the clever producers thought it would be nice to invite John along to the ceremony. John got there, smiled for the cameras then proceeded to – involuntarily – abuse two black presenters on live television. “I also called Alan Cumming a pedo,” he sheepishly confessed afterwards, referring to the gay Scottish actor who had worn a plastic bracket over his head that night purportedly to represent the transgenders.
But they are very disappointing these days, celebrities. They don’t throw televisions into swimming pools from high rises anymore; to say nothing of cars, overdosing is at a two-decade low and plastic surgeons are clearly being given the wrong instructions.
One of the more intriguing explanations for the vanishing of any impulsive liveliness from today’s stars involves their agents, and the outsized role they’ve come to play in their subject’s lives. Because most of today’s celebrities were groomed for stardom by their parents, sometimes at the barrel of a pistol or the end of a whip, the celebrity doesn’t know how to say “no”: if a luxury belief pops up, their agents warn them to get angry, cry, post about it then blame white people – or else. This is the idiocracy that has swamped Hollywood and London in the last two decades.
It’s become ubiquitous enough to call a factory setting. A rich production line sees different celebrities obsessing over exactly same things in the same ways – programming to date has included lockdowns, vaccines, BLM, Gaza, gay soldiers, transgenders, the neurodivergent – whatever that is – and most of the other line items you’ll encounter in the professional protester’s continually updated guide.
But that meets a hard stop at UK comedian Ricky Gervais. For years Gervais has been the most normal celebrity around, measured primarily on the fact that his annoyance with certain people – mainly said celebrities running their mouths- is consistent with our own. For years that is…until the past six weeks.
Enter John Cleese, the UK’s comedy icon, its greatest ever, above Gervais and his own contemporaries. The UK had some foundation of comedy when he arrived on the scene, but he upgraded it, then again, and then again: if it is true that Cleese was uniquely gifted, then this gift became the most enduring and versatile force in UK entertainment history.
Invariably Cleese settled into the twilight of his life in the same way as millions of English milquetoast boomers – rich, angry and opinionated, the standard, elderly left-wing position in the country. He had terse things to say about the conservatives, about Nigel Farage and the seven or eight itinerant football thugs sitting in an internet cafe who comprise this “far right” force in the UK and who are said to be the country’s most dangerous security threat. Then six weeks ago, Cleese’s factory settings started malfunctioning.
It started with the revelations that emerged from a crowdfunded, independently set inquiry into the allegations of rape and grooming by Muslim men and gangs of Pakistani lineage. Rupert Lowe MP, then an independent, had convened the inquiry, in which survivors of events that have disembowelled many towns in northern England spoke of their traumatic experiences. Barely a handful of other MPs attended. The media was uninterested, shameless.
Oddly, Cleese was watching, and he was horrified. Given that establishment UK media has deliberately underreported the scandal, it could have been the first time he’d heard about it.
The type of things discussed at the inquiry don’t happen in the celebrity world. There’s no anal branding at Chateau Marmont or those luxury retreats established to dry the elite out of digital addiction. Nobody threatens the cast of Bridgerton with assault then follows through. On Hollywood’s sets, the police ordinarily investigate crimes and arrest perpetrators; in England’s north, they were complicit in rape and human trafficking.
So, Cleese started commenting and in doing so, became the first mainstream celebrity to acknowledge his country’s greatest shame. But commenting on the behaviour of Muslim men is banned from the programming – white, no problem, Muslim – keep schtum. At this point, you can imagine telephones ringing Defcon 1 in Hollywood – the streaming giants barking instructions to their production teams: find out if there’s any trace of that mental boomer on our books and if so, burn them.
Whilst Cleese was wondering out loud about Rupert Lowe maybe becoming Prime Minister one day, a Muslim extremist featured on the organizing team of an event that saw Muslim men take over Trafalgar Square to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Here, Cleese went after London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan when the pint-sized supreme leader suggested that criticism of the event made Muslims feel unsafe. “You silly little man,” Cleese said, “just read the Quran to them then.” Woah. Easy now.
Multiculturalism as a concept in the UK (a vastly different proposition from demonstrably successful multi-ethnism in SA) and the legacy of the rape and grooming are so preposterous in theory and practice it’s hardly surprising that the first mainstream resistance would emerge from a character once known as Basil Fawlty. The country might be puzzled that it came to this – but will take it.
But for everyone else who has regrettably pivoted to laughing at celebrities scolding the public, a defect, or product recall, of this magnitude could signal this species terminating their pointless sabbatical and reverting to dancing, singing, acting and beneath that, benders, perp walks and mugshots. In other words, returning to exactly the places we expect them to be.
[Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Cleese_in_2024_-_54020963437.jpg]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend