Lockdown Bulletin 4 - Not funny, Not Clever, Just Maddening

If you can stand it, take a look at this and this and this. Each of these ghastly displays has been posted by a famous person in the last ten days. They have done it in the belief, one assumes, that just the sight of them, however unamusing, witless and banal they appear, will make people all over the world feel better.

Maybe I'm alone in this, but I'm afraid it doesn't work for me. My only reaction to these terrible spectacles is to resolve to make every effort, when this crisis is over, to effect a change to end the cult of celebrity - or, at the very least, if we must have celebrities, to ensure we have celebrities who possess self-knowledge and talent.

I suppose none of the above examples was more than execrable, however, whereas this, the response from the dean of an arts college in New York to students needing their fees returned to them, given that classes can't go ahead due to the outbreak of COVID-19, is a glimpse of pure cold bastardry.

And don't get me started on the toxic combination of a parade of semi-celebs (I neither know nor care who most of them are, so it's no use asking) and NHS worship, which was on display in this broadcast. What was the point of it? It will probably add to the burden on Britain's perfectly okay health service (but no better than those of several other countries and fetishised in a way that makes it impossible to improve) by creating an influx of people made sick by the empty sentimentality of the gesture.

What a demonstration that noxious film is of how celebrity has been allowed to be equated with superiority: why is it more interesting to see these performers say thank you to the NHS than to see less famous people do the same thing? I know that the collective for people who are not well-known is "ordinary people", but I hadn't realised, until I saw this video, that, for those in charge of the media, the adjective "ordinary" is more than a tag - the makers and broadcasters of shallow video clips evidently believe that people who aren't famous are genuinely "ordinary" - that is, of no interest - and their "thank yous" aren't worth displaying to the wider world.

Of course, in my view, as I've already said, none of these thank yous are more than pure flannel, filled with that dreadful Jim'll-Fix-It kind of faux bonhomie that I've always mistrusted. If celebs actually were better than the rest of us, they would have recognised the superficiality of the whole ghastly enterprise and insisted instead on doing something genuinely useful - for instance,  all looking into the camera and, instead of being wet and meaningless, asking why Transport for London cut services just when it was most important that buses and underground trains become less crowded. That might have been a helpful way to use their fame to highlight something stupid and possibly bring about some useful change.

What we learn from all this is the obvious - performers are people who are desperate for attention.  When they make their little video clips, they may pretend they are trying to lift our spirits, but really they are thirsty for our gaze. I prefer to watch a less needy cult figure - Bernd, the famously depressed piece of German bread.