The ideological capture of the entertainment industry
We shouldn’t be surprised to see TV stars delivering sermons.
With the exception of the Worst Picture gong at the “Razzies”, perhaps the least coveted prize in the entertainment industry is “Celebrity Ally” at the British LGBT Awards. The latest recipient is the actor David Tennant who, at the award ceremony this week, used his acceptance speech as an opportunity to rail against the equalities minister Kemi Badenoch. Specifically, he called on her to “shut up” and said that he wished she “did not exist anymore”. And all because Badenoch has taken a clear stance on the rights of women and gay people in the face of attempts by trans activists to see them eroded.
Badenoch has hit back, writing on X: “I will not shut up. I will not be silenced by men who prioritise applause from Stonewall over the safety of women and girls”. She described Tennant as a “rich, lefty, white male celebrity so blinded by ideology he can’t see the optics of attacking the only black woman in government by calling publicly for my existence to end”.
One would have thought that as an “ally” to activists who routinely claim that criticism is indistinguishable from genocide, Tennant might have been more cautious about making such quips. And he might have realised that a white man criticising a black woman would be a major violation of the intersectional creed. In his defence, Tennant is just one of many celebrities who simply has no idea what he is talking about. He hasn’t listened to, or hasn’t understood, the arguments that women and gay rights campaigners are making. Those who are still unclear about why Pride is now essentially a homophobic enterprise could do worse than reading the piece I wrote for Spiked this week.
Why are so many in the entertainment industry preaching an identical gospel, one that depends upon completely disregarding the hard-won rights of women and homosexuals? Future historians will no doubt find much of this inexplicable. How is it, they will ask, that major public figures in the early twenty-first century suddenly took this regressive turn, that they considered it to be morally acceptable to include men in women’s sports and to accommodate men in women’s prisons, to medicalise young people for being gay, and to insist that anyone who disagreed ought to be characterised as a demon in human form?
One wonders whether Tennant may end up asking these questions himself. As the impact of the Cass Review continues to resonate across the world, it surely won’t be long before some very vocal celebrities begin realising how wrong they were and making their excuses. It will be particularly difficult for Tennant, of course, due to his involvement in the BBC’s Doctor Who, which was once a much-loved science-fiction show for children and is now an exercise in ideological propaganda with a few CGI monsters thrown in.
One deservedly ridiculed scene shows the Doctor being berated by his assistant for assuming the pronouns of a furry alien called “The Meep”.
“Are you he or she or they?” the Doctor asks. Of course, we are dealing in science fiction here, so perhaps this creature requires a plural pronoun because it embodies multiple personalities, or has a second head concealed under its fur. But the reason most sensible viewers find this stuff so cringemaking is that it gives the impression that a priest had suddenly barged into the writers’ room and demanded that a line of scripture be shoehorned into the dialogue.
And of course it’s not just Doctor Who. Those of us who enjoy going to the cinema or watching streaming services such as Netflix will have noticed that many of the shows and films that are now produced are sermons dressed up as entertainment. Divisive social justice boilerplate is smuggled in wherever possible, and the audience can’t quite shake the feeling that it’s being hectored. Major prizes in the realms of theatre, film and literature are given to activists to reward them for spreading the sacred word of intersectionality. Critics are complicit too, lauding artists that promote the “correct” values and damning those that don’t. It all starts to feel like state-sanctioned art, agitprop for the establishment. And that’s why so much of it feels bloodless and dispensable.
Worse still, anyone in the creative arts - be they writers, artists, musicians, comedians, poets - understands that they must toe the line in order to be commissioned, and to receive the plaudits they so desire. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t exceptionally talented artists producing good work, but it does mean that their output is somewhat sanitised, that self-censorship is common, and that the most innovative of minds are stifled and unable to find work.
I am not implying here that art cannot be political or pedagogic. One of my favourite books growing up was Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) by Thomas Hughes, which is explicitly preachy, but a fine novel nonetheless. And doubtless you’ll remember the death of Jo in Bleak House (1852), where Charles Dickens halts the narrative to lecture the wealthy reader on the plight of the poor.
“Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.”
The novel momentarily turns into a homily, and although the book remains one of his finest, this is its least effective moment. Personally, I’ve always found that didactic art leaves me cold. I’m with Oscar Wilde, who explained in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) that vice and virtue are simply “materials” for artists. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book”, he said. “Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
I don’t read novels for lectures in morality. If I wanted that, I’d go to a church. In one of the rare moments when he got it wrong, George Orwell claimed that “all art is propaganda”. In truth, propagandistic art is often the most banal. The essence of creativity is individuality. Art is, as Zola put it, “life seen through a temperament”. When artists are expected to parrot the accepted views of the establishment, they cannot be said to be producing art at all. Rather, they are slaves to another person’s vision.
Of course, the decline in the popularity of Doctor Who suggests that even fans of the series would rather not see it transformed into a messaging service for the fashionable views of the establishment. Most of us have come to accept a degree of preaching from the arts, but surely that time is coming to an end. Meanwhile, we’ll just have to suffer the likes of David Tennant making absurd quasi-religious proclamations from their various soapboxes and assuming that this is the God-given role of the entertainer. It’s all terribly tedious, but with any luck we’ll live long enough to see its demise.
Wishing someone no longer exists is vicious, sorry. These are not 'kind' people.
Tom Browns Schooldays was one of my dad's favourite books. He always encouraged me to read it & I will definitely do so. Celebrities make me want to vomit. I've always thoroughly disliked most of them for their insecurities, the desperation need they have for validation & to be liked. I can't relate to that because I absolutely embrace being disliked. I don't give a a hoot whether ppl do or don't that's not for me to worry about. They are very happy to jump on a bandwagon, to conform. This trans ideology is homophobic as you rightly say. Being gay is so passé now & trans is "cool" definitely a social contagion Perfect for those who want to be "right on" & accepted by the ppl we choose to align with