Paul Thomas: Let stars have voice but kids' clamour the loudest

Paul Thomas

It used to be said that children should be seen but not heard. The cover story in last week's Canvas went one step further, arguing that the same rule should apply to celebrities.

Given the opportunity to plug her new book on celebrity culture, Guardian columnist Marina Hyde made the most of it, excoriating the likes of Madonna and Angelina Jolie for their high visibility espousal of various causes.

"It's ludicrous," she sniffed. "These people make movies and music, for goodness sake. They're not especially bright, they don't have analytical brains, and they're not experts in the fields they are drafted into. They're doing more harm than good."

Another high-profile activist raked over the coals this week was Prince Charles who scuppered a luxury housing development in London, to which he objected on aesthetic grounds, by persuading Qatar's royal family to withdraw their backing for the project. He was accused of acting unconstitutionally and "in an almost feudal way".

Lectures from Hollywood stars on, say, child poverty can be hard to stomach if you assume that having shaken the dust of Africa from their Prada shoes, they jetted off first class to Cannes to promote an escapist fantasy, the making of which cost enough money to sustain an Ethiopian village for a century.

Nevertheless, this push to gag celebrities should make us uneasy. In the first place it's selective: is anyone suggesting that Renaissance Man Viggo Mortensen, for instance, should keep his opinions to himself?

One can't help feeling that the old dumb blonde syndrome is at work here - the assumption, by no means confined to men, that the more attractive a woman, the lower her IQ.

Secondly, their critics come across as self-appointed thought police. The modernist architect Lord Rogers is urging the British Government to set up a committee of constitutional experts to examine Prince Charles' role in public life.

That sounds suspiciously like a kangaroo court designed to silence a critic and deprive an individual of the right of free speech.

Hyde declares that "many celebrities have gone well beyond their mandate and they need to be reined in".

Who has decided they've gone beyond their mandate? Who has decided they need reining in? Who's going to tighten the reins? The answer would appear to be Marina Hyde.

Presumably the vacuum created by Commissar Hyde's gagging order would be filled by her and people like her. However, if you combined the voices of every bleeding heart celebrity on the planet, it would still be a barely audible squeak compared to the roar of the media machine which is heard around the world, all day, every day.

And I suppose if we put our minds to it, we could think of one or two columnists who fit Hyde's dismissive description: not especially bright, lacking analytical brains, not experts on the subjects they pontificate about. (Not that I know any personally, you understand.)

Finally, I get the impression that clotheshorses, bimbos, hedonists, and meatheads, none of whom could give a toss about the plight of the Palestinians or the starving kids in Africa, are still in the majority in show business. Can't we handle a few celebrities with a cause? As a Times columnist wrote of the controversy swirling around Prince Charles: "What do you want the heir to the throne to do? Do you want a vacuous, empty-headed playboy or a serious person?"

Rather than silence celebrities who, after all, are easy to ignore, I'd suggest we focus our attention on the noises emanating from our children. As anyone who has sat through student speech competitions or events like Stage Challenge will be grimly aware, when the youngsters of today see a bandwagon coming, they generally pile on board.

Leaving aside the suspicion that their disgust over child labour in the third world won't stop them buying global brands made in Indonesia, or the knowledge that their homilies are heavy on platitudes but light on perspective and historical context, one wonders who they think they're addressing. An audience of baby boomers doesn't need to be lectured about social problems. Hell, we invented half of them.

Until we came along, society assumed that the whole point of having minorities was that it gave you someone to look down on.

It's fine that children have an awareness of these issues, but I hope they're being encouraged to think for themselves rather than just being spoon-fed fashionable attitudes.

I hope we're not going down the dreary path of insisting that every speech or production has to have a message and rewarding earnestness or feigned empathy at the expense of wit and originality.

I hope we're not producing a generation of prigs.