Even the celebrity classes have some real shining stars

Acentury of normal life gave us the Oscars, a hideous festival of self-regard in which the most beautiful and wealthiest gathered not just to big each other up (most professions do that) but to demonstrate to the rest of us that wealth and beauty and devoting one’s life to a job that is basically supercharged showing-off doesn’t automatically render a person less worthy. Indeed, they feel they are superior morally and intellectually, not like Those People Over There with the bad teeth and the boring jobs who voted for the funny orange man.

The plague month, on the other hand, has given us the Thursday night applause for our key workers, the people without whom society would rapidly regress. At last, it seems, we understand what applause is for; not bigging up the privileged impotent, but showing gratitude to the anonymous important.

As I wrote here recently, one amusing symptom of the pandemic has been the unintentional reveal by celebrities about who’s really top dog in the star/fan dynamic; from Madonna seeking our attention in her tub to Sam Smith having a meltdown in his non-binary mansion, they need us more than we need them. What nightmares of a new reality must torment these confused creatures, without their face doctors and “glam squads” and monstrous regiments of PR spinners to stand between their neediness and the paying public.

On the other hand, how pleasant it is to be proved wrong about people you loathed before the plague.

I’m thinking specifically of the Woke-ing Dead triumvirate of Joe Wicks (the online fitness guru who has in just a couple of weeks donated £80,000 from his online exercise classes to the NHS) and of Jack Monroe (the gender-fluid cook who raised more than £12,000 in birthday donations for food banks). And, most astonishingly, the appalling Gary Lineker (who has become notorious for scolding us to share all we have with the wretched of the earth, while with the other hand grabbing millions each year for his underwhelming career as a television sports pundit) has promised to donate two months’ salary to the Red

Cross. As this could be as much as £300,000, for once his £1.75million annual BBC salary does not make one recoil in repulsion.

How lovely it is when the solemn and self-regarding are revealed as cheerful and public-spirited. And yet how unfortunate that most famous people still haven’t grasped what the grave new world will look like.

I’m obviously not going to slam whole swathes of people for being brash, boastful and basically useless; I’m a newspaper columnist, so that would be self-loathing. But it would be a fool who would object to a moral recalibration of our societal hierarchy in which the teenage shelf-stacker had higher status than a social influencer of the same age.

There will always be a place for entertainers in any civilised society. But in recent times we have come too far from the age when hotels would show the sign “No dogs, no actors” to allowing mere thespians to believe that they are something more than human. By the time we emerge from this, we will be a simpler but also, paradoxically, a more sophisticated species.

We will remember which entertainers used the plague to grandstand, and those who made themselves useful. I’m thinking of Marlene Dietrich, the actress and singer, who not only spent most of the Second World War entertaining Allied troops, but actually entered Germany with the troops of General Patton. When asked why she had done this, in spite of the obvious danger of being within a few kilometres of German lines, she astonishingly replied “aus

(out of decency). She later spoke of her war work as “the only worthwhile thing I have ever done”.

This is a terrible time, but one good thing about it is that when we emerge, we will no longer be able to kid ourselves that we are decent people if we did nothing. This applies to the famous as much as anyone.

In a global village where you can be anything, be a Dietrich – not a Madonna.