Portraits of a free society: that was then, this is now

Monday March 22, 2010

In the second of a series of articles for The Free Society entitled Reflections on a Free Society, Simon Hills, associate editor of The Times Magazine, argues that that the society in which we now live is like a luxury Soviet Union.

As the awards season came to a close, it was informative to look at some rather fine pictures from 1962 of Tom Courtenay, Audrey Hepburn and Richard Attenborough celebrating after the Baftas. And compare them to the pampered elite who step up the red carpet now.

In Tom’s hand is a huge cigar, a cigar that says, ‘We’re celebrating and tonight, we’re rich’. They looked beautiful, these young actors – like a million dollars, even if they were probably earning hundreds – and happy to be alive.

They are portraits that belong to a free society. You would not see images like this in the Soviet Union, or China, or Castro’s Cuba. If ever you want proof of the tyranny of bigotry, then look a the citizens at play in the great dictatorships of Hitler, Mao or Stalin – that is, if you can find any evidence of citizens at play in the drear, sepia archives of their idealistic efforts at utopia. At best you might see the odd sports teams, whose smiles are those of frightened children at the school photo.

Nor, tellingly, do these carefree pictures from the early Sixties exist in the West in 2010, and it speaks volumes of how we live today. You won’t see similar images from this year’s Oscars, that’s for sure. The photos that were digitally sprayed to the world’s press in seconds showed vain, self-important celebrities, pointedly looking funereal as they refuse to wear the black bow tie for fear of being bourgeois, scowling at the cameras, painfully aware of their self-image. Tom and Audrey just, well, smiled. This lot look as if they’re made of china. If they fell over drunk, they’d shatter.

Not that anyone could possibly be drunk in this most priggish and self-righteous of decades. No, today’s celebrities are timorous beasties who for half their lives fly around the world to premieres and film shoots to promote their careers and for the other live self-obsessed, cosseted existences driving in Toyota Priuses between their gated residences. They are fortified not by a convivial smoke and glass of champagne, God forbid, but prescription drugs and an army of sycophants. The smoking bans meted out in New York and California didn’t save Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson.

For the truth is that the society in which we live in now is like a luxury Soviet Union. Political debate is encouraged provided there is no dissent. As in the Duma you could discuss ways towards socialism, so in the White House you can argue how best to discourage people using their cars. You cannot say that driving is a good thing if you want a career in politics or, for that matter, the movie business, or in any of the industries in which are run by the intelligensia.

Similarly should you turn up to an awards ceremony black tie dinner in a black tie, you are nailing yourself as a reactionary in the same way as you would have been vilified in post revolutionary Russia or China. You couldn’t be Bulgakov then, and you certainly couldn’t be Courtenay now.

In our intensely puritanical age, the jeunesse dorée are moping around vip rooms and central London clubs, a tarnished elite terrified of going anywhere near the hoi polloi. How ironic that in a free society, those who benefit most from it should be the most trapped.

Simon Hills is associate editor of The Times Magazine