Like all of you, I’m sure, I’ve got accustomed to celebrities – particularly actors and comedians, but also pop stars and sporting luminaries – sharing their unsought opinions with the public. My eyes have gone grey from it, to the extent that the brows above them no longer so much as twitch when a celeb ‘drops’ some ‘content’ of this kind, unless it’s one of those very rare occasions when they don’t take the approved line. So I thought I was immune to such rubbish.
French has form for getting carried away
Enter Dawn French, who managed to induce in me a flinch response that I thought had atrophied in about 2002. The Vicar of Dibley star uploaded an extremely unpleasant video on social media, in which she adopted a wheedling babyish voice to cavil about the Hamas atrocities perpetrated on Israelis in October 2023; ‘but they did a bad thing’ she squeaks. When this hit a wall of revulsion she followed it with an apology/clarification. French acknowledged that the video “appeared one-sided”, and insisted that she never meant to “mock, or dismiss, or diminish the horror” of that day. But this merely underlined the already apparent fact that she is just very, very thick.
French has form for getting carried away by what the other Good People are aerating about – ‘taking the knee’ in an excruciating Vicar of Dibley sketch about Black Lives Matter back in 2020 – But that was run-of-the-mill celeb signalling. This latest blunder is much harder to forgive. It’s tragic to see someone I so admired reduced to these antics.
I nominate Dawn French to be the spokesperson for Palestine.
— Max 📟 (@MaxNordau) June 6, 2025
This is the most articulate argument for Palestine I’ve ever heard. https://t.co/tR3KOluoqx pic.twitter.com/9evpVRGFmJ
Dawn French has served me up a lot of laughs over the years. She emerged, with Jennifer Saunders, as I hit my late teens; younger readers will have to take my word at how refreshing and unusual they seemed back then. There had been many female comedy stars, despite what you get told – Peggy Mount and Thora Hird, for example, now both almost forgotten, led films and TV series for decades – but French and Saunders were unique. They were able to capture on TV just how funny teenage girls simply mucking about can be.
There was, in fact, despite their ‘alternative’ pedigree, not an enormous amount of difference between them and trad, low-end male turns like Little and Large. Many of their skits followed exactly the same format; the skinny one being serious, and then the fat one bursting in mugging to camera. This is because fat people are funny; all fat people know this, we just are. Where French & Saunders triumphed was in adapting these ancient techniques for new targets, dragging up in reverse; the characters of the horrible lecherous old blokes and the gay stylists were particularly memorable. We’d never seen anything like that before.
But, as Absolutely Fabulous made abundantly clear, the brains of the outfit, the genius seed that sometimes lifted them above the ordinary, was clearly not French.
As so often, a TV career gives people a TV-sized brain. Fame does odd things to people, and often the long-famous are the most disconnected. After French’s Gaza video, I heard people picking their jaws up off the floor and saying What was she thinking? What did she think the reaction would be? I can answer that. In her ovine milieu, I know from long experience, it would be normal to come out with this. But most of them would at least have the sense to keep it behind closed doors.
French doesn’t seem to have run the clarifying statement by anyone else either. It contains the fresh coining ‘attricious’ which sounds like it could be a word, but isn’t. In our world of technological signs and wonders it should be impossible to drop such clangers. As I typed it just now an angry red line appeared under it; perhaps Dawn has switched that function off.
Worse, she seeks to defend herself with a grandiloquent line, explaining why she suddenly ‘spoke out’ now.
‘I have felt my silence is complicit or even somehow sanctioning,’ she tells us. What an incredible own of the self! Dawn, I’ll tell you this – if nobody else will – for free, gratis and for nothing: Nobody on the planet, but nobody, whatever their position on the Gaza situation, was wondering, ‘I wonder where the Vicar of Dibley stands on this?’ or ‘The voice of the Marks and Spencer’s ads is suspiciously silent on the Middle East’.
Why do the frothy and the frilly feel this increasing need to break their ‘silence’? Ego, obviously, but I think there’s more going on. We are rarely all on the same page nowadays. The common culture has frayed, thanks to technological and social changes. This has left us with the news and politics as about the only things remaining that we all know about, and can share gags about. (Sport lingers too, a bit.)
Who is in the pop charts? What’s happening in the soaps? It’s anyone’s guess. But everybody knows who Donald Trump, Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage are, the same way we could recognise Richard Nixon, Ted Heath and Harold Wilson back in the day. Everyone knows about Gaza.
People often say they feel ‘disappointed’ when a celeb says something ill-informed or grossly crass about a serious subject. I’m lucky, in a way, because in my media career I encountered that sort of thing very often, in the flesh. So I just assume that pop stars, actors and comedians will be political idiots, and work backwards from there, which at least means you get the occasional nice surprise. You can ignore all that, and just enjoy their actual talents. Oh, but if only they would do that too!
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