Donald Clarketoasts ye olde Hollywood drunkard
Hooray for Bill Murray! The famously impassive actor was arrested in Stockholm last week on suspicion of operating a golf cart while under the influence of alcohol. Raise a bigger, boozier cheer for Danny DeVito. Late last year, the spherical polymath turned up on a US chat show in a state of psychedelic drunkenness and began making delightfully inappropriate remarks about George Bush: "He has a head like a stuffed aardvark and sounds like a lobotomised baboon." George Clooney, the world's most beloved human being, jumped quickly to his friend's defence. "He is one of the funny drunks in the world as opposed to the angry, mean ones," the former Dr Ross said.
Somewhere over the last two decades the figure of the amiable drunken loudmouth has vanished from gossip sheets and been replaced with the severely ill alcoholic who is in danger of becoming "his own worst enemy". Indeed, errant behaviour of any sort is now punishable with a spell in a rehabilitation facility. The most bizarre example of this occurred earlier this year when Isaiah Washington, star of something called Grey's Anatomy, was dispatched to rehab after using an F-word - the one that can also mean a bundle of sticks - about a gay colleague. It can only be a matter of time before addiction specialists are asked to treat people who sleep in late or who forget to put the top back on the toothpaste.
It is, of course, terribly wrong to use derogatory language about homosexuals and, yes, boozed-up stars can set a very bad example to the world's impressionable youth, but it's hard to avoid the impression that the new Puritanism has sucked some of the vitality out of celebrity discourse. In the olden days, we used to enjoy living vicariously through the bad behaviour of red-faced actors in sports jackets. If you worked in a car plant and had to clock in at a decent hour each morning, stories about Richard Burton boozing his way around the Mediterranean kept your wish-fulfilment glands in healthy working order. In those days we were permitted the myth that certain superhuman beings could consume nothing but gin without suffering any serious ill effects. Well, yes, Burton did drop dead from a cerebral haemorrhage at 59. But that could happen to anybody. Couldn't it?
It's all so much more depressing these days. Vulnerable young girls such as Lindsay Lohan and Amy Winehouse are looking worryingly green around the
gills while the awful Robin Williams, once a boozer, now irritatingly clean, walks about untroubled by ulcers or cirrhosis. Do we have to look towards the incoherent tub of lard that is Russell Crowe for our vicarious middle-aged bibulousness? Must we settle for the belching anti-Semitic tirades of Mel Gibson? Where is the new idol of the cocktail hour?
Why, there he is, negotiating his way through Scandinavia in a small electrically powered vehicle. Raise a glass. If it's true, you, Bill, make the world a better, blurrier place in which to live.
