The United Nations has decreed that British pop stars are bad role models. Last week the UN’s anti-drugs chief attacked “coke-snorting fashionistas” like Amy Winehouse, whose nasal habits are apparently causing “untold misery, corruption, violence and instability” in Third World countries where drugs originate.

In truth, British popsters aren’t bad enough. The pop music scene here has become a state-funded, Soviet-style cultural factory that churns out agreeable singers to entertain the nation. Far from being rebels without a cause, too many of our pop stars are shaped and moulded by government cash.
Causing "Untold Misery" in the Developing World: UN emits waffling bureacratic piffle about other human catastrophes, but let there be no doubt about their position on the devastation wrought by Brit singer Amy Winehouse.
The cardboard-cutout nature of British pop was on full display at the annual Brit Awards ("the Brits") in February. The Brits are a bit like the Grammies, only less well-executed and less glamorous. This year’s Brits were notable for two things. First, Amy Winehouse was forced to censor, with black eyeliner, the nipples of the naked lady tattooed on her left arm—an act of image-policing that set the tone for the rest of the conformist awards ceremony. And second: the revelation that most—of Britain’s young pop talent is now produced by something called the Brit School.

This is a state-funded school in Croydon, a soulless suburb of South London, which has 850 pupils aged 14 to 16. They furiously study the theory and practice of performing arts, creative technology and media, all of them desperately hoping to become the Next Big Thing.

The school is heavily subsidised by the government’s Department for Education and Skills and also by the Brit Trust, the body which – yep, you guessed it – organises and oversees the annual Brit Awards. Not surprisingly, then, this year’s awards ceremony looked and smelt like one, long, super-dull advert for the pop starlet factory in South London.

All of the kids in the front row of the audience at the Brit Awards were students of the Brit School – and a disturbing number of winners and performers were alumni of the Brit School. Former pupil Adele, the 19-year-old singer who has the worst faux-cockney accent I’ve ever heard, won an award for her single Chasing Pavements. Alumni Kate Nash won Best British Female Solo Artist.

Leona Lewis, who performed her No.1 single Bleeding Love at the ceremony, is a former Brit School pupil. So is Katie Melua, the curly-haired singer of soft folk-pop songs. Even Winehouse—dear, brilliant, troubled Amy—learnt her trade (singing, shuffling, looking moody beneath the tonne weight of her beehive) at the Croydon pop factory. Of course, as the UN informs us, Ms Winehouse is no government-approved, Department of Education-stamped role model for British “yoof”—yet she is the exception that proves the rule about The Brit School.

The school doesn’t only produce girl singers well-educated in how to carry a tune and how to conduct themselves in TV interviews. It also trains future indie band performers – which is ironic, since “indie” is short for independent.

Bands like The Kooks, The Feeling and The Noisettes—all of whom consider A Well-Behaved Lady, with Bland Gentleman Escorts: State-sanctioned "rebels," the Noisettesthemselves denim-wearing, serious, edgy musicians—were set on the path to stardom courtesy of the government money sloshing around in their alma mater, the Brit School. One newspaper has described the school as a “conveyor belt for indie-music success.”

The government wants to go even further. Not content with funding the guitar and singing lessons of 16-year-olds who will later become bedroom pin-ups for Britain’s tetchy teenagers, the Department for Culture, Media and Sports is now looking into directly funding independent record labels. Indie bands always prided themselves on being “independent” of massive music labels like EMI and Universal—yet soon they may become “dependent” on the British state. I’m sorry, but give me an EMI-backed, commercial, stadium-playing superstar over a government-funded indie band any day of the week.

Such is the domination of state-generated pop acts today that those who criticise the Brit School are easily silenced. At the Brit Awards, the Arctic Monkeys—a decent guitar band from Sheffield in North England who definitely did not attend the Brit School—parodied the school’s pupils in their acceptance speech for Best Album.

Mischievously wearing country tweed suits and flat caps—as if to poke fun at the middle classes who now dominate the pop scene—the Monkeys said in mock-posh accents: “We all went to the Brit School, we remember you all. We had a great time in them years…” The powers-that-be weren’t happy. Canned applause was played to drown out the Monkeys, and they were bundled off stage. Never mind the New Musical Express or any of Britain’s other supposedly rebellious music magazines, it took the Financial Times—the Financial Times!—to point out what the silencing of the Monkeys was all about: “Soviet-style airbrushing was ruthlessly employed to restore order to the show.”

This is all bad news for British youth. In the past, teens normally resisted the rules and morality of their rulers, and instead identified with mods, punks or rockers—the more outrageous the better. Today they are fed a diet of well-behaved girl singers and bland bands produced by a state-supported music factory. Ignore the UN: Britain needs some properly bad role models. Where’s the next Johnny Rotten?

The tragic death of Heath Ledger -- just determined to be an overdose -- has robbed Hollywood of one of its Australian stand-ins for American machismo. Never mind the trade deficit, or even Barack Obama's "moral deficit"; Hollywood is suffering from a macho deficit, and it's having to turn to the land of beer-swilling, sheep-shearing men-in-denim to find its cowboys and cads.

When Hollywood first flirted with all things Aussie in the 1980s, it was a bit of a po-mo joke. "Look at Crocodile Dundee with his big shiny knife and taste for lager - how quaint!" laughed cinema audiences. It's no joke today. At a time when American stars have been feminised, preened and plucked, it's Australia that is providing the muscle for the grittier acting jobs.

Crocodile Dundee: A joke, not a man In recent years, Ledger had joined Russell Crowe, Hugh Jackman and Eric Bana as a Real Bloke who could play gruff cowboys, lascivious bastards or any other role that required the leading man to have hair on his chest. In his breakthrough film 10 Things I Hate About You, a high-school spin on Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, Ledger looked like he had been shuttled in from another planet rather than simply another hemisphere. Where the hairless, super-tanned jock (Andrew Keegan) was boringly arrogant, and the geek with a crush (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was predictably nervous, Ledger's scruffy, unkempt and slurry-voiced Patrick Verona was a complex macho character - nasty to begin with, but later opened up by the love of a good woman. The director even allowed him to keep his Aussie accent, as if to accentuate this untidy, unruly character's exoticness amid the cardboard cut-out boys and girls of a typical high-school movie.

In later films, Ledger played American rather than Australian; his rugged Down Under temperament meant he was frequently more convincing as a manly American than many of the prim and waxed actors who are actually American-born. He even played cowboy better. In Brokeback Mountain, Ledger's tortured and mumbling Ennis Del Mar is far more believable than all-American Jake Gyllenhaal's Jack Twist. (In one scene in that film, Ledger and Gyllenhaal were required to leap naked off a cliff into a lake. Ledger did it, but Gyllenhaal was replaced by a stuntman because he is scared of heights. If you want an actor to take risks, look Down Under.)

Traditional masculinity: Untraditional lifestyle In Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, in which six actors play characters based on Bob Dylan, Ledger's "Robbie Clark" is the most convincingly American. Half-James Dean, half-Jack Kerouac, Ledger certainly makes a far better fist of his role than Brit actor Christian Bale, whose American accent and demeanour are so contrived that he ends up sounding like George Bush with a quiff. Amongst the ragbag of American and British actors tackling Dylan in I'm Not There, Ledger best captures the swagger and sexism of the American male with a 1950s mentality who is desperately trying to adapt to life in 1960s America. It is striking that Haynes employed an Australian woman - Cate Blanchett - to play the character most clearly and literally based on Dylan. It seems even women from Down Under, otherwise known as "Sheilas", are better at playing American heroes than American men are.

Again and again, Hollywood looks to Australians to inject testosterone into a movie. Like Ledger, Russell Crowe recently played a cowboy: Ben Wade in 3.10 to Yuma. If an American actor was to play Wade, a coach-robbing outlaw, he would first have to put on weight (and then give numerous interviews telling everyone how difficult it was to "be fat") and then do some method-style research with menacing men who have been involved in hold-ups of one kind or another. Not Crowe; his jowls and his sense of menace are real; attributes of his Australian manhood.

Who wants a piece of this?: Do not call this man a sissy It is striking that Ridley Scott called on Crowe to play a hard, 1970s drug-busting cop in his epic American Gangster. Young American actors only seem interested in playing 1970s crime-busters for post-machismo laughs; think of the awful Starsky and Hutch and Dukes of Hazzard remakes. It took a full-bodied, croaky-voiced Australian to breathe life back into that old American character, the committed, flares-wearing cop, who was a staple of 1970s TV shows and cinema. And let us not forget Crowe's greatest cinematic moment, as General Maximus Decimus Meridius in Gladiator, a role many said was symbolic of the true American values of valour and loyalty over backstabbing corruption. Hollywood, if you need an American symbol, phone for an Australian.

Australian men are called upon to play Hollywood's edgier superheroes, too. Sure, pretty but dull American boys can safely play Superman and Spiderman (Brandon Routh and Tobey Maguire respectively); but if you need a superhero with hair on his chest and mad thoughts rushing through in his head, only an Australian will do. Hugh Jackman's fearsome Wolverine, huge, hirsute and with sideburns to die for, is the spiritual leader of the pack in the X-Men movies. Surrounded by young men and women who experience their superpowers as mental and physical afflictions (all played by young American actors, of course), Jackman's cocksure and principled Wolverine is the natural American leader, the steady-minded figurehead of this band of freaky rebels. It took Eric Bana to play the Hulk, American pop culture's most obviously tortured macho soul. Part shy scientist, part raging beast, Bana played out America's own crisis of masculinity on cinema screens, bringing both his notable acting skills and his innate Australian swagger to a role that required him to be both wimp and whack job.

In our PC, flaccid, image-obsessed times, new American actors seem to lack the personality and resources to play hard American, crazed American, tortured American or heroic American. Instead that faraway land where old masculine values still survive is having to send its young men to American shores to roleplay American virture and fury. Heath Ledger's death is not only a great tragedy for his family and friends; it has also lowered Hollywood's quota of blokes.

Also in Jewcy: So many of Hollywood's American-born macho men have been Jews that we had to make a slide-show to hold all the pictures.

We have some mad makeover shows in Britain.

In You Are What You Eat, "Dr" Gillian McKeith moves in with a morbidly obese couple, pokes around in their poo (literally), and tells them that if they don't stop scoffing chips they will die. In What Not To Wear, two posh women with a penchant for botox claim to be able to improve people's self-esteem—and thus the mental health of the entire nation—by giving them fashion advice. In The Sex Inspectors, a group of "sexperts" watches a couple frolicking late at night and then gives them advice on how to improve their love life.

But these shows seem perfectly sane compared with the maddest makeover series yet: Make Me a Muslim (watch the show at bottom of this page).

This mini-series, which kicked off on Channel 4 this week, features four "MuslimIslamic Eye for the Queer Guy: Channel 4's crack team of Muslims tries to whip various classes of deviant into order mentors" who try to instill Islamic values into a bunch of slovenly Brits. In the first episode, we were introduced to a beer-swilling taxi driver (scum!), a mum and part-time glamour model (slag!), and a gay man with a high-pitched voice who wears pink t-shirts (deviant!), all of whom will be whipped into shape by the pious Islamic lifestyle gurus.

Make Me a Muslim borrows heavily from other makeover shows. It has the snobbish dietary element of You Are What You Eat: on Sunday the Muslim mentors visited the contestants' homes and emptied their fridges of pork and alcohol. And the show is fixated on fashion: One of the Muslim mentors, a bearded imam, took the gay contestant to a clothes store to buy him some "manly clothes." It was like Islamic Eye for the Queer Guy.

The female Muslim mentor encouraged the mum-cum-glamour-model—who normally wears skimpy outfits—to don an ankle-covering, hair-hiding hijab. I sympathised with the glamour model when she complained: "This thing is choking me....I feel I am being oppressed by clothes."

The mentors were disgusted to find that one of the contestants—a feisty blonde— sleeps in the same bed as her partner even though they're not married! They demanded that she decamp to the spare room.

Channel 4 describes the show as a "unique social experiment" in which the mentors try to "rescue" Britons who have no moral values. This got me thinking: we hear a lot about "institutional Islamophobia" these days, where Britain's political and cultural elites allegedly whip up fear of Muslims to justify draconian measures. But what about its twin: institutional Islamophilia, the authorities' bizarre belief that Islamic values might make Britain great again?

Trendy opinion-formers and officials promote Islam as the solution to Britain's moral decline. Earlier this year, Time Out magazine, the bible of "An Islamic London Would Be a Better Place": —Time Out magazine, the bible of London's latte-drinking classesLondon's latte-drinking, theatregoing classes, argued that an "Islamic London would be a better place".

Apparently we'd all be healthier since alcohol would be banned. "Turning all the city's pubs into juice bars would have a massive positive effect on public health", said Time Out. And the capital would be greener, too, because "the Islamic concept of halifa or trusteeship obliges Muslims to look after the natural world". Save the planet and your health: go Islamic now!

Last month London's Evening Standard hosted a debate titled "Is Islam good for London?", in which some participants argued that Islam's "core values" might help to anchor out-of-control Brits. The daft notion that drunken and disrespectful Britons might benefit from a short sharp dose of Islam is becoming widespread. In 2005, six Tory Members of Parliament wrote a letter to the Spectator in which they said that Islamists who describe Britain as decadent are "right". "Whether it is lawlessness, family breakdown, the menace of drugs, binge-drinking, teenage pregnancies or merely the coarse brutishness which has infested British culture... the results of years of woolly-minded liberal thinking are plain to see", they said.

Meanwhile, everyone from London mayor Ken Livingstone to former PM Tony Blair speak of their "deep respect" for Islamic values.

We've ended up with a kind of colonialism-in-reverse. Once, arrogant British elites sought to force their Christian, imperialist values on "the natives", including Muslims, in the Third World; today a bereft and confused British elite hopes that importing some of the natives' culture over here might help to keep unruly Brits in their place.

The terrible irony is that Islamic radicals, the biggest Islamophiles of all, are driven by a stunningly similar fear and loathing of the feckless masses. The Crawley plotters, found guilty of terrorist offences earlier this year, wanted to blow up nightclubs and kill "those slags dancing around." Those who planted car bombs outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in London on ladies' night in June, and crashed car bombs into Glasgow airport during the height of the summer holiday season, also seemed keen to target Britain's "slaggish", hedonistic culture.

These hot-headed extremists fancy themselves as rebels. In fact they're more like the armed wing of Institutional Islamophilia. Where Channel 4 wants to make us into Muslims through makeover shows, violent Islamophiles want to make us into Muslims through fear and terror. Both sides are motivated by a desire to save Britons from their own alleged beastliness.

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As I write, Nick Griffin, leader of the far-right British National Party, and David Irving, Holocaust denier-in-chief, are preparing to speak to 500-odd smartly-dressed students and a pack of hacks at the Oxford Union Debating Society.

The OU's decision to invite a racist politician and an anti-Semitic historian to its hallowed halls has caused an almighty stink. A Conservative Member of Parliament resigned his life membership of the Union, and various other British bigwigs— including Des Browne, Secretary of State for Defence, and a black TV presenter called June Sarpong—have cancelled planned appearances at the OU.

The cry goes up around Britain: "How can supposedly brainy students provide aLeave the Gag Off So He Can Make an Ass of Himself: The British National Party's Nick Griffin platform for these charlatans?" For me, the most shocking thing is not that Griffin and Irving have been provided with a platform—after all, their weasel ideas are better out in the open where we can at least take potshots at them—but the issue they have been asked to pontificate about: the right to free speech!

The OU debate is titled "This house believes that even extremists have a right to freedom of expression," and Griffin and Irving are on the side of defending freedom of expression. Neither of them has a libertarian bone in his body. They wouldn't recognise free speech if it jumped them in an alley.

Irving's response to Deborah Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust, in which she exposed him as a fact-fiddling denier of the Nazis' extermination of half of Europe's Jews, was to demand that she pulp every copy. He then sued her for libel (and thankfully lost). So Irving supports freedom of expression for extremists, but not for American professors. Especially Jewish ones.

Griffin's British National Party (BNP) is founded on a profoundly authoritarian programme of restricting immigration into Britain. Asking these two characters to defend freedom of expression, or freedom of any kind, is a bit like asking Mark Chapman to speak on healthy hero worship.

That two fascists/fascist sympathisers can hold forth in Oxford about free speech is actually an indictment of the British left and British liberals. So-called progressives have abandoned the cause of free speech in recent years, which has allowed cranky elements on the right to pose as the true upholders of open debate.

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