James Corden, the celebrity wit and actor, complains, with justice, of discrimination against “chubby” artists like himself.
They are never cast, straightforwardly, in romantic roles. A visiting alien could, he says, easily get the impression – supposing it relied on films for information – that “if you are chubby or fat or big, you never really fall in love, you never have sex”. He’s right. You’d need a heart of stone not to mourn the loss, assuming that more conventionally handsome actors can’t be made to step aside, of, say, James Corden’s Vronsky, James Corden’s Heathcliff and/or Mr Darcy, James Corden reminding us, in a remake of Brokeback Mountain, just how long audiences have had to tolerate the unconscionable tyranny, on screen, of the beautiful and muscular.
But as painful as it must be for Corden, as his romantic potential is dissipated in Carpool Karaoke, many older, homelier, shorter, scrawnier, speccier, greyer male actors (unless they are Woody Allen), as well as most female actors over the age of 35 and countless actors of colour, will have experienced something similar. Film studios can be culpably prejudiced and conventional.
Given, however, that audiences might not – equally culpably – have warmed to a sexual James Corden as they did, for instance, to Armie Hammer in Call Me by Your Name, or more recently to Andrew Scott creating havoc in Fleabag, fantasy specialists can possibly make a better case for their fattism than can those responsible for the swaths of public life, featuring no scenes of a sexual nature, where full chubby participation is likewise discouraged.
Corden’s visiting alien, were it foolish enough to risk a UK detour, might reasonably conclude, having compared our parliament’s obese component with that (26%) of the general population, that some sort of regulation restricts the number of overweight ministers. Is there, the alien might ask, any evidence to suggest that a medically approved body mass index is indicative of superior probity? On the contrary: Boris Johnson’s recent “spaffing” comments, though emanating from a more pristine (he assures us) physique, are, if possible, more degenerate than anything uttered before he took up porridge and water, under the alleged supervision of a recently acquired 30-year-old.
Exposed to national television, Corden’s busy alien will further discover that “chubby, fat or big” performers are similarly airbrushed from current affairs (unless they are male and over 70) – and even from programmes exclusively about cake – though they may still find a welcome in comedy or as the special “character” component in reality TV competitions.
But even these performers will find themselves better loved if, by getting thinner, they effectively confirm that an observable official aversion to weight is benevolent and not, as has been alleged, a contributor to the bullying and stigmatising of bigger people. It is routine for slimmed-down celebrities – the recently redeemed including Greg Wallace, Huw Edwards, Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay – happily to fat shame their weaker selves, from before they discovered self-denial or a personal trainer.
Nothing in the long career of Labour’s deputy prime minister, Tom Watson, generated the interest that followed his break-up with Hobnobs. “Every day I wake up happier and more relaxed, clearer-thinking,” he told the Guardian, after losing seven stone. Christ. Could bleariness explain why his former self believed the absurd allegations of sexual abuse invented by “Nick” and levelled against politicians? And how soon can we get rid of the remaining fuddle-headed, tense, unhappily overweight MPs who can’t, or won’t, follow suit? “I hate,” Watson adds, “going to bed at night not having done 10,000 steps.” It’s probably one way of not thinking about Brexit.
At this fractured time, ambitious male politicians can unite around, if nothing else, the delusion that a low resting pulse rate compensates for comprehensive unfitness for high office. Whatever our other faults, chorus Michael Gove, Johnson, Watson, Dominic Raab, Jeremy Corbyn et al, no one could accuse us of chubbiness.
Gove, with no expert to remind him what they said about Nicolas Sarkozy, thinks his schemes can survive the repeated trauma, for spectators, of his shorts. Corbyn’s staff believe that reports of regular runs will, like photographs of 72-year-old Mao in the Yangtze, inspire confidence, as opposed to further doubts about their 69-year-old leader’s priorities. It’s not as if we expect Corbyn to start reading books, not after all this time, but will no one think of his compost? His jam? Or are the exercise hours carved out of his occasional parliamentary commitments?
Meanwhile, Johnson advertises the coincidence that his midlife crisis diet should synchronise, so perfectly, with the needs of a similarly afflicted nation as it too plunges, ludicrously, into the unknown. “We know,” he writes, “that we have to get ready – to be lighter on our feet and more agile…”
Step forward Johnson, who, having dumped his former role model, the prodigious drinker and eater Winston Churchill, and mislaid an aversion to Jamie Oliver, now seems more closely aligned, philosophically, with fellow Brexiter and teetotal biscuitphobe Jeremy Corbyn. Notwithstanding his age, the Labour runner must surely, what with being so skinny and thin, have the agile edge so critical to leadership, providing he isn’t lost, beforehand, down a plughole.
“Is it working?” the dieting Johnson swanks, to no one in particular. “You bet it is. My sight is keener, the days seem longer and more full of interest and I have lost 12 pounds in two weeks.”
So he should probably revisit all decisions taken in the preceding decade or so, as much as he noticed it through his fat-dimmed eyes. Could the plus-size Johnson even see what was written on the bus? Could the garden bridge be attributed to a convocation of jaded fat cells?
However thoughtlessly it treats chubbier operatives, Hollywood has yet, unlike Westminster’s diet and exercise bores, to suggest that they are actually unfit for work.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
