“What is your favourite smell?” Pizza, he says. “What is your guiltiest pleasure?” Peanut butter crunch Häagen-Dazs ice-cream, he says. It’s fluff.

Then, last week, the paper published an extensive and detailed report of sexual harassment allegations against Clarke, based on the testimony of 20 women. Within 24 hours, ITV had pulled the finale of Clarke-starring primetime drama Viewpoint from its schedules. Sky had halted work on all projects with him. Bafta suspended both his membership and the award. Another six women came forward.

Clarke’s career is over, for the foreseeable future at least. A statement in which he expresses himself “deeply sorry” for the way his “actions have affected people” and promises to “[seek] professional help to educate myself and change for the better” suggests that he knows as much.

If Clarke were aware of the investigation when he did the Q&A, that might explain the strangely suspicious, embattled tone of some of his answers. Asked about the trait he most deplores in himself, he says: “I can’t help being a loyal person and I expect that back. When it doesn’t happen, it can upset or anger me.” Asked about the trait he most deplores in others, he says: “The inability to say what they mean.” The last question is: “What is the most important lesson life has taught you?” Clarke replies: “Don’t trust anyone.”

Does he feel let down that women were speaking out against him? If he does, he has no right to. The picture of his behaviour in the Guardian investigation is one of rampant entitlement to and casual degradation of women. But it’s the kind of rampant entitlement and casual degradation that can only happen in an industry which enables it.

Bafta was aware of the allegations when it decided to give him the award, and Clarke may well have considered it a vindication. “As far as we’re concerned,” his business partner told one woman, “the thing has now gone away as much as Noel can do in his power.” Women owed him no silence, but seeing your industry turn away from you after initially appearing to back you must feel like a cruel betrayal.

Because Clarke couldn’t have done all that he’s alleged to have done without, at the very least, a reckless lack of oversight from his collaborators. Some of the allegations against Clarke involve the kind of misconduct that happens between one man and one woman, and can only be made visible when multiple victims tell their story. A lot of them, however, do not: there are claims that Clarke not only sexually harassed women on-set, but that as a producer and director, he ran sets in ways that facilitated the harassment.

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Will Billie Eilish ever grow up?

By Sarah Ditum

If, as alleged, he hired strippers in preference to professional actors who would have been aware of usual working practices; if he failed to run appropriate “closed sets” when filming nude scenes; if he demanded off-script nudity from female performers and spent time filming pornographic footage that could never be used on-screen; if he did these things (and Clarke denies that he mistreated women on-set), it’s very hard to see how any of this passed under the radar. Some of it must have appeared on budgets.

As is the way of these things, Clarke’s cancellation was savagely efficient when it came. The suspicion is that the savage efficiency marks not just the industry’s authentic horror at the allegations, but also a desire to restrict any reputational damage to one man alone. With Clarke cast out, quarantined with his reported misdeeds, the film and TV business can evade any difficult questions about the abuses it might tolerate.

There’s another betrayal, too — less severe than a filmmaker’s betrayal of the duty of care to women he employs, more sympathetically compelling than the betrayal experienced by a man who can no longer luxuriate in the complacency of his industry. When someone is famous in the way Clarke is, it’s because people like him. Why would anybody give over two seconds’ reading time to his favourite smell or guiltiest pleasure if they didn’t have some personal attachment? Clarke’s alleged behaviour is a betrayal of that attachment.

It’s why the wiping of Clarke’s work from the schedules feels so much less egregious than last week’s other big cancellation — that of author Blake Bailey, whose biography of Philip Roth was pulled from print by publisher WW Norton. That also followed allegations of sexual misconduct, with two women accusing him of rape and several more claiming that he had “groomed” them when they were teenagers and he was their teacher. (Bailey has denied criminality, while conceding: “My behaviour was deplorable.”)

The Bailey allegations are queasy stuff, but they don’t impinge on the book in the same way that the allegations against Clarke impinge on his work. Whether the biography is a faithful, insightful account of Roth’s life or not can be assessed on its own terms: liking Bailey is besides the point, and Norton’s decision smacks of panic and pointlessness.

In fact, wrote Judith Shulevitz (who was initially critical of Bailey’s book), Bailey’s work might be more interesting in light of the allegations: “Reading my suspicions about Bailey into the book now does make it easier to imagine how biographer and subject could have tapped into the worst parts of each other to construct a collective monument to un-self-awareness. And that, in turn, gives me a glimpse of how men collude to deny women reality and reduce them to inviting targets.”

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I can’t believe I fancied David Walliams

By Tanya Gold

There’s no such perverse redemption available for Clarke’s work. I thought Clarke’s girly heist film 4. 3. 2. 1. was sexist trash when I saw it on release in 2010 (inside the first three minutes, Clarke contrives a crotch shot of one of the female leads), and am not convinced that revisiting it as a “monument to un-self-awareness” would profit me much. Unlike Bailey, Clarke could use his work to further his abuse — and vice versa — which makes being a viewer a complicity too far.

Clarke was a star, and his kind of stardom is a contract of love. It does not make much material difference to most people if their favourite actor or singer turns out to be a bad person; except it does make a difference, because choosing a favourite is a statement of faith that they are a good person, and more than that, that you are a good person by implication of your taste. It feels like being cheated on to be contradicted.

Clarke was likeable because he was Mickey in Doctor Who — the resolutely ordinary boyfriend of the Doctor’s companion Rose, who eventually redeemed himself. He was likeable because he was a young black British man who established himself as an auteur (it would have been churlish to point out that his vision involved a lot of upskirting). He was likeable because his guiltiest pleasure was ice cream.

What has been suggested now is very much not likeable. Very much not a feelgood story. Some cancelled TV projects and a withdrawn award shouldn’t be the end of this. Perhaps instead of women sadly saying “Me too!” to each other, this time there will be men thinking frantically to themselves: “Me next?”

The self-aggrandising, faux-naïf speeches drag. The host starts to make cracks of the “chin up, we’re almost halfway through” variety. Throughout this process there’s always the outside chance that you might have won something. And then you lose, and a dash of sour grapes is added to the cocktail of physical fatigue, existential ennui, and mild drunkenness. 

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Sermons from Hollywood A-listers will never deserve an audience again

By Douglas Murray

Why was I there? Why did people tune in? What is the function of prizes? These ceremonies are one of those cultural rituals that we just accept, and everybody goes along with. They’ve always been there and they always will be there, so nobody pays them much conceptual thinking, like herpes or Ken Barlow. But, recently, they’ve turned from an obvious lot of industry puff and guff that didn’t do much harm in the universal schema, into supposedly significant grandstands of the culture war battles, adding an exciting new stratum of nonsense. 

These prizes are often old, sometimes very, very old. The first Oscars ceremony took place in 1929, the first BAFTA was handed out in 1949, the first Booker in 1969. The Brit Awards came along in 1977. Most are decided by mysterious secluded juries of the great and the good, though anyone with a BAFTA membership gets to vote in the first round of nominations, which goes some way to explaining why they are often frowned upon, what with their faint whiff of democracy. 

Awards voted by the public are disparaged and discouraged, because they show up the gap between what people actually like and want, and what they should like or want. Public votes such as the National Television Awards are about the mass market; stasis, habit, continuity — witness the endless wins for Ant & Dec. The twitter snob reaction to Mrs Brown’s Boys winning Best Comedy at the NTAs was very telling. Art as a thing that tickles or soothes you rather than makes a great statement is regarded as hopelessly improper. 

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How I was cancelled by Doctor Who

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The most obvious purpose of awards is to show the reverse of public opinion, to act as a showy, physical embodiment of the even longer established magazine round-ups or newspaper critics’ lists. A prize is not just the object or the prize money itself. It can keep a cultural product alive, give it a second lift. It enhances the career prospects of the winner. These are all reasonable enough things. 

But add grievance, moral purity and racialised thinking as criteria into the mix of ego and whoomf — the balloon goes up. The steady, slow seepage into the arts of HR nonsense and polytechnic critical theory has led to awards becoming flash points of accusation and reaction. They’re #sowhite, or #somale, and everyone gets to pull their ‘terribly concerned’ face or their ‘oh don’t be ridiculous’ face, depending on where they stand. We now have the somewhat silly spectacle of the Booker Prize being given to two people, not because of the quality of the work but because the writers look different. 

The licensed fool is an anthropological figure used to puncture pretensions and diffuse tensions in human societies down the centuries. Combine this with the more specific (and slightly baffling to us) American tradition of the ‘roast’, and step forward Ricky Gervais. These interventions allow some steam to blow off, yes — but nothing actually changes. The whole pompous, pious circus rolls on. 

This is how the Hollywood of awards season can apparently be both a shining city on a hill dispensing moral lessons and a cesspit of degradation, when in fact it’s just another workplace where law should be applied and crime punished. 

The key thing about the licensed fool is that he is licensed. Gervais has (ironically) the privilege of being able, literally, to afford to tell Hollywood to its face that it’s a hypocritical freak show. Anybody working in the arts without that licence cannot risk questioning the smothering zeitgeist, or even to laugh at or question the nuances of sweaty-palm issues like #metoo, or the indisputable moral worth of ‘diversity and inclusion’ drives, no matter how murky their unintended consequences.

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The Booker Prize judges had one job

By Sam Leith

No lasting awareness of the ridiculousness is engendered. The licensed criticism just glances off. Just a few weeks later, Prince William — of all people! — was able to pontificate about diversity at the BAFTAs without turning a hair, without even a particle of self-awareness. This got rather lost in the media scrum around certain other global events, but I think it was a really significant moment. It was proof that the ideology of grievance and gesture is now so firmly baked into the establishment that a prince, heir to the throne, can opine on it, as if it was as uncontroversial and uncomplicated a thing as his great-grandmother saying “yes, the weather has been very bad today, have you come far?”. 

Pre-regnal finger wagging leads us back to the existential question. What is the function of art? Why does it have to be something more than itself? Art is without morals — it is not a good or a bad thing in itself. Yes, it can bring people together but sometimes it can make them come together in a really bad cause. It can open up debate. It can also close it down. 

Joaquin Phoenix’s nauseating ramble at last night’s Oscars put the tin hat on it all, providing us with the definitive mission statement (and it is a mission, in the Onward, Christian Soldiers sense of the word). The deluded bubble politics, the patronising and quasi-religious tone. The function of making movies is, apparently, to “give voice to the voiceless” and to “guide each other to redemption”. Translated, this means giving voice to people who agree with ‘us’, and no, not cancelling those who disagree (such godlike mercy!) but instead steering them off the primrose path for their self-evident sin in disagreeing with ‘us’. The transformation of Oscars stage to pulpit is complete. 

The great irony is that by becoming so hung up on niche political concerns, by trying to be good people, the cultural sphere is becoming more sequestered and remote. And we see that very starkly on the nights the prizes are handed out.