Those crazy yanks. When they’re not shooting each other or wolfing down burgers, they’re glued to their cinema screens, happy to worship whichever lunk-headed Hollywood idol is thrown their way. Right? Right?

Well… actually, no.

According to a poll conducted by studious types at The Associated Press, the majority of our Transatlantic buddies think that "movie stars are poor role models and almost half say movies generally aren’t as good as they used to be."

What with scary old George Dubya and the Christian Right cutting a swathe across the ‘flyover states’, it would seem that your honest, god-fearing, fork-lift-driving man in the street has no time for those zany Tinseltown antics anymore.

"They just don’t have the morals," one randomly-selected US citizen fumed. "They marry and divorce [and] sleep around a lot."

Unlike the real world, of course, where adultery and divorce simply never happen. Oh no. Not at all. It’s a big old garden of Eden as soon as you step outside Beverly Hills, now isn’t it?

One name which popped up during questioning was Aussie troubadour Russell Crowe (DVDs), whose charming habit of slamming a telephone into a hotel employee’s face has won him few new fans (outside of anyone who’s ever had to put up with the service at a certain British motel chain).

As for the accusation that movies have long bypassed some sort of golden era? hecklerspray says: pants. Sure, the 1970′s threw up a fair share of classics, but lest we forget that for every Taxi Driver or Annie Hall there were a million Confessions Of A Window Cleaners lurking at the sidelines.

Give us Sin City over The Sound Of Music any day. And let’s keep our celebrities controversial, eh? God only knows – we’d all be out of a job otherwise.

[story by C J Davies]