The preposterous Hollywood Foreign Press Association gravy train might have chugged on for ever if its members had just swallowed their pride and done more for diversity.

An investigative report by the Los Angeles Times into the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, that notoriously rackety organisation which administers the Golden Globes, has shown an eminently corruptible body drenched in antediluvian attitudes; this has resulted in NBC cancelling its TV coverage of next year’s ceremony and Tom Cruise handing back the three Globes he has personally won over the years.

The HFPA is famed for having a bizarre voting membership of 87 people; some write for credible publications, but most are a hilarious ragbag of sub-Norma-Desmond has-beens with the most reactionary worldview outside Mar-a-Lago, including freelancers, part-time writers, bit-part actors, former beauty queens and bodybuilders who have lucked into LA’s juiciest club, which pays its committee members handsomely from the TV rights income, allowing them to get luxurious junkets and to “scalp” their assigned tickets to the awards ceremony itself for tens of thousands of dollars.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association was always a preposterous organisation; if it is slapped into some semblance of humility and common sense by these events, that will be all to the good.