Word up! Stop these pointless cameos

The sight of celebrities grinning gormlessly in the background of a movie can ruin your viewing pleasure. That means you, Richard Branson.

Richard Branson
Cameo obscura... Richard Branson. Photograph: Andy Butterton/PA

What a bad sport British Airways has revealed itself to be by removing all traces of Richard Branson from the version of Casino Royale available on its in-flight entertainment channels. On the other hand, you can see their logic. Not because Branson's Virgin Airlines and BA are sworn enemies, but because it doesn't do for passengers to encounter any traumatic material during the potentially stressful experience of flying.

Sequences depicting plane crashes and other disasters are routinely scissored out of movies shown on board flights. So why should people have their anxiety levels ratcheted up needlessly by the unheralded appearance of a smug, grinning fop gorging himself on publicity?

It's not just Branson - though he is making an annoying habit of compromising our viewing pleasure, having also cropped up in Superman Returns and Around the World in 80 Days. Such cameos are usually bad news, disrupting any spell the movie has cast on the viewer, and serving little purpose other than to nudge us in the ribs, or provide a quick ego-boost for the participant. 24-Hour Party People acknowledged as much, rather brilliantly, in the scene in which Steve Coogan, as Factory Records supremo Tony Wilson, alerts us to all the celebrity cameos in the film.

Perhaps every airline could be persuaded to adopt a zero-tolerance policy on irritating cameos. Then we would be relieved of seeing Stan Lee's grinning mug in every Marvel-related movie that reaches the screen (his latest appearance is in Spider-Man 3, where he delivers one ostentatious line, all but winking into the camera). And we would be spared seeing Jeffrey Archer, Julian Barnes and Salman Rushdie grinning like baboons on E in the party scene in Bridget Jones' Diary. Don't give up the day job in future, lads. Don't even leave the house.

A well-placed cameo can serve an important function in the right circumstances. I rather like the director John Landis's habit of stuffing the lower reaches of his cast lists full with fellow film-makers, including the esteemed likes of Gillo Pontecorvo, Atom Egoyan, Costa-Gavras and David Cronenberg, all of whom appear fleetingly in The Stupids. And there's something wondrous about seeing Meryl Streep playing herself in the unlikely setting of Stuck On You, the Farrelly Brothers' comedy about conjoined twins.

Brad Pitt contributed a couple of reaction shots, no more than a few seconds in length, that raised a laugh in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Being John Malkovich; the latter also featured Charlie Sheen's best screen work, largely because a) we are supposed to believe in the ridiculous notion that he is one of Malkovich's dearest confidantes and b) because he's only on screen for a minute or two.

Robert Altman was, of course, the king of the cameos, but then he was the king of most things. He knew how to use strategically-positioned celebrities, playing themselves, for maximum satirical effect. Witness Julie Christie being gawped at in Nashville by an in-character Ned Beatty and bitched about by Karen Black ("She can't even brush her hair!"). Altman was adept at jumbling up real life and fiction, but his cameo-lust came to a head in The Player, where real movie stars (Bruce Willis, Julia Roberts) played themselves in a bad-movie-within-the-movie, while the real Malcolm McDowell rounded on the fictional studio executive portrayed by Tim Robbins.

The Player was so deeply imbedded in the Hollywood scene that these cameos nourished the feeling of authenticity, rather than detracting from it. With the odd exception - such as Marshall McLuhan appearing as the living punchline to one of the best gags in Woody Allen's Annie Hall - cameos don't have a particularly high strike-rate. Cringing is the only appropriate response to seeing David Beckham and Alan Shearer in the soccer drama Goal!, while the presence of Bruce Springsteen in High Fidelity or Burt Bacharach in the first Austin Powers comedy is overshadowed by their palpable awkwardness.

The cameo is a small but potent element that can make a scene fragrant, or pollute an entire film. That was definitely the case when the Spice Girls hired Gary Glitter to bring some of his unique magic to Spiceworld The Movie. Talk about bad timing. Between the movie being shot and its release at the end of 1997, Glitter had rather lost his lustre, and some hasty re-editing was required. The press notes that were handed out at the preview screening I attended still contained an effusive précis of his career up to that point, but the leader of the gang was nowhere to be seen on screen. However, the movie wasn't entirely stripped of ill-advised, car-crash cameos: Michael Barrymore's still in it.