CLOONEY – what is he up to? Now, we all love George, even though his acting carries all the weight of a bag of blow-dried hummingbird feathers. And we can forgive that, because he’s got charm.

But his latest role, as producer/director/actor in a six-part TV remake of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 begs the question ‘Why?’

Clooney, at first, said he wanted nothing to do with a remake of the 1961 novel featuring Second World War bombardier John Yossarian’s desperate attempts to do anything but bomb.

The Ocean’s Eleven actor believed the depiction of women in the book to be “terrible.” He saw the male characters as misogynistic. He hated the language, for example, used to describe the female prostitute who is called Nately’s Whore, and her 12 year-old sister, referred to as Nately’s Whore’s Kid Sister.

Clooney doesn’t says as much, but no doubt he was disturbed by the fact women are seen largely as objects of lust. We don’t get a female character’s point of view until 350 pages in, and even then to tell of how she likes being with and receiving attention from men.

And the Hollywood star has, of course, a perfect right to read the book and hate its writing, to believe its sensibility has no part to play in a modern world.

But then he changed his mind. He announced he would join the project if the sexism were removed. Which inevitably happened. Who wouldn’t want Clooney on board?

However, St George of Oxfordshire has slain a dragon that should have been left well alone. There is no denying that soldiers of war were sexist. There is no doubt that injured airmen grabbed at nurses. It’s entirely true that pejoratives such as whore were rifled at women.

But Heller’s book worked because it told us how it was – which was harsh, cold and horrifying. He runs with the theme of absurdity; the absurdity of existence, the absurdity of people in positions of power. And the inevitability of death.

Clooney, however, in adding comfort softener to the wash, is allowing us to forget how badly men have behaved. He’s denying the moral climate of the 1940s, he’s ignoring post-traumtic stress disorder. The reality is he’s ignoring the reality.

And if you attach a modern-day sensibility to historical tales they emerge as anachronistic and silly; will the TV script use the phrase Nately’s Sex Worker?

Let’s not open all the bomb doors on Clooney’s head however. It can be seen as a real positive that he has brought in a woman to direct two episodes. “We tried to be part of the solution as opposed to being part of the problem,” he argues.

But how does attaching women to the project deal with the major tonal shift?

He has also instructed at least one of the female characters to be re-written, to make Nurse Duckett “more complex, and emotionally interesting.”

Yet that’s also worrying because it’s not the nurse Heller created. If he’d planned to take us closer into the minds of female characters he would have done. This is a story told through the experience of the highly disturbed, desperate men sent out on never ending bombing missions, facing death every time a propeller turns over. This doesn’t mean their sexism was acceptable, but it does reveal how the minds of men coped in that dark, dangerous world of near anarchy and impending doom. And it’s a reminder of how sensibilities have altered. Who, for example, ever complained at the sight of scantily clad women painted on the side of the B52s, underneath the cockpits of young men facing a 95 per cent chance of death?

Variety Magazine wrote: “Catch-22 is a classic of mid-20th-century American literature, but to try to recapture what made it so is to invite failure.”

They were right. It’s risky, even when sticking close to the original character lines, as did the Catch 22 film of 1972, which didn’t catch on.

But if we continue to take a snowflake approach to remaking classics where will it end? I gave my 12-year-old friend Catcher in the Rye to read recently and while he didn’t like Holden Caufield’s excursions into homophobia and sexism he understood the character was formed out of experience and of the times. And what if Philip Roth’s books were remade with a modern day sensibility? Take the darker sex-obsessed thoughts of the likes of Alexander Portnoy away, of how he violated socks, his sister’s underwear, and a piece of liver, and you’ll be blinded by the light of banality.

And should we stop watching MASH, Catch-22’s rival in exposing wartime absurdity? Can we still laugh at the (in)famous scene whereby Ltn Hoolihan’s shower screens collapse all around her? If the series were remade by Clooney and co we’d have to dump the Klinger character completely lest he offend the transgender community.

What seems to be happening is that George Clooney wants to be an iconoclast who can make a TV series about breaking the rules. But he sees the only way to make it acceptable is by surrendering to the rules of modern day political correctness.

Catch-22, George?