British comic Matt Roper gets wet in Burma & scanned in a Bangkok hospital

(A version of this piece was published on the Indian news site WSN)

When last seen: Matt Roper in a Saigon hospital  (Photograph by nurse Than Thiet Sang)

When last heard of in this blog, British comedian Matt Roper was in a Saigon hospital suffering from deep vein thrombosis. Now he is in Bangkok. Yesterday, he told me:

“I hadn’t realised how serious the DVT was when I went into hospital. They said if I had left it a couple more days I could’ve died. I have had to totally quit smoking as it puts me at high risk for a haemorrhage – and drinking has gone out of the window too.

“I need follow-up treatment for 4-6 months. I was discharged from hospital in the middle of March but was banned from flying long-haul so had to stay in Southeast Asia for my weekly INR (blood) test. I am on drugs to thin my blood and the INR test is to make sure the dosage is correct so my blood is regulated to a normal level.

“I am meant to be home in the UK right now previewing and honing material for my Edinburgh Fringe show in August, but no can do. No Fringe show for me this year as there is no time. I am gutted.”

Matt was banned from making long-haul flights, but this did not include shorter flights, so he flew to Myanmar/Burma for nine days. These are extracts from his diary:

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DAY ONE

I have a bit of an accidental tradition of landing in countries when everything is closed because of a national holiday, a religious observance or some sort of civil unrest. A prime example of this was showing up in Paris during the riots of 2005. Or landing in Marrakesh midway through the month of Ramadan for a two week holiday. The latter denotes a particular lack of planning.

As my car inches its way through the traffic of the wide, tree-lined streets which take me from the airport to downtown Rangoon, it seems like I’ve landed on the set of a movie.

Happy New Year: The locals get very wet wet wet in Rangoon

Thousands of people armed with water guns, hosepipes and buckets are soaking each other and hurling vast quantities of water at the passing traffic. This is the first day of Thingyan, the Burmese New Year celebrations. Everything is closed for four days. Apart from the temples. And the taps.

On the opposite side of the road, heading towards the airport, a tourist bus crawls past us with its windows wide open. The people inside it are waving to the crowds and getting drenched.

“Japanese?” I asked my driver.

“No!” he laughed. “North Koreans.”

Finding this difficult to believe, I asked: “Are you sure? Not South Koreans? I don’t think North Koreans can travel, can they?”

“Oh yes,” he said, “they are North Koreans. We like North Korea in my country. Good friends.”

I sit back and ponder this for a bit, with eyes glazed over, until a bucket of water comes right through the car window and into my face.

DAY TWO

I acquire a guide. A sixty-something man named U Win, unusually tall, pot-bellied and balding. U Win wants to talk about George Orwell, which we do for a bit.

After a while, we sit in the shade of a tree, where he begins to talk to me about vipassanā meditation. “Do you know it?” he asks.

“Yes,” I respond, “I do know it.”

“Do you practise?” he asks.

“I went to a retreat once,” I confess, “but I left after three days… my back was in too much pain.”

“Nonsense!” he laughs. “Just let it pass!”

And that seems to nail Buddhist thought for me: Just let it pass.

“What about the army?” I ask quietly. “Do you think they practise meditation?”

He laughs loudly, looks away, thinks for a bit and comes back me: “No. The army don’t meditate.”

“Do they pray?” I ask. “Are they religious?”

“They offer prayers,” U Win responds. “But only prayers born from living in fear.”

DAY THREE

On University Avenue, I get utterly soaked during this third day of the Thingyan celebrations. At first I try to avoid it but, after a while, I throw away all inhibition and join in with it, filling up buckets with hosepipes, drenching complete strangers and passing traffic. It is enormous fun.

Aung San Suu Kyi addresses a political meeting

At sunset I head up the street to the house of Aung San Suu Kyi, hoping she will be at home to soak with water and New Year good wishes.

A ten foot wall and reinforced gates prevent me from doing so.

She is not stupid. The last thing she needs is a hippie soaked to the bone offering unsolicited hugs after a busy day working hard for democracy. Anyway, as I find out later, she is in Japan.

As I move on and nightfall descends, I fall into a gaping hole in the pavement. Pulled from the hole, bleeding from a gash to the right foot, a thought rushes to my mind: It’d be terrible for a man to come to wish a Nobel Peace Prize winner a Happy New Year and end up leaving with nothing but gangrene.

DAY FOUR

I stay in the guesthouse most of the day with the dodgy foot. I have to look after the foot and let it not get infected. It’s the foot at the end of the same leg (the right leg) in which I have deep vein thrombosis. Because I am on drugs to thin the blood, I bruise easily and, if I get a cut to the skin, it takes ages to heal over. The drugs can also make me very, very tired some of the time. And irritable. Not always, but sometimes. Today has been one of those days.

This is the only country I know where they steer right hand drive cars on the right hand side of the road. As you can imagine, being a passenger while the driver attempts to overtake somebody can be a potentially murderous experience. Fingernails into the dashboard time. This is due to an episode back in the days of the dictator Ne Win.

Ne Win, a superstitious man, one day consulted his personal fortune teller who advised him on all things auspicious and how to avoid bad fortune. Soon afterwards, the people woke up to be told – out of the blue – that from now on they must no longer drive on the left. You can imagine the chaos.

Matt saw more than just the tourist temples

DAY FIVE

A French lady named Anne comes over to join me at my table. She offers me a cigarette. “Feel free,” I tell her.

Since I quit smoking, my sweet tooth has swollen fantastically and I am making little effort to discourage it from doing so. I sit there watching her smoke while I sip my tea and eat condensed milk by the spoonful.

Anne and I sit by a lake, swampish and green. The lake is full of rubbish: floating plastic bags, empty cans and the odd sandal bobbing about. There are no bins in Burma. It depresses me. So does the bit of dog shit just a few yards in front of me. And the water fountain to my right which has run dry for the last thirty years. Three dogs are snarling and growling because another dog has had the cheek to walk into the park. I quietly mourn silence as I mourn dustbins and civic pride.

Meanwhile, a young couple walk past us hand-in-hand looking for all the world as if they’ve just entered heaven on earth.

DAY SIX

There’s a market over on 26th Street. Dead animals hang from hooks above marble slabs or over large plastic bowls flecked with blood. A bamboo cage crowded with live chickens – unaware of their delicious and hopefully well-cooked ending – shuffles very slightly by my feet. The stomach of a cow droops before me, about eye-level; the creature’s hind quarter is getting butchered noisily on the block beneath it. The tongue and the organs are all for sale. Skinned and ready to go too are all four legs complete with feet. Sellers grin widely at me, exhibiting reddened teeth stained with the residue of the betel nut, chewed for years then spat out onto the streets of Rangoon.

The streets have opened up for business following the chaos of the five day Water Festival.

Everywhere I turn, I am greeted with smiles. Genuine smiles.

Occasionally, somebody will stop me to ask which country I’m from, then which city and so on. I tell them the nearest one – Manchester.

I soon learn that you can’t move anywhere in Rangoon for running into United football supporters and, when they hear me say Manchester, they near enough explode with joy and thank me.

Cyclone Nargis: Burma’s worst natural disaster

DAY SEVEN

I took the passenger ferry across the Yangon River today to explore the town of Dalah and found myself for the first time in the Burmese countryside: swampy lakes, pagodas, bamboo houses on tall stilts. The word idyllic doesn’t seem to do it justice.

Cyclone Nargis ripped through this place back in 2008 and caused complete carnage. In total, over 150,000 people died.

The junta were still in charge with absolute power and – paranoid as ever about foreigners – refused entry to aid groups who could have treated people dying from preventable conditions. Aid workers were stranded at Rangoon Airport while the junta decided – over the course of two to three days – whether or not they would be issued with visas.

DAY EIGHT

I wonder how such gentle people as the Burmese could be ruled by such a ruthlessly brutal regime for nearly fifty years. They have so much grace.

Before the Second World War, this country was the leading exporter of rice in the world. By the late Sixties – six years after the military coup – they couldn’t feed themselves. By the Eighties they endured the humiliation of being lumped alongside North Korea among the poorest nations on earth.

Sixty million people ruled by an army of fifty thousand men. Men guilty of ethnic cleansing. Men who imprison and torture people who have opposed them. Men who think nothing of using rape against women as a weapon of war.

By releasing Aung San Suu Kyi – the symbol of the pro-democracy movement – from house arrest in 2010, the junta embarked on the final step of a meticulously designed ‘roadmap to democracy’. The following year, they held elections and – while not exactly a fully-fledged parliamentary democracy (the army having guaranteed themselves a 25% quota of government seats) – Burma has now at least a quasi-civilian government.

The internet firewalls have been removed. The press have been granted an unprecedented freedom. The intimidating signs which once warned civilians not to “be influenced by negative external forces” have been torn down. Heads of state and foreign ministers are returning from Burma telling the outside world with confidence that it is highly unlikely Burma will return to rule by the old regime.

DAY NINE

Café, Yangon Airport.

Reading the paper here, I am faced with headlines of destruction and riots between Buddhist and Muslim communities in Arakan state.

U Win Tin – that wonderful writer imprisoned by the junta for nearly 20 years – is being harassed by the authorities, while reports of forced evictions by the Tatmadaw (the army) are on the increase. I don’t know what the answers are.

I wish I did.

On the other hand, the European Union has lifted the last of its sanctions, which has led to the release of more political prisoners.

Does the army use these people as pawns in the game of politics? Or are things changing for the better? I think, perhaps both.

But what do I know? I’m too romantic. I’m too callow when it comes to the reality of politics, but I do understand people. This week has left me feeling more than hopeful about Burma and that all the talk of the Orwellian state will be a thing of the past in years to come.

My flight has just been called. It is time to ascend to the skies and hope for the best.

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Matt Roper is now back in Bangkok.

Yesterday, he had an ultrasound scan at a local hospital.

“They found a calcification in my flesh,” he told me. “At this point I did wonder whether the nurse wheeling me in and out of the scanning room would be the same nurse to have to lay me out. Time will tell.”

Ignore the new Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical, this is how the Profumo political sex scandal really happened

John Profumo, the UK’s disgraced Secretary of State for War

 

 

A couple of days ago in my blog, there was a discussion between comedy club owner Martin Besserman and writer Harry Rogers about whether people accused of sex crimes should be named in the press before they are prosecuted.

There is another interesting angle to this which Harry Rogers knows a bit about. Not a sex crime but a sex scandal… The Profumo sex scandal of 1963 which ultimately brought down Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government.

But this blog is really about Johnny Edgecombe, whom I think I probably met at Malcolm Hardee’s Up The Creek comedy club in Greenwich in the 1990s. By then, he was known as Johnny Edge. I have a vague recollection that Malcolm introduced me to Johnny Edge once; but I can’t be certain.

What interests me about Johnny is how small incidents in apparently insignificant individuals’ lives can change history.

For those too young to remember, the Profumo Affair involved ‘good-time party girl’ Christine Keeler having sex with John Profumo, the UK’s Secretary of State for War. This was not good, given that he was married to actress Valerie Hobson. Worse though, given that Profumo knew Britain’s entire defence secrets and this was the height of the Cold War, was that Christine Keeler was also having sex with Yevgeni Ivanov, a senior naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy in London. All military attachés are assumed to be spies.

In October 1962, the United States and the USSR almost stumbled into a nuclear war over the Cuban Missile Crisis.

At the same time, in London, Johnny Edgecombe was Christine Keeler’s boyfriend and allegedly her pimp. Before that, Keeler’s boyfriend had been drug dealer ‘Lucky’ Gordon. When she split from Gordon, he attacked her with an axe and held her hostage for two days. She then became Johnny Edgecombe’s girlfriend.

Just before Christmas 1962, she split from Johnny Edgecombe. What happened then resulted in a court case in which John Profumo’s name was mentioned in open court and the whole Profumo scandal became public knowledge.

Johnny Edgecombe went to prison for what happened in the mews.

I had a drink with Harry Rogers last night.

Harry Rogers remembers Johnny in Greenwich last night

“I met Johnny Edge just after he came out of prison,” Harry told me. “I think the intelligence services knew very well what was going on with Christine Keeler: that she was having an affair with Profumo and was also seeing Ivanov.”

“What had Johnny done before the Profumo thing?” I asked.

“He’d been friends with lots of jazz musicians in London,” Harry told me. “And he’d worked for Peter Rachman.”

“The dodgy slum landlord?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Harry. “Rachman bought a lot of properties up and, when he had trouble getting people out of a property, he would get Johnny Edge and a couple of others to go and take over the basement in the building and set up a shebeen. A shebeen is an illegal drinking establishment with lots of loud music pumping all night. So Johnny’s role was to set up the shebeen and get musicians to come in there and party. They had a great time and the people got so fed up with the noise they left. It was like constructive dismissal – constructive eviction, really.”

“But eventually,” I said, “he met Christine Keeler, she left him and that triggered off the whole thing.”

“Yes,” said Harry. “When Christine Keeler left him – he was kind of pimping her in a way; he was living off her earnings, anyway – he wanted money and he needed money and also Johnny was in competition with Lucky Gordon, who was out to get Johnny. He saw him as the person who had taken ‘his Christine’ away from him – cos he’d been pimping her too.

“Lucky Gordon had caught up with Johnny in the Flamingo club in Wardour Street in Soho and there had been a big running fight through the club. They were chasing each other about all over he place. Lucky Gordon was going to beat up Johnny, but Johnny pulled a knife and ‘striped’ his face.

“After that, Lucky Gordon was really, really angry and so he got a machete and he was threatening to cut Johnny Edge’s head off. And that’s why Johnny got a gun. And the gun that he got was Christine Keeler’s. She had a Luger pistol.”

“Why did she have a gun?” I asked.

“I think for protection,” Harry replied. “Anyway, Johnny took her gun and he was carrying it because he knew that, if Lucky Gordon did catch up with him – if he wasn’t protected – Lucky was going to kill him.

A 1964 book on the Profumo Scandal

“When Christine left Johnny and went to Stephen Ward in the mews, Johnny got a taxi to the house. Christine was there but wouldn’t come to the window. Mandy Rice-Davies came to the window and told Johnny Christine doesn’t want to speak to you - Here’s some money – Go away! – and threw a handful of fivers out the window.

“That made Johnny angry, so then he decided he was going to go in and talk to Christine. So he tried to do what they do in the movies. He tried to shoot the door open by blowing the lock off the door with the gun.

“That didn’t work, so then he got back into the taxi…”

“The taxi driver,” I asked, “had just been sitting there twiddling his thumbs through all this?”

“Yes,” said Harry. “The cab driver was still waiting. Johnny got back in the cab. And they drove off.

“Meanwhile, the police had been phoned. They caught up with Johnny and arrested him and charged him with attempted murder. They said he’d actually tried to shoot Christine Keeler from the street through the window. He never did that. But they needed a court case to break open the whole thing so they could officially look into everything that was going on. And, from that point onwards it all came out.

“What Johnny told me was that not only was Stephen Ward supplying various members of the Establishment with women… There were a number of them: Christine Keeler, Mandy Rice-Davies, Rona Ricardo and two or three other girls were involved in this circle, this kind of call girl ring that he was running… They would all go down to Lord Astor’s place (Clivedon in Buckinghamshire) and have the swimming pool, the weekend orgies, all the rest of it… not only was Stephen Ward doing that, but he was also supplying lots of Members of Parliament and the aristocracy with marijuana.”

“Which would be a big thing then,” I said.

“Which was a big thing then,” Harry agreed. “And which Johnny Edge was supplying to Stephen Ward.”

“How did the Russian get involved?” I asked.

Profumo resigned because he lied to MPs

“Well,” explained Harry, “Stephen Ward would host parties which diplomats and all sorts of people would attend – He was just a military attaché. I don’t think there was any attempt to screw information out of Profumo. There’s no way that Christine Keeler was pumping Profumo for information to give to Ivanov, who she called her ‘Russian teddy bear’. It was all just sex and drugs, really. But spooks, being what they are, often read a lot more into the situation than is there.

“Profumo was a pretty honourable man. He just liked screwing.”

“You’ve heard about the new Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical that’s being written about Stephen Ward?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Harry. “Johnny Edge told me Stephen Ward was a great guy and it was terrible the way he was vilified out. Really, he was just serving a need.”

“And was driven to suicide,” I said.

“And,” said Harry, “Johnny was sent to prison. He spent about six years inside. The Labour Party – Bessie Braddock in particular – said, as soon as they got into power, they would ensure he was released. But, of course, what happened when the Wilson government came in? They left him there to rot. He kept writing to them from prison trying to get them to honour what they had said they were going to do, but they left him there.

“He’d been sent to Dartmoor! For a while he shared a cell with Frank Mitchell.”

“The Mad Axeman?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Harry. “Everybody was really frightened of Frank in there. Not just the prisoners, but all the Screws. He was like an animal. But he took a liking to Johnny so, consequently, life was easy for Johnny inside because he had total protection. In those days, it wouldn’t have been easy being a black West Indian like Johnny in prison.’”

“And you met him soon after he got out?” I asked.

“When he first came out of prison,” explained Harry, “he didn’t go back to Notting Hill, he moved to a flat in Blackheath, then later he moved to a flat on a council estate by what’s now the Up The Creek comedy club.

“His aim was, if he could ever make enough money, to go out to the West Indies and buy a boat like his dad had had. Of course, it never happened.

“He would wake up in the morning and smoke a joint. Then he would get washed and dressed. Smoke another joint. Have breakfast. Smoke another joint. Then he was set up to go out for the day. He was always stoned. Always.

Johnny Edgecombe in later life + one of his cigarettes

“He decided he was going to make money from selling chess sets. He met somebody who had access to a whole load of reproduction fancy chess sets: the Lewis chess set, the Reynard The Fox one, a Mexican carved crystal one and an erotic chess set – pornographic, basically – the bishops had little boys sucking them off. They weren’t cheap. He made a good mark-up on them.

“Also, if you wanted to buy half a pound or a pound of dope, Johnny knew where to go. In 1971, you could probably get a pound of dope for £500 and he’d charge you £550. He wasn’t a big dope importer or anything, but he was big mates with Howard Marks, who was.

“After the chess sets, he got into buying VW camper vans in Amsterdam and filling them up with Second World War leather jackets and overcoats he bought in a warehouse near where he bought the VWs. They looked like Nazi overcoats but weren’t – most were actually Dutch motorcycle police coats, but they looked the business.

“So Johnny would fill the camper vans with these coats, bring them back to Britain and sell them. The rock singer Chris Farlowe used to run a Nazi militaria shop and Johnny Edge used to sell him these Dutch police overcoats as genuine Nazi wartime overcoats at a massive mark-up.

“Needs must when the Devil drives. There was no way he was ever going to get employed in a straight job; he was so stoned all the time.

“He was a very likeable guy. He was a great guy.”

“And he died just over two years ago,” I said. “What did he die of?”

“Lung cancer,” said Harry.

So it goes.

Margaret Thatcher, UK trades unions and my first job in television production

I had an NUJ card because I wrote words

Margaret Thatcher became British Prime Minister in 1979.

In 1979, I was working at ATV in Birmingham as a Scriptwriter in their Promotion Dept. I had to be in the NUJ (the National Union of Journalists) because I wrote scripts. I wrote scripts for the announcers but I could not edit promotion trailers because that area of work was controlled by the ACTT, the technical union for film & TV workers.

It was impossible to work in specific jobs in TV without being in the appropriate union.

In 1979, I realised that 14th November 1980 would be the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Coventry by German aircraft. The raid destroyed 75% of the city. So I suggested to Brian Lewis, head of documentaries, that ATV should film a programme about the raid. Coventry was in the ATV region.

He was interested in the idea and asked me to do some preliminary research on the background to a documentary film, but made it clear that I could not be employed or credited as a researcher on any production, because I was a member of the NUJ, not the ACTT.

At the time, the ACTT seemed more of a protection racket than a union. The employers had to do what the unions demanded or their TV signal would be taken off air and the TV companies would make no money. The workers had to pay the union money in order to work. If you were not a union member, you were not allowed to work. Most television and film work was a closed shop and there was a Catch-22. You could not get specific jobs unless you had a union card. It was highly difficult to get a union card without already having the specific job.

I did some preliminary research for the Coventry film and talked to director John Pett who had been assigned to the project. ATV, being an honest company, paid me for my work. But I could not work on the production and got no credit. That was fine. That was the way things worked at the time.

The hour-long documentary was made, with two ACTT researchers working on the production. It was transmitted on the ITV network as Moonlight Sonata in 1980.

ACTT – more protection racket than union

Eventually, I managed to get an ACTT union card as a Researcher by getting a job on the ATV children’s TV series Tiswas.

Much later, I was able to get a coveted ACTT card as a Director in the Promotions Dept at Central, the successor to ATV. It was a long, complicated and slightly Byzantine process to get the card. At around the same time, Margaret Thatcher stopped union ‘closed shops’.

So I needed an ACTT director’s card to work as a director… I eventually got one… but, by the time I actually got a director’s card, I could have worked without having one.

Margaret Thatcher destroyed the unions’ closed shops.

Good for her.

And good everyone else except the power-crazed union bosses of the time.

Now she is dead. Her funeral is today.

So it goes.

“Have I Got News For You” in London & from Kenya with comedy critic Copstick

(Parts of this piece were published on the Indian news site WSN)

Vivienne Soan turned the other cheek to Bob Slayer

Last night, I went to the recording of tonight’s edition of TV show Have I Got News For You.

Such are the strange times that Margaret Thatcher created and which we live in, that this BBC TV show is recorded in the ITV studios on London’s South Bank. I used to work there when it was London Weekend Television.

Given that the recording for the half hour show lasted over two hours, I do not envy the editor.

One of the guests on Have I Got News For You was former London Mayor ‘Red Ken’ Livingstone – a late replacement, it seemed, for a Conservative politician who did not fancy being on a show that was likely to make many a mention of Margaret Thatcher’s death this week.

I would guess one of the bits likely to be cut out of the show (for length reasons) is a reference to the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. Ken Livingstone said he had been told when he was London Mayor that he could not put anything permanent on it because it was reserved for a statue of the Queen, to be erected after her death. But, said Ken, he had been told not to tell this to anyone.

After the recording, my eternally-un-named friend and I had a drink in a pub opposite the ITV studios with comedian Bob Slayer and Pull The Other One club owner Vivienne Soan.

It was a pleasant – if lengthy – evening in London in a warm television studio and a rather over-priced pub glittering with lights.

When I got home, there was an e-mail from comedy critic Kate Copstick. She went to Kenya at the beginning of this week, continuing work for her Mama Biashara charity.

Mama Biashara  helps poor people in Kenya set up their own small businesses which may give them a lift to a better life; it also gives health aid.

She gets no money of any kind from the charity, takes no expenses and, when she is there, she lives in the slums of Nairobi.

These are extracts from Copstick’s diary this week:

MONDAY

British Airways check-in at Heathrow are delightful – even when I spill condoms and bleach tablets, bottles of kiddy vitamins, cod liver oil and multivitamins (thank you once again HTC) all over the concourse in an effort to reduce my ridiculously overweight bag to being merely overweight.

When I reach Nairobi, it is flooded. It is pouring with rain; there are great lakes of water everywhere.

My tiny slum palace awaits but, as it is late, we cannot take the shortcut through the carwash and I have to heave my bags through flooded and muddy pitch dark compounds. There is a massive blackout across Corner – fairly usual when it rains like this.

I only have one candle, so I save unpacking till morning.

The cats have come to greet me and stay the night. Which is sweet except when the kitten is sick under my bed.

TUESDAY

Giraffe & skyline of Nairobi: very obviously a city of contrasts

The cats have shared my bedspace and, in return, have allowed their fleas to bite me into a flurry of little red itches.

Today, Uhuru Kenyatta is being sworn in as President of Kenya, along with William Ruto his Vice President (some say with the emphasis on Vice; I couldn’t possible comment).

It is a national holiday.

We tour around the deserted city centre looking for a Forex foreign exchange shop to change some money. We eventually find one. The exchange rate is dire. But I have no choice.

Everywhere – on radios, in cars, on phones – is the relay of the swearing-in ceremony. Everyone is listening.

Various African Presidents speak. The outgoing President speaks,.William Ruto speaks… The Kikuyu are delighted.

“So you have a war criminal for a president,” I observe.

They laugh.

“What if he is found guilty at The Hague?” I ask.

“There is no Hague,” they reply. “We do not recognise the Hague,” they say. “When The Hague indicts George Bush we will recognise it,” they say.

You cannot fault the logic.

“And Tony Blair…” I offer. “And Tony Blair.”

I suppose that, even if Kenyatta and Ruto are guilty, they kept out of other people’s countries.

Mama Biashara has a new fundraiser in my cousin Gus, an excellent bloke who runs up and down mountains for fun. He is approaching some trusts and, if they are to make with the dosh, it will have to be for something more grown-up-sounding than ageing Scots loony woman runs around the nasty bits of Kenya setting up odd businesses in unlikely places and mopping up pus.

Doris’s mum has just died of cancer of the absolutely everything. As Doris talks, I learn that, just to be admitted into an oncology ward in Kenyatta Hospital (a government hospital), you have to pay a deposit (on admission) of 45,000ksh – around £400. As a basic payment. To which the cost of medication etc is added. Per week. To die. After which you have to pay Mortuary Fees while they store your body as your desperate relatives try to find a way of paying the hospital bill. This in a country where labouring pays £2 per day of hard graft and even a decent office job pays about £90 a month.

Copstick (in blue) at a Mama Biashara project

Doris has lined up a group of 190 refugee women, forced out of Kisumu in the aftermath of the election, to get the Mama Biashara treatment. They are Kikuyu in a Luo area. And the Luo are pretty pissed off at the result of the election.

The plan is to dig and stock three fish ponds for the refugee women to farm fish (it is the only business they know) on a piece of land they have been offered rent-free for ten years. 190 women is a serious project.

Jayne calls from Awendo to remind me the children have malaria, everyone needs shoes and the growth in Pamela’s anus is still there.

Now Felista arrives. She has become something of a national celebrity since appearing on TV when a man was killed by dogs outside DECIP, a children’s home which caters for children who are orphans, homeless and destitute.

The circumstances are typically murky and the Kenyan propensity for (a) turning a crisis into a massive drama and (b) gossiping the most massive amount of rubbish with endless enthusiasm means that no-one will ever know.

Felista says one dog nipped the man’s leg and then he died. The papers said that a “pack of rabid dogs” had attacked him and eaten his leg off. A mob of locals had descended on DECIP threatening to set fire to the place. And they would too. I have seen the Kenyan mob in action and it is fairly scary.

Felista got (and Mama Biashara paid for) an armed police guard until the hoo-ha died down a little.

Meanwhile, a second mob came to stone the dogs (any dogs, really) to death. The local authorities got in first and put the dogs down but the mob got in and stoned them anyway.

WEDNESDAY

I awake to find I have an arse like Doris’s. OK not quite. But it seems that, despite my dangling little insect-abattoir strips about the room, the mosquitoes have been in and had themselves a party on my ass. It ain’t pretty. Scratching uncontrollably, I head to the bank and withdraw a wedge and a half.

I meet Doris and we head out to Kenool for a little workshop. I have a gift for Doris but it has suffered an unfortunate tragedy. As British Airways are not as generous as Virgin when it comes to excess baggage, I use my two allowed free bags on the way back when I bring a mountain of stuff. This leaves me with two bags on the way out and you would not believe how much really good cod liver oil and multivitamins weigh (thank you HTC).

I spent an afternoon decanting syrups and cough mixtures from glass bottles into big lightweight plastic bottles. Ignoring my sister Amanda’s advice to wrap them in clingfilm, I arrive to discover that Doris’s beautiful purple boots (thank you Age UK) are soaked in Kilkof cough linctus. Not good. I scrub and clean them as best I can and Doris seems delighted with everything except the lingering smell.

Excitingly, my brother calls to confirm he will be in Nairobi on Saturday at 5.00pm.

The walk back home is wet and muddy. The slum mud has stuff in it you really don’t want to think about and has the effect of clamping great gobs of it to your feet so, by the end of a 100 yard walk, you have doubled your body weight.

I curl up with the cats.

THURSDAY

Kate Copstick in Kenya: takes one step at a time

I meet with Doris after she has been coffin-shopping and we get together with some more groups in Dagoretti Corner. We fund a fresh ginger and garlic selling group; some women who will be buying, slaughtering and selling chicken; a rice business; a group of three men who have the opportunity to buy a chainsaw and start a firewood business; and another men’s group who have got themselves knee-deep in orders for duck meat.

The Chinese are really taking over here.

I notice, when I go into the supermarket, alongside The Nation, The Standard and The Kenyan, there is now The Chinese Times.

Margaret Thatcher and naked men at a Trades Union conference in Blackpool

Mrs Thatcher & Greatest Show On Legs in 1982 Sun cartoon

Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died yesterday.

The late ‘godfather of alternative comedy’ Malcolm Hardee remembered in his 1996 autobiography I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake various occasions when he was part of The Greatest Show On Legs, performing their naked balloon dance:

“We even performed at a TUC Conference in Blackpool where Neil Innes of the Bonzo Dogs got booed off for being sexist: he was singing a song about a woman with tits and they didn’t like him. But they liked The Greatest Show on Legs naked with balloons.

“Except that we didn’t use balloons: we used photos of Mrs Thatcher to cover our genitalia and, after we turned round, our penises were sticking out of her mouth.

“They loved it.”

Disgraced Chris Huhne, in poems and diaries by the teenage girl he snogged

(This was also published by the Huffington Post)

Chris Huhne, the man who snogged teenage comic Charmian

Last May, I posted a blog which was headed:

Cabinet Minister Chris Huhne and the Convent-Raised Comedian

in which comedienne Charmian Hughes remembered now-disgraced British politician Chris Huhne giving her her first snog when she was a pupil at Westminster Boys’ School (it’s a complicated story).

So, when Chris Huhne yesterday (after ten years of denying it) admitted in court to perverting the course of justice… and when his son’s venomous e-mails to him were made public this morning… I sent an e-mail to Charmian:

Any bloggable memories or comments? I asked. He seems to have been liked by his son!

Did Westminster School rate telling the truth highly? At my grammar school, they had a debating society (I wasn’t a member) where the most admired people were the ones who could successfully argue for a motion which they didn’t agree with at all… A microcosm of Parliament, I think… Lying was admired and celebrated.

Charmian Hughes at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe

Charmian replied:

All adolescents hate their parents and I hope they get through this. It is very sad. My daughter says things like that to me on a daily basis and I haven’t even done anything!

I think maybe he has confessed to save his son from going to court. It’s like A Tale of Two Cities: ”It is a far far better thing that I do now than I have ever done…”

He gave us the most fun in our teens, but not out of generosity but because we hung on to his tails by the skin of our teeth. I have a five year diary that is full of him and how amazing I thought he was.

Did you know I am a writer of serious poetry since the age of 7? So here is one written in October 1971 and guess who it is about and what it predicts. Forgive the metaphysical, meteorological and geographical confusion. These are my teenage poems about Chris.

________________

THE OSTRICH – (October 1971)

The wolves pursued me through the snow,
I was an ostrich fleeing across the strand,
aware of death if I were to let go,
I buried my head, an ostrich in the sand,
and when I reached my mother’s arms
I tried to hold her, but she let me go,
let the wolves devour me,
an ostrich in the snow.

SNOWMAN – (September 1971)

When that warmth
almost thawed the frost,
I was ready to worship the sun.
But you clothed yourself in cloud
and my heart has become numb.
Sensitivity has formed its own barricade.

Love – I have forgotten how to love;
and I am like some empty Antarctica
that nothing can penetrate.

Don’t try to melt me
or you too shall become frozen;
and two unfeeling snowmen
shall stare indifferently
at a bleak and frozen world.

LOUISE - (9th December 1972)
(for CPH)

a cold day -
our tears are all frozen
into hard smiles.
The same axe
splintered all our dreams.
But on the thousandth day
we rise again:

More bitter and more silent,
but still with instinct to survive, endure,
forget, and love again.

________________

Charmian continued:

I came from a convent where truth was absolutely paramount. If a teacher told a girl off for talking in class, another girl’s hand would shoot up straight away: “Please, Sister, it was my fault actually,” and that herd mentality protected the group, so honesty paid off.

Westminster certainly protected its own. It was educating the political and legal class – the sins of youth were probably expected, even covered up.

People were always laughing at other people there, mocking the sensitive. I think if you laugh at someone (not in entertainment but in ridicule)  it is the least intelligent, least curious response to that person and is just expressing a fait accompli superiority devoid of moral growth. Lots of people laughed at my poems and thought I was oversensitive but, mind you and touch wood, I’m not in prison am I?  Abuse of a metaphor is not yet a criminal offence!

These are extracts from Charmian’s teenage diaries:

________________

1970

August

in evening i went to see Chris Paul-Huhne. He has grown his hair – much nicer!!! Chris edits a v. serious magazine called Free Press, one shilling and he and others spend hundreds on it.

12th September

Chris looked super. we sold Free Press in market and tube station. moved to pop concert but lost Chris – saw him disappear in car with girl on his lap.

13th September

Chris apologised and said while we were in market he and pals were at tube looking for us. he’d gone on to party and we’d have gone too if we’d found him.

31st October

In morn shopped at Kensington Market. Bought purple vest/shirt. In afternoon went to Chris’s. Marcus W was there. Chris wilfully flared the lighter in my face and tried to singe my eyebrow! My god, he could have singed my eye and blinded me!! He tried to make me jealous by saying about a house party next Saturday. We left with Free Press. In evening Mish asked us round. We tried ringing Chris to see if anything on. Was not on.

1971

14th April

Went to see Chris. He was having breakfast. This time he played the piano and sung his own combination. God! Actually he’s got quite a good voice. When the romantic moment came, he told me I owed him 14/6pence for the Free Press I’d sold.

23rd April

Chris wanted his cash so i gave it to him out of sponsor cash.

31st May

Went to Chris’s. He seemed pleased to see me and asked me in. He kept staring at me. I said I was either Marxist or Labour and he said he’d send me Manifesto of Communism for birthday. I told him date.

4th June

My birthday. No manifesto from Chris.

18th July

In evening went to see Chris. He said I embarrassed him as I represented his childhood. Then he said I’d changed a lot since he last saw me and was mature.  he said I had… an air of serenity. We listened to records. He is a very deep person.

________________

After she read these diary entries from Charmian, my eternally-un-named friend said to me:

“Well, if he can sing, he should write a song in prison. He might get a pardon if he writes a good one. Or he could sing Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree…”

Tantalisingly, Charmian told me:

“I had to edit and cut those extracts as they presented him in rather an unfair light!”

UK comic Tiernan Douieb is becoming more political and is going to Iceland

Tiernan Douieb in Piccadilly Circus, London this week

A few years ago, the comedian Tiernan Douieb was at risk of having the Michael Palin problem: people just thought he was too nice.

I had a feeling Tiernan decided to change his persona sometime around 2010, by bringing politics into his act, so I asked him about it this week:

“Oh, I think I’m still quite friendly on stage,” he said. “I’m trying to do the politics in my own voice, by saying I’m an idiot but this is how I understand things and this is why I’m upset. I’m not trying to get on my high horse and say I know more than the audience. But, yeah, I did want to get away from just doing silly gags.”

“Why were you worried about being loveable?” I asked.

“I wasn’t so worried,” Tiernan laughed. “But, at the moment, I’m just generally very angry with the government and I thought I want to talk about this because, for the first time, it’s really bothering me. I felt what I was saying on stage – the gags – didn’t really… I didn’t care about it any more.

“My family – my dad and brother and mum – are all quite political and I’ve generally been the crap one who didn’t care really care enough until a couple of years ago. I did start doing political stuff a little before the Coalition came in – about the financial crisis. It felt like a good challenge and I quite enjoyed getting my teeth into it – saying to myself: How do I make this horrible situation funny?”

“So how do you make a horrible situation funny?” I asked.

“If you look into a subject enough, there will always be something ridiculous, but you’ve got to research it. I’m learning. I’m still learning. I’m finding that there are gigs I can’t really do the political stuff at, especially on a Friday or Saturday where people seem to just switch off. People have the automatic assumption that, if you start to talk about politics, they won’t enjoy it. They just think: This is going to be boring. I’ve just finished work. This is the last thing I want to hear. I want to hear dick jokes.”

“So,” I asked, “you perform one type of routine Sundays to Thursdays and another type Fridays and Saturdays?”

“That’s almost it,” agreed Tiernan. “Also if I’m compering, I don’t do political stuff very much then because, selflessly, I’ve got to set it up for the other acts and, if I do something that changes the opinion in the room…

“The other problem with doing topical or political stuff is that it changes every week. I have bits of material I have where I go: Argh! I can’t do that any more! because they’ve changed that policy or whatever.”

“Did you also start writing for the Huffington Post because it gives you more gravitas?” I asked.

“Well,” said Tiernan, “much like you, I used to write a daily blog on my website. The object was to force me to get up and write something each day. Then, because my blog was about all sorts of things, I thought I’d write one for the Huffington Post which was just political stuff. And then I gave up writing my blog because I got bored with writing something every day.”

“I find,” I said, “that writing a daily blog does force me to do things. But I still don’t understand how to use Twitter effectively. Performers love it, though: possibly because they want constant attention.”

“Personally,” said Tiernan, “I like using Twitter because it helps me to generate jokes. I can write a topical joke very quickly and then it’s out there immediately.”

“But doesn’t that also mean,” I suggested, “that you’re giving away good jokes for free and, if you then use that joke in your act, it feels like a stale joke because people who follow you on Twitter will have heard the joke already?”

Tiernan disagreed.

“I don’t use a lot of jokes I Tweet,” he explained, “because they are so topical. If I do three short jokes based on the news, they won’t be relevant tomorrow. I do Twitter for the same reason I used to do a blog: I find it keeps me really sharp. I get up every morning and think What gag can I get from that?… And what gag can I get from that?… Bam-Bam-Bam… I need to start my brain in the mornings, otherwise I can sit there aimlessly for hours. And often I put on Twitter a short joke that, later, I find is a theme I can develop. If it gets ReTweets, I know people have found it interesting. If I do a couple of jokes and they work, then I Tweet I’m gigging there… and that does work as self-promotion. At the Edinburgh Fringe, I sold 4 or 5 tickets a day, just as the result of Tweets.”

“And your next big project?” I asked.

“I’ve got a director friend and we’re talking about doing a video-cast every week – 5 minutes on YouTube of political humour, really topical. We’re both very sick of the fact there’s so much that dictates what’s on television and radio. We both have a lot of projects turned down because everything needs to be changed: You’re not allowed to say that on television or whatever.

“Sod it! We want to do an angry political rant every week. We might call it The Partly Political Broadcast and make it as funny as possible but with a point.”

“So you’re going to carry on down the political path, then?” I asked.

“Yes, I’m enjoying it. But I’m not a big Labour Party fan either. I think they’re awful as well. I don’t think anyone really speaks for the people or really cares. It’s mostly about earning money and I think, while that’s the case, there’s a lot to say.”

“What about Boris Johnson (the Mayor of London)?”

“I hate him,” said Tiernan. “I got booed at a gig for saying I hated him. He’s awful. He’s terrible.”

“But he makes people laugh…” I said.

“That’s the thing about being funny,” said Tiernan. “You can get away with everything. Comedians are dangerous.”

“And Boris is a comedian…” I said.

“No, he’s a clown.”

“What’s the difference?”

“He’s more farcical,” said Tiernan. “He’s more slapstick. His scripts are well-written. I’d love to know who writes his speeches. I think he improvises parts of them. I went to one of the Mayoral Debates and I didn’t really like any of the candidates. Brian Paddick was reading a script…”

“He was the gay policeman?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Tiernan. “And he was just so wooden and boring… but Jenny Jones and Boris came over as being very normal. If you watch enough performers and performance, you can tell when people are being ‘real’ and they just seemed genuine. But Boris ‘mugged’. Any time anyone else spoke, he would pull faces and distract the audience, so people were giggling. It was so cruel.”

“But effective,” I said.

“Incredibly so,” said Tiernan. “I just hated it.”

“Perhaps you should be a politician,” I suggested.

“I couldn’t do that,” said Tiernan instantly.

“The problem,” I said, “is that, to be an effective politician, you have to be two-faced and have adjustable morals to deal with all the shits you have to negotiate and compromise with.”

“I’m going to Iceland on Monday,” Tiernan said. “for my first holiday in two years. I like their ethos. Not their eating ethos – sheep’s heads and putrified shark – but the Mayor of Reykjavík, Jón Gnarr, was a stand-up comedian and went in to the election for a bit of a laugh. He formed a party called the Best Party and some of their policies were We’re definitely going to get a polar bear in the zoo and Free towels at all the swimming pools and all the voters went Yeah, We’re so sick of everyone, we’ll vote you in and he ended up being Mayor and now he’s going to run for Prime Minister.

“Their whole ethos is just Peace. They want to be a peaceful nation. They don’t want an army. They’ve got these lovely ideas. I mean, they still eat puffins, but… I dunno… the whole place appeals to me.”

Bouncing Czechs & Presidential pranks

(This was also published by Indian news site WSN)

Vladimir Franz – the tattooed face of Czech politics

I worked in Prague a few times, making promotions and press tapes for some start-up TV channels around 1995/1996.

It was only a few years after the Soviet empire crumbled and I thought Prague – and the Czech people – might be a bit grey and dour. It only took me about a week to re-appraise the situation, when I started to think of the country not as the Czech Republic but as Bohemia.

The Czechs are bohemians.

That is not 100% politically and geographically correct, but it is psychologically correct.

Certainly, when I was there, they liked their beer and they liked a party.

I should have realised this earlier because, before I actually worked in the Czech Republic, my sole experience of Czechs was bringing Ernő Rubik (inventor of Rubik’s cube) over to the UK for a couple of appearances on the anarchic children’s TV show Tiswas.

Erno was a very laid-back dude who liked jazz and wore corduroy trousers.

And THAT was under Soviet Communism.

I like the Czechs. They are generally sophisticated, cool and creative.

During my time there poet, playwright and former dissident Václav Havel was President. He had new uniforms for Prague Castle’s guards designed by the man who designed costumes for the movie Amadeus. He appointed glorious rock god Frank Zappa as ‘Special Ambassador to the West on Trade, Culture and Tourism‘ for the Czech Republic.

You have to like the Czechs.

But, like all relatively small countries (population 10.5 million) you have to accept the good (the capacity for eccentric decisions) with the bad (a possibility of corruption). In that sense, it is not unlike the Republic of Ireland.

Which brings me to the President of the Czech Republic.

In the UK, today’s Guardian newspaper carries a piece on Vladimir Franz, a tattooed-all-over opera composer, painter and professor at Prague’s Academy of Performing Arts. He is running for President and, in this week’s Presidental election race, he has an estimated 11% support and is running third. He has been compared (because of his tattooed face) to “an exotic creature from Papua New Guinea”, has no political experience and admits he doesn’t know much about economics.

So, obviously, I asked former Scots comic Alex Frackleton (now living in the Czech Republic) for some background on current Czech politics.

“In the outside world,” he told me, “it is the year 2013 – but, alas, not here where, despite digital television and high-speed internet, it feels like we’re living in the middle ages, circa 1320.

“On New Year’s Day, the out-going president of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus (known to me as ‘Cunty Baws’) announced a presidential pardon that would see the release of 7,000 prisoners from Czech jails and court proceedings. Among those released are a number of persons either convicted of or in the process of being prosecuted for multi-billion dollar frauds which took place during the privatization process of the 1990s. Purely coincidentally – and I hasten to add this is merely an observational point on my part – Václav Klaus was Prime Minister of the Czech Republic in the 1990s.

“I seem to be alone in assuming that this is merely a coincidence as every single person I know here is furious. Everyone is going mental. Even people who don’t normally care about politics are shouting their heads off.

“To date, 600 Mayors and 500 schools have taken down the President’s portrait in protest at the amnesty. The British equivalent would be removing a picture of the Queen, the Pope or Stephen Hawking …

“Cunty Baws is shouting about how the press/media/his enemies are blowing the whole thing out of proportion. This is the guy who, as a visiting President to a conference in Chile, was caught on camera stealing a pen.

“If he wanted to do something to mark his out-going-ness, he could easily have granted free heating to all pensioners during the three coldest months of the year.

“If ever there was a moment for another ’68 Prague Spring uprising or a real revolution to replace the velvet cushiness of ’89, then that moment ought to be now.”

The late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: a great loss to British comedy

An inspiration: Margaret Thatcher

Yesterday, I was talking to an anonymous person I shall call ‘Chris’ because that is nothing like their real name and it could be either a man or a woman.

Chris is an ex-comedian.

I was talking to Chris about political comedy. There is not a lot of it about any more.

Chris left comedy, let us say, in the 1990s because – to an extent – he/she was disillusioned. There was not enough ‘serious’ comedy around. People had stopped making points in comedy. And alternative comedy, said Chris, had stopped being alternative.

“There used to be mixed bills,” Chris told me. “Odd variety acts, political comedians, gag-based comedians, poetry, a bit of music. Now it’s all interchangeable stand-up acts trying to get on radio and TV. It’s all gone bland. There’s no difference between the type of comedy in clubs and the type of comedy on TV.”

Margaret Thatcher, Chris told me, had been great for comedy because she made Chris – and many other comedians – really angry.

“I hated Thatcher,” Chris told me.

“But,” I said, “can’t you get angry now? You’ve got a Conservative government and you’re not a Conservative voter… The Prime Minister and the Chancellor are both posh public school educated millionaire toffs, which Margaret Thatcher was not – she was a shopkeeper’s daughter… And you’ve just been going on to me about unfair employment legislation… There’s unemployment and a bad economic situation.”

“But,” said Chris, “I can’t get angry about it the way I got angry when Thatcher was Prime Minister.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I hated her.”

“What about the economic situation at the moment?” I asked.

“It’s worse abroad,” Chris said.

“What about the posh boy Prime Minister and Chancellor?” I asked.

“I can’t hate them,” Chris said. “I can only dislike them.”

“When you were a comedian,” I said, “I guess you were struggling financially and it was difficult to survive on comedy. Now you could afford to be a comedian because you have a steady day job and you could perform comedy in the evening without having to rely on the money you may not make from it.”

“I just don’t feel angry,” Chris said. “I used to feel angry.”

“Does your day job satisfy you?” I asked.

“No,” said Chris.

Jimmy Savile was knighted to save money on Stoke Mandeville Hospital

Call him Sir Jimmy Savile

My chum mad inventor John Ward tells me:

“While doing a talking head bit yonks ago on early morning BBC Radio 4, discussion afterwards in the Green Room got round to Jimmy Savile.

“One very posh-talking government minister-type person pointed out to one of the production crew that Her Majesty’s Government thought it a good idea to bung Jimmy Savile a knighthood as they cost nothing and it worked out cheaper than the NHS having to spend millions to rebuild Stoke Mandeville Hospital when Jim would fix it and get all the peasants rallied to do the job because they would do anything for the God-like person in the track suit.

“And, as it ‘appens, that is wot happened.”