John’s UK Coronavirus Diary – No 7 – The human effect on friends and family

… CONTINUED, REALLY, FROM DIARY No 5 …

EASTER SUNDAY 12th APRIL

The UK figures for deaths related to coronavirus are now over 10,000 – in fact, 10,612.

But Prime Minister Boris Johnson was discharged from hospital today, after being in an Intensive Care Unit.

My Central London friend, mentioned in previous blogs, who has a friend in an Intensive Care Unit with the virus, told me that, last night:

“A consultant phoned me after ICU rounds. He said my friend’s oxygen requirement remains high but was stable on maximum ventilation – but he is now needing 24/7 dialysis. His blood has shown a bacterial infection somewhere although they don’t know where, so they are treating that with broad spectrum antibiotics and it is improving. He has no fever. The swab from last week has confirmed he has COVID-19.

“The consultant said that they (and we) were hoping by now for a small sign of improvement because, after a week, most patients who make it out the other side are showing some reduction in ventilator dependence. They will keep giving him all the support they can, in the hope his body can take over some of the breathing. But the more and longer support they give – and the more organs involved – the more his survival is compromised. 

“The consultant was quite blunt and it was hard to hear and it is awful to write. I am beyond sad and distressed. Sort of numb, then tears, then numb. Yet I am getting a lot of support all round and a huge amount of loving messages for my friend. 

“I am so busy fielding questions and talking to his family and friends and answering so many texts coming through with good wishes. He has so much more living to do, such a zest for life; he is so generous and charitable, so fit and healthy and active at 59, always climbing up those hills near where he lives (his home is not in London). No pre-existing medical issues except for a bit of gout. He has helped so very many people with so many things – I had no idea, but I am receiving a wealth of heartwarming messages. 

“This is a nightmare for so many families, I cannot comprehend the enormity.” 

EASTER MONDAY 13th APRIL

British comedy performer Tim Brooke-Taylor died of coronavirus yesterday. Someone asked me if I had ever met him and, for the life of me, I could not remember. But, then, my friend Lynn told me she had had a dream last night in which she had been in the Green Room at London Weekend Television and disgraced film director Roman Polanski was sitting in a chair not talking to anyone. It was only when she woke up that she remembered she actually HAD encountered Roman Polanski in the Green Room at LWT years ago and he was sitting in a chair not talking to anyone. She had forgotten she had ever encountered him. He was, she said, extremely small.

I had a flash of a dream myself last night about having a dream about having a dream (it was one of those dreams!) about something I was told last century by an Italian archaeologist who was a sleeper agent for the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Strange but true. I have mentioned it before – years ago – in this blog. He told me:

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One of the most famous legends of Central Asia tells of a horseman, the standard-bearer of the great Khan. As the Khan’s army are entering a city after a glorious victory, the standard-bearer sees a dark lady looking at him. The dark lady has fearful eyes, as if she is looking right inside him. Afterwards, he becomes scared that this woman is a witch and she has put the Evil Eye on him, so he goes to the great Khan and tells him his fears and says he wants to go to another city.

“Of course!” says the great Khan. “Give him the finest horse we have! Let him escape!”

“So (he) takes the fastest horse in the Great Khan’s army…”

So the standard-bearer takes the fastest horse in the Great Khan’s army, rides off across the desert and, in record time, travels to the other city. When he arrives, he sees the same dark lady standing by the city gates, waiting for him. She looks at him, smiles and says:

“I was so worried. I knew I was due to meet you here today but, when I saw you in that other city so far away, I was worried that you would not make it here in time for your appointment.”

And the standard-bearer realises that Death is with him.

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I got another message from my friend in Central London:

“I just spoke to the Senior Critical Care Nurse.

“My friend had a less good night, needing meds to support blood pressure. Today more stable although still needing dialysis. I asked whether it is possible for his kidneys to recover from acute renal failure and she said Yes. 

“The plan this afternoon is to try decreasing oxygen by a minuscule step to see if he can tolerate less ventilation. This is something they do every few days to see if there’s any improvement in lung function. 

“He is not absorbing feed well at the moment. 

“Overall, the nurse told me, they cannot predict the outcome, as he continues to be critically ill and has not yet turned a corner. However, she added that they continue to support him because, at this point, there is still a possibility of improvement.

“So we are not without hope. 

“It sort of depends who one talks to at the hospital. Some doctors are very blunt. The other day one said to me: ‘He’s not dead, so that’s a positive.’ Whereas the nursing staff are more compassionate but they may just be more skilled at delivering the info in a more palatable way… Who knows?” 

The UK figures for hospitals today are 717 dead in last 24 hours. Total 11,329

It was like finding the Ark of the Covenant…

TUESDAY 14th APRIL

The highlight of today was going into the local Iceland store and finding three plastic bottles of antibacterial handwash. I have not seen anything like these for maybe three weeks. I only bought one bottle, of course, as I am not a panic-buyer.

There were some face masks on sale in a small local shop last week – one-use only masks – at £5 each.

Online, I got some PVC gloves (£10 for 100, including postage) six days ago, kept forgetting to put them on the first three days and have worn them the last three days. 

But I can’t stop random scratching and touching bits of my cranial anatomy. Which, I suspect, makes wearing the gloves rather pointless. 

Romanian entertainer Dragos Mostenescu has put online another episode of his series about being in the London lockdown with his family:

Meanwhile, YouGov today reported that “With some public health experts warning that the government could face ‘an unforgiving reckoning’ for its early handling of the coronavirus crisis, we asked Britons how confident they are in the scientific advice that is being given to them by its health advisers.

“71% are either fairly (57%) or very (14%) confident in the advice being given.

“Only 21% are not very (16%) or not at all (4%) confident.”

Today’s government figures are that the number of coronavirus hospital deaths jumped by 778 in the last 24 hours to a total of 12,107.

… CONTINUED HERE …

Sexual abuse: when women & children were seen as ‘fair game’? – in the past?

A British Rail poster from the past, with paedophile pop star Gary Glitter

The last words of my blog yesterday were:

“The past does not exist, even though everything is interconnected by happenstance.”

Someone took exception when they read this yesterday and told me:

“You’re an idiot. Of course the past exists.”

Well, it doesn’t and it does…

Two days ago, I posted a blog headlined Rolf Harris, Jimmy Savile, Gary Glitter, Roman Polanski – and what it is like to be sexually assaulted as a child.

Yesterday, I got a response from ‘Sandy Mac’. This turned out to be someone I met at the Edinburgh Fringe last year. This is what she wrote yesterday:

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I was born in 1946.

I was about seven years old or a bit younger and sometimes looked after by a neighbour with a small daughter. I rarely saw her husband but, on this occasion, he was at home.

He and I were in the front room sitting in front of the fire. Amidst the chat, I looked up to see this ‘thing’ in his hand which he urged me to touch.

I remember feeling uncertain, confused if not a bit frightened at what he was asking, although I didn’t know why.

I remember him saying: “Go on. It won’t bite.”

Then his wife called us to the kitchen to eat. I can’t remember how I felt after that as we all sat around the table.

I do know that I didn’t tell my mother, but I didn’t go to that house again.

A happy coincidence maybe, but no explanation was given.

In my early twenties, I remember working for one particular employer who was an absolute menace around women. He also wielded quite a lot of power. Not a happy combination. As well as witnessing my employer’s behaviour towards women at first hand, I heard accounts from other people too. This would have been in the mid-1960s.

That sadly was the climate of the times.

Police at that time, I remember, were loathe to intervene in cases of domestic violence. Oh how I applauded Erin Pizzey when she opened her first refuge in Chiswick in the early 1970s.

I was an ‘unmarried mother’ at sixteen and was sent to a mother and baby home, run by nuns in Stamford Hill.

The stigma was huge in 1962, only matched by my mother’s disappointment in me.

My daughter will be 52 this year with three boys of her own. She was reunited in Canada with her father and his lovely wife. She and her dad had about ten years to get to know one another. She was with him when he died a few years ago now.

Rolf Harris, Jimmy Savile, Gary Glitter, Roman Polanski – and what it is like to be sexually assaulted as a child

Today’s headline in the Daily Mirror

Yesterday, children’s entertainer Rolf Harris was found guilty of twelve sexual assault charges dating back to the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, including an attack on a child of seven.

“He always had the reputation,” I said to a chum this morning, “of being a groper. And, I mean, feeling the breasts of 22 year-old secretaries is obviously bad, but this is a different level. Now, I suppose, we won’t see him in clips of any old programmes, just like the BBC now removes Jimmy Savile from any old Top of the Pops re-screenings.”

“It’s as if all my childhood memories are being trashed,” my chum said. “First of all it was Gary Glitter and Do You Wanna Be in My Gang? and I Love You Love and now it’s Rolf and Two Little Boys and Jake The Peg mit his extra leg.”

They didn’t want Gary Glitter in the gang

“Well,” I said, “I loved the Spice Girls movie Spice World and that had a big sequence in it with Gary Glitter in Do You Wanna Be in My Gang? and they had to cut it out at the last moment before release because he got arrested and most of the Spice Girls’ fan base were pre-pubescent and only-just pubescent girls.”

“My friends in Germany used to come over every year to see Garry Glitter perform,” said my chum. “It was their big annual thing, like going to the Glastonbury Festival.”

“How old were they?” I asked.

“In their twenties, I guess. And there was a poster about reduced railway tickets for students. I asked at the railway station, got two of those and sent one to Germany. Obviously, I don’t have it up on the wall now and I haven’t played my Gary Glitter records since: I’ve got one of his LPs.”

A British Rail poster featuring Gary Glitter

“Why don’t you play the record?” I asked.

“Because all you’re aware of is that this person singing is this very unpleasant person who wants to use and abuse people, that sex is so trashed, debased turned into a nasty abusive thing.”

“But,” I said, “the music is still the same. If it was good before, it’s still good now, even if you know the guy was a nasty sexual predator. Just because you’re a mass murderer doesn’t mean you can’t produce a good piece of music or a great novel or a movie.”

“You’ve said that about Roman Polanski before,” my chum told me.

“Yes,” I said. “I think he should have his bollocks cut off and be thrown in a pit of vipers for the rest of his life. But it doesn’t change the fact Macbeth and Dance of The Vampires are great films and they should not suddenly be un-screened.”

Unlucky British Rail also used Jimmy Savile (centre back) in their ads

“It’s irrelevant whether it’s good or not,” said my chum. “It’s a reminder of something nasty that has ruined that work of art. With Roman Polanski, he (normally) is not actually starring in the films and most people aren’t aware who directed a film. It’s not like Gary Glitter or Rolf Harris or Jimmy Savile who are up there performing in front of you as themselves. Once you know something about someone, it changes your perception and you can’t un-know it.

“The thing is my experience of… It’s not a heavy one like other people you know… But, on the beach when I was nine or ten, we were all by the chewing gum machines and it was dark and late and the parents were off in the house chatting. And there was this man – he might have been only a teenager himself, but he seemed a grown man to me – he was putting change in the chewing gum machine.

“I was walking on the beach about twenty yards away from the other kids, somehow. And he said Hold my finger and I realised it wasn’t his finger, cos it was without a bone in it. It was squidgy.

“I was only a kid and all I knew was there was something alarming about it. Something unpleasant and you realised Oh! a bit like the ice cracking underneath you if you were on ice. Or Oh shit! The road’s falling away. Oh dear! Trouble! Nasty! It’s like you’re treading on ordinary ground and then Oh, no! This is wrong! This isn’t right! How do I save myself from this?

“It was nothing that I even understood. You don’t really understand anything at nine or ten. This adult is intending to do something. You hadn’t wanted to hold someone’s finger. They’ve even lied to you to get you to do something. Your mind is with all the other kids like Let’s run round in circles and then run round in the other direction! You’re on that level and suddenly… It is a nasty thing and in one’s consciousness your brain is suddenly aware of Alarm! Danger! – What’s this?”

“And,” I suggested, “you don’t quite know what the danger is?”

“Yes. You’re completely in your own little world as a kid. You just know something is not good. Nothing hurt. He wasn’t nasty to me. He didn’t say nasty things… You never forget it happened. If something worse had happened, it must be like…”

She paused.

“Did you tell your parents?” I asked.

“No. Why didn’t I tell them? There’s a feeling that someone’s done something wrong. Something’s gone wrong. If a dog had come and bit me or even just frightened me, I’d have told them Oh! That dog’s frightening me! but, for some reason… It’s as if you don’t know if maybe you have done something wrong yourself. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. But it was like you are in a complete sleep and you suddenly wake up and find yourself in a slight nightmare of Oh! What’s this? Oh no! This isn’t right! I just turned round and walked away. I realised it wasn’t his finger. I think that’s what woke me up to the danger.”

The deleted Spice World sequence featuring Gary Glitter is on YouTube.

Jimmy Savile, Gary Glitter and Roman Polanski. Comparing artists and arses.

(This was also published by the Huffington Post)

Spice World released with scum removed

“Roman Polanski?” someone said to me yesterday afternoon. “Well, he’s not as bad as Jimmy Savile, is he?”

That is like a red rag to a bull.

Was Jack The Ripper not as bad as Adolf Hitler because he did not kill as many people? You could even argue Adolf Hitler was a morally better person than the Jack The Ripper because, as far as I am aware, Hitler did not personally kill anyone during the Second World War.

It is a pointless argument.

Jimmy Savile had-it-off with more under-age girls than Roman Polanski and was apparently at-it for 50 years. Roman Polanski was only prosecuted over one girl.

But the truth is you cannot compare evil.

Most things are grey. But some things are black and white and incomparable.

I had a conversation with two other men a couple of days ago and which I started to write a blog about the next day but which I aborted because it was too dangerous…

One man was involved in the comedy business. The other had been involved in the music business. We had got talking about Gary Glitter.

When the Spice Girls’ movie Spice World was made, it included a big musical routine involving Gary Glitter. Very shortly before the film’s release, he was arrested on sex charges. He was cut out of the film because (quite rightly) it was thought to be dodgy given the movie’s target audience.

But now, in many places, several years later, his music is, in effect, banned from being played because the act of playing it – and saying his very name in the introduction – is thought to be in bad taste.

The conversation I had with the other two men revolved around Art v Scum.

Just because someone is scum does not mean they cannot create Art.

Just because they have been rightly arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned for an act of evil does not lessen the level of any Art they may have created.

I am sure all sorts of artists over the centuries have committed all sorts of morally and criminally heinous acts. But that does not mean we should not appreciate their art.

You may see where this is going and why I abandoned writing this particular blog a couple of days ago. Just by discussing it I might seem to be lessening my dislike of what the scum did. Which is not the case. But it is a danger.

Just because Gary Glitter is scum does not mean he did not create some very good pop music. Perhaps it was not high art. But it was good pop music. The fact that he was imprisoned for having pornographic images of children in Britain and committing sex crimes in Vietnam does not mean his records should be banned.

There is the fact that, if you buy his records, he will receive royalties. That is a problem, but does not affect the theoretical discussion.

Clearer examples are actors Wilfred Brambell and Leslie Grantham.

Homosexuality was stupidly illegal in the UK until 1967. In 1962, Wilfred Brambell (old man Steptoe in the BBC TV comedy series Steptoe and Son) was arrested in a Shepherd’s Bush toilet for “persistently importuning”, though he got a conditional discharge. Ooh missus. He died in 1985. In 2012, he was accused of abusing two boys aged aged 12-13 backstage at the Jersey Opera House in the 1970s. One of the boys was from the Haut de la Garenne children’s home, which is now surrounded by very seedy claims of child abuse, murder and torture (and which Jimmy Savile visited, though this is strangely under-played in newspaper reports).

Actor Leslie Grantham – who famously played ‘Dirty Den’ in BBC TV’s EastEnders – is a convicted murderer. In 1966, he shot and killed a German taxi driver in Osnabrück. He was convicted of murder, sentenced to life imprisonment and served ten years in jail.

Wilfred Brambell’s presumed sexual sleaziness and Leslie Grantham’s actual imprisonment for killing someone does not mean the BBC should never repeat Steptoe and Son nor old episodes of EastEnders, nor that it would be morally reprehensible to watch the Beatles’ movie A Hard Day’s Night because Wilfred Brambell plays a prominent role in it.

It does not mean that Wilfred Brambell and Leslie Grantham’s undoubtedly high acting skills should not be appreciated.

A chum of mine was recently compiling a history of glam rock for a BBC programme and was told he could not include Gary Glitter. That is a bit like not including the Rolling Stones in a history of 1960s British rock music or not including Jimmy Savile in a history of BBC disc jockeys.

Which brings us to Roman Polanski.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I think he is scum and (figuratively speaking) his balls should be cut off and he should be thrown into a bottomless pit of dung for eternity.

He drugged, raped and buggered a 13-year-old girl.

End of.

The defence “She was not that innocent” is no defence.

In January next year, the British Film Institute starts a two-month “tribute” to Roman Polanski at the National Film Theatre in London.

I have no problem with that. I might even go to some of the movie screenings.

Dance of the Vampires, Rosemary’s Baby and Macbeth are brilliant films. Chinatown and Tess are very good – although I have also had the misfortune to sit through the unspeakably awful Pirates.

As a film-maker, Roman Polanski deserves a tribute. As a criminal on the run from justice, he deserves to be arrested and imprisoned.

Art is often created by people who are scum.

Here is the deleted scene from Spice World:

Fugitive rapist film director Roman Polanski delivers a pointless turkey

Last night, I was invited to a preview screening of Roman Polanski‘s new film. It was never likely to end happily. It was a bit like a Jew being invited to a screening of the Nazi propaganda movie Triumph of the Will, except that Triumph of the Will was an artistic success.

Let us get ‘the Polanski factor’ out of the way first. As any regular reader of this blog will know, I think the rich fugitive rapist should be rotting in some stinking prison cell in California.

Personally, I would not finance a movie directed by some criminal who drugged, raped and buggered a 13 year-old girl and then fled the country to escape justice – and I know something about financing films involving criminals. But Polanski’s showbiz friends seem to think an ‘artist’ of his ‘stature’ (an ironic description, given that he is vertically-challenged) should be forgiven for what they see as a past minor crime. They and I perhaps have different opinions on that – and on our choice of meaning for that crucial word ‘minor’.

I never much rated his early Knife in the Water nor Cul De Sac. But Repulsion was very effectively paranoid, Dance of The Vampires was brilliant and his Playboy-financed version of Macbeth – the first film he directed after his wife Sharon Tate was butchered by the Charles Manson ‘family’ – is one of the two best movie Shakespeares I have ever seen (the other being Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet).

Pirates (1986) and What? (1973), though, were virtually unwatchable.

Whether or not he has made great art in the past is somewhat irrelevant; artistic merit is no mitigation against serious criminal charges.

We also have to bear in mind that all views of movies are personal views. So, for example, when I saw Polanski’s allegedly comic new movie last night, it sounded to me as if the publicists had inserted ‘laughers’ in the third row to lead the hoped-for audience merriment: it is always difficult to ‘dub’ laughter naturalistically and the guffaws appeared to be slightly misplaced.

I may have been wrong, though.

Later, coming out of the screening, I talked to a comedian I know and his friend. They had both genuinely enjoyed the movie and had laughed in many places. So I was perhaps wrong in finding the thing a totally laugh-free zone – although, in my defence, they did compare the movie to Cat On a Hot In Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire, neither of which I see as laugh-a-minute raucous comedies.

So… let us get to the movie itself: Carnage, which has some passing aspiration to depth with references to atrocities in Darfur and the Congo and to the God of Carnage. At the start, it includes the line “If this kid gets away with hitting people, why would he stop?” – a line included apparently without any intentional irony, despite Polanski’s past – and, towards the end, it includes a line about how, morally, you are supposed to control your compulsions “but sometimes you can’t”.

If only the script actually addressed these points. But it does not.

This is the sort of film that actors admire.

It has four excellent actors – Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, John C. Reilly and Christoph Waltz – getting their teeth into what looks less like a movie script and more like an Actors Studio limbering-up performance piece. It is a sub-Edward Albee claustrophobic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? style extravaganza of psychology and showy performance. Jodie Foster, with the showiest, juiciest role, displays genuinely brilliant Oscar-worthy acting of a type that Academy voters love.

But the thing I saw last night is not a movie. It might be a good stage play (which is what it originated as) or even a radio play or it certainly could be a cheap TV play, but there is no reason on God’s earth for it to be made as a big screen movie.

With the exception of a brief opening MacGuffin and a brief final coda set outside, the entire 79-minute film takes place in real time inside a New York apartment (though it was shot in Paris because Polanski is a fugitive from justice in the US).

I describe the opening scene as a Hitchcockian MacGuffin because, really, it does not matter what the protagonists are arguing about. The plot is that four people – two couples – argue throughout with each other in varying configurations. What they argue about is almost irrelevant. The plot is the psychological arc of their arguing though, it has to be said, it is aimless and, ultimately, reaches no climactic end resolution.

I suspect Polanski (who co-adapted the stage script and is therefore partly to blame) may have been attracted by the chance to show he can keep an audience’s attention in a single location as Alfred Hitchcock successfully did in Rear Window and Dial M For Murder or Oliver Stone did in Talk Radio.

It is visually competent, but no more – though Polanski shows-off to film students and cineastes by placing one wall mirror in the apartment’s living room and three in the bathroom – mirrors are difficult for directors to shoot round. But what is the point of this film other than, when it comes down to it, a self-indulgent acting exercise?

The movie does not have the psychological depth it aspires to and, though well-acted, it is a shallow shouting match between four people. It never seems to be going anywhere and, in fact, never reaches anywhere. The film just ends without warning or meaning.

I never laughed once and, as far as I could see, the only humour in the film came when Kate Winslet unexpectedly vomited on a coffee table. There was a knee-jerk laugh. But, if you have to rely on an unexpected vomit for your laughs, you are in big trouble.

Give me a knob gag any day.

From my humourless viewpoint, the marketing strategy on this film appears to be wildly misconceived. A comedy movie it is not. It is like selling Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as a comedy. Why bother? If anything, it is a filmed actors’ showcase within a stage context.

At the end of his excellent, though over-rated, movie Chinatown, someone got shot. With this new movie, it should have been Roman Polanski himself.

I was going to compare the movie (filmed a year ago) to the Emperor’s New Clothes but, really, I think I will settle on describing it as a movie which should have been released at Christmas. That is the traditional time to sell turkeys.

Why Roman Polanski’s glamorous rape-excusing friends should be ashamed

I once had to make a television trailer for a documentary on the Waffen-SS. It was very difficult to cut together any pictures that did not make the SS look glamorous because most of the footage was actually shot by the Nazi regime itself, therefore it had a Triumph of the Will style about it. Wonderful angled shots of smart, black-uniformed men marching down steps in formation. The Nazis tended not to film the Waffen-SS butchering men, women and children. Bad for the image.

Let’s be honest, Hitler’s Third Reich made good films and had a great sense of visual style in the design of their uniforms, their architecture and the staging of big-scale live events. But that doesn’t mean that The Holocaust was a minor matter and that Adolf Hitler “should be forgiven this one sin”.

I always find that, if you take an opinion or an event – especially on moral questions – and re-position it into an extreme situation, then that clarifies the opinion or event. My extreme situation is Nazi Germany.

If an argument works put into the context of Nazi Germany, then it probably works in general. Which brings us to Roman Polanski.

His glamorous showbiz chums sit around saying that he should be ‘let off’ the sex abuse charges on which he was found guilty in the US – and on which he jumped bail – in 1977. They say that he should be forgiven his trespasses because (a) he is famous, (b) he is or was a good film director, (c) he had a bad time in the War and (d) it all happened a good few years ago.

I admire Polanski’s earlier films.

But he drugged, raped and buggered a 13 year old girl. This is no small matter and the facts are not in dispute.

If Hitler were found living in Surbiton, the fact the Holocaust was a long time ago and he had had a difficult childhood would not quite merit ignoring what was done and letting him off with a slap on the head and “Don’t do it again, you naughty boy,” said in a disapproving tone.

I recently mentioned in passing on my Facebook page that when IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn, charged with attempted rape, was initially refused bail, one reason the judge gave for not giving him bail was the fact that Roman Polanski had done a runner on a rape charge.

Someone pointed out to me that the girl victim in the Polanski case “has been trying to drop charges for the last ten years… She has said that all of the publicity for this incident has hurt her more than the actual crime itself… She’s suffered enough; let it drop.”

Well, if Hitler were found living in Surbiton, the fact that the Holocaust was a long time ago and the people who suffered would be upset by a trial would not affect what crimes had been intentionally committed.

Raping a 13 year old is not right. Buggering a 13 year old is not right. And, equally, jumping bail to avoid a jail sentence for drugging, raping and buggering a 13 year old girl is not something to be ignored just because you used to be a good movie director and it happened a while ago.

The fact Polanski’s original trial judge in 1977 was running for public office, desperate for self-publicity and sounds like he changed his mind on giving Polanski a custodial sentence does not enter into it. I imagine some of the judges at the Nuremberg Trials were scumbags; it does not mean that Nazis found living in freedom 30 years later should not be tried.

My bottom line is that, if you drug, rape and bugger a 13 year old girl and then flee abroad to escape a custodial sentence, you deserve to be imprisoned for a considerable time. The fact glamorous showbiz names champion Roman Polanski and, in effect, say he should be pardoned for artistic merit nauseates me. Hitler was a painter and commissioned good movies. I don’t think his artistic merit or the artistic merit of Leni_Riefenstahl enters into it.

You can read the 37 page transcript of the Grand Jury proceedings against Roman Polanski in 1977 HERE.

According to the girl’s testimony, after giving her champagne and a Quaalude, Polanski sat down beside her and kissed her, despite demands that he “keep away.” He eventually, she said, “started to have intercourse with me.” Later, he asked the 13 year old: “Would you want me to go in through your back?” before he “put his penis in my butt.”

Asked why she did not more forcefully resist 43 year old Polanski, the teenager, who was 13 at the time of the rape, said: “Because I was afraid of him.”

The girl sued Polanski in 1988, alleging sexual assault, intentional infliction of emotional distress and seduction. In 1993 Polanski agreed to settle with her and according to the Los Angeles Times he agreed to give her half a million dollars. Reportedly, she was still trying to get part of this money from him in 1996 but she and her lawyers later confirmed the financial settlement was completed.

The girl publicly forgave Polanski in 1997, twenty years after the rape and buggery.

In 2009, Lech Walesa, former President of Poland, argued that Polanski “should be forgiven this one sin.”

I say fuck him.

Details of what was in Polanski’s 111 page Polish Secret Service file are HERE.

Write it as Art, sell it as baked beans… How to publicise stage shows, movies, books, TV and Shakespeare

Sit back, relax and have a cup of tea.

Throughout my life, whenever I’ve been asked what I do, I have never been able to give any understandable answer because the truth is I’ve really just bummed around doing overlapping this, that and sometimes the other.

One thing I used to do was review and write feature articles about movies, so I saw previews a week or a month before the films were released, having read little or nothing at all about them.

I saw them ‘cold’ as they were structured to be seen.

That blissful ignorance happened again last night with the movie The Adjustment Bureau. I had read nothing at all about it. I knew it starred Matt Damon, was based on a short story by Philip K Dick (who wrote the stories on which Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report were based) and, on the poster, Matt Damon and a girl in a red dress were running away from people chasing them in a city.

That was it.

So last night I saw The Adjustment Bureau cold and thought it was a fascinating film – quite often totally doolally, but fascinating. It is severely weird for a commercial film and it is well worth seeing.

But the poster bears no relation at all to the basic content of the movie – to the extent that it even implies The Adjustment Bureau is in one particular type of movie genre when it is actually a totally different movie genre (I don’t want to give it away).

So that’s an example of a misleading movie poster successfully attempting to get bums on seats. It’s a potentially counter-productive strategy because word-of-mouth soon gets round.

I’m interested because another thing I did – for over twenty plus years – was make on-screen TV promotions – ‘trailers’.

I was a writer or producer or director or writer-producer or writer-director or whatever it took a company’s fancy to call the job.

So I am interested in how creative products are ‘sold’ to the audience.

A couple of days ago, someone asked me about their 40-word show entry for the Edinburgh Fringe Programme.

My advice was the same advice I give on anything creative.

Write it as Art.

Sell it as baked beans.

If the content is high quality in itself, it won’t be demeaned by a tabloid headline type of publicity.

There’s nothing wrong with being populist.

The opposite of popular is unpopular.

The creative work itself is what you want people to read, hear or see. It can be as subtle and/or as sophisticated as you want. Publicity is another matter. Publicity is like someone standing outside, in a busy street, with lots of other audio distractions, yelling through a megaphone to try to get people to notice you and your creation exist.

If it fails, no-one will see what you have struggled to create. So don’t knock it.

If you are in Piccadilly Circus or the High Street in Edinburgh amid 150 other people yelling about what they’ve done, then you need to be loud to be heard and you need to wear bright colours to be seen.

I’ve also written books. In standard publishing contracts, the author gets total control over the text inside a book – the publisher cannot change it without the author’s permission. But the publisher has total contractual control over the design of and text on the cover. There is a reason for this.

What is inside the book is the artistic creation you want people to experience. What is on the cover is advertising and promotion aimed at intriguing potential readers into picking up and buying the book and its unknown content.

Publicity is persuading as many people as possible to buy an invisible pig inside a bag.

In its own way, it is equally creative. But it is different.

Content is a different form of creativity from publicity.

In television, the last thing you want is for a director to make the promotion for his own TV programme. The result is almost always shit. For one thing, he or she is too close to it to be objective. Also, he or she may be able  to make a great 30 or 60 or 90 minute TV programme, but, trust me, he or she knows bugger all about selling a programme to the viewer in 20 seconds in the middle of other promos amid forests of £500,000 adverts for soap powder, cars and insurance companies.

There is a difference between creating something which will give a pastel-wearing theorist at the Arts Council a creative hard-on and creating something which will get people en masse to pay out money and/or spend time to read-hear-watch it.

Repetition is also not always bad.

There is nothing wrong with populism.

The opposite of popular is unpopular.

‘Populist’ is just a word meaning ‘popular’ made up by people who can’t create anything popular themselves and want to save their egos by trying to seem culturally superior.

Shakespeare was never less than populist.

Macbeth was written by Shakespeare because the new English King James I was actually King James VI of Scotland who was interested in witchcraft and the supernatural. So what better way to suck up to the new King and revived public interest in the supernatural than to write a Scottish play with witches and ghosts in it? And bung in death, destruction, gore and swearing.

The best Shakespeare film I have ever seen is Baz Luhrmann‘s movie William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet – a movie so untraditional and in-yer-face that, the first time you see it, it takes about five minutes to adjust to the OTT style.

The second best Shakespeare film I have ever seen is Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, financed by Playboy magazine, with Lady Macbeth nude in the sleepwalking scene and awash with more blood than the Colosseum on a bad day for Christians. It was the first film Polanski directed after his wife Sharon Tate was butchered.

I’m sure Shakespeare would have loved both movies because they are real audience pleasers. Once you get people in and watching, you can communicate any in-depth piece of philosophical seriousness you want.

Reverting to my chum who wrote 40 words on their Edinburgh Fringe show… The first version was ineffective because it described the plot rather than push the unique selling points of the show.

I asked: “Don’t tell me what’s IN it, tell me what it’s ABOUT.”

You want to say what it is ABOUT – what made you want to create the thing in the first place. And that, in fact, is how to promote bad productions too.

My rule of thumb in TV promotions was never to mislead or lie about a programme to the audience. If it was shit, I tried to figure out what the original concept was that got the producer, director and cast keen to make it.

No-one intends to create a shit book, play, comedy show, TV series, movie or whatever.

In promoting anything, part of what you want to communicate is whatever made the people involved keen to create it in the first place. If the audience can be interested in the concept as much as the failed creators originally were, then you may get an audience and they won’t feel too let down because what they have been told is there actually IS there. Even if it’s not very good.

If the creative product is good – as The Adjustment Bureau is – then that’s even better.

Pity their poster was so misleading.

Of course, some things are so shit, the only thing to do is to get in and get out fast before the word-of-mouth gets round.