Christmas Day – and a sinking feeling

A Christmas message from Anna Smith

Over several years, I have posted messages from Anna Smith, this blog’s occasional Canadian correspondent.

She lives on a boat in Vancouver, Canada. At least…

…she USED to live on a boat in Vancouver.

Today is Christmas Day.

I received a new message from her this morning:

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HAPPY CHRISTMAS JOHN (and assorted friends and family there).

I am on the bus right now, on my way to deliver a frozen turkey to friends and family for Xmas.

For the moment, I am staying at the ‘historic Queens Hotel’ (a former strip club which evolved into a ’boutique hotel’) It is a few blocks from the boat.

I never wanted my obituary to read: “She died on her beloved boat”.

Instead my beloved boat has died on me.

The reason it sank is, because after I spurned the aggressive advances of the marina owner, he towed my boat to a dangerous spot above a sand bar on the river bank and moved onto harrassing the next single woman there.

The river levels get low in the winter, especially during extreme tides. At low tide, my ‘antique’ wooden boat weighing three tons was resting at a 45 degree angle and, with all that weight on the transom, propeller shafts, the most vulnerable part, it was more than the vessel could stand.

The whole boat is still rearing up at low tide. The inside looks like it was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. 

Some people are trying to start a crowdfunder page for me, but they are having some tech glitches with it at the moment.

The curious thing is…

The day before boat sank, documentary film director Ruggero Romano took me out for coffee to discuss his next feature film. I told him a year ago that, if he wanted some interesting material, he should come out and take a look at how people live on the river.

He went to Italy last year and told me that all summer he was thinking of doing ‘the river’ film.

I tried to disuade him then, because most of the people living on the river were curmudgeonly old men who don’t want to talk to anyone, fearful of losing their moorage. But…

To be continued, with photos…

Anna

…CONTINUED HERE…

Dick pic etiquette, virtual flashing, the Scottish comedian and sausage & eggs

The Record‘s front page. I have obscured the face.

At the Grouchy Club both three months ago and two months ago, there was gossip about a Scottish male comedian who had allegedly sent offensive unsolicited text messages and photos – ‘dick pics’ – to various younger female comedians. The story was not discussed at this month’s Grouchy Club, but resurfaced as a front-page story in the Scottish Daily Record and was then picked up by the English Daily Mirror and the English Sun last Saturday.

Unconnected to the above, I know other female comedians who have received ‘dick pics’ from male comics.

It gives new meaning to the phrase ‘stand-up comedians’.

So I thought: Who do I know who is likely to talk about this subject ON the record?

Well, obviously, Malcolm Hardee Comedy Award winning Becky Fury.

We met at a Pret a Manger branch in London’s Soho. The glamour never stops.

Her right shoulder was hurting. It was a boxing injury. She is left-handed.

Quite why she had been boxing may well be the subject for a future blog, but she does not want to talk about it now and… I am just saying… Don’t mess with Becky Fury.

“Have you ever heard of women sending men unsolicited pictures of their nether regions?” I asked her.

“No,” she replied.

“With dick pics,” I prompted, “some women have said to me – well, one woman in particular has said to me: Oh, it’s a just a bloke being a bloke. It’s not rape; it’s not mass murder. I think men may actually, bizarrely, treat it more seriously than women. Well, not more seriously than rape or murder. But I certainly do treat it seriously. It might be my Presbyterian upbringing. I see it as outrageous. But women – some women – do see it as just One of these things you have to suffer.”

Becky Fury seen via a Pret a Manger tea stirrer

“Well,” said Becky. “it’s virtual flashing. So it’s a mild sexual assault.”

“Why is it mild?” I asked.

“Because flashing is quite quaint… Well, no-one does it any more, do they? It’s a quaint sex crime now. You don’t get old men hiding in the bushes wearing dirty old macs showing their willy to old ladies.”

“Or, more seriously, to 10-year-old girls,” I said.

“Or to 10-year old girls,”agreed Becky. “But it doesn’t happen any more. Things have moved on. If you have sex crimes on a scale, then flashing is a mild one – compared to rape, for example. I am used to dealing with smutty boys.“

“This has happened to you?”

“Yes. I’ve been asked if I wanted to be sent a dick pic.”

“As a sampler?” I asked. “As a precursor to…”

“A precursor to more dick pics,” replied Becky. “It never really goes anywhere. Men just like to send pictures of their penises.”

“I don’t,” I said. “But you have, in the past, encouraged dick pic sending?”

“Well, I have agreed. There is dick pic etiquette. It’s like anything. If someone really wants to send a picture of their penis, just ask first – May I send you a dick pic? Then you will get a Yes or No and, if No, then you say: OK. That’s absolutely fine. Have a lovely day.”

“So,” I asked, “if I send you a dick pic request in half an hour, what will make you decide one way or the other?”

“Well, that’s the question,” said Becky. “Am I interested in seeing a picture of your erect penis? If Yes, then I tell you and you can send me the picture. If No, then that’s a No.”

“Could negotiations take place?” I asked. “Like You don’t want to see an erect penis but could we compromise on flaccid?”

Becky with her 2016 Malcolm Hardee Cunning Stunt Award

“Well, you have to ask. It’s all about consent. Like anything else that has a sexual element, consent is vital.”

“But is there a negotiation process?” I persisted. “Could you start with erect and work your way down?”

“That could be involved,” said Becky. “Everything is open to negotiation.”

“If you were a tough negotiator,” I asked, “could it come down to me sending you a photo of a vague bump shape in the trousers?”

“Yes,” said Becky. “If you wanted to send that, you could. But you should still ask first. Because, once you step across that consent barrier, then it starts becoming virtual flashing.”

“You are going to hate the reaction you get to this blog,” I suggested. “Hundreds of solicitations. How many pictures does consent cover anyway? One picture? Twelve?”

“It’s a grey area – internet exchanges with people. Apparently it’s very common on Tinder. I have a way of dealing with it. When I received an unsolicited dick pic, I said: Do you want to see mine? They presumed they were going to see a picture of my private parts, but I found a picture of the thickest, fattest dick on the internet and sent that back to them.”

“How do you find the thickest, fattest dick on the internet?” I asked.

“You Google the phrase ‘Boris Johnson’,” Becky explained.

Becky Fury, comic stirrer with a negotiator’s eye

“So,” I said, “you have received unsolicited dick pics from people you knew and people you didn’t know?”

“I have never received an unsolicited dick pic from someone that I knew. When a dick pic is sent unsolicited, it’s not going to be from someone you know particularly well. Normally, sending dick pics involves not having very much respect for the other person. Like I said, it has this element of being an assault.

“If you’re involved in a smutty exchange, a sexualised conversation, with somebody on the internet – somebody you haven’t fucked – and they want to send you a dick pic, then they should ask permission. It’s not necessarily something you want to receive unexpectedly first thing in the morning over breakfast.”

“When you are having your sausage and eggs,” I suggested.

“Precisely,” agreed Becky.

“Why do men send dick pics anyway?” I asked. “Is it a form of advertising? Forthcoming attraction! Coming soon!”

“I dunno what the psychology is,” said Becky. “But I really don’t want to receive any more.”

Personally, if you send a dick pic, I think it is a true selfie – You really are a dick.

Becky’s 2016 Edinburgh Fringe comedy show image. She returns this year with an updated version.

Bitching about famous people. Your chance to guess – who is XXXXX, the lecherous showbiz groper?

Isn’t gossip a wonderful thing?

Yesterday, following on from my blogs about The downside of being a dead celebrity and Famous two-faced showbiz pond scum, I was having a wee e-chat with Scots comedian Stu Who about the “celebrities” we’d met.

He told me: “My own personal nemesis was XXXXX, who I found to be a particularly rude and lecherous auld cunt, when out of the public gaze… Lechery, of course, is no sin, but when a position of power is abused by touching-up young runners and crew in a ‘joking’ way, I just can’t keep quiet and had a couple of altercations with XXXXX …. not a nice man!!!”

This interested me, because I had heard XXXXX was a groper, but wasn’t sure if it was true because I’d met him briefly twice and both times he seemed very amiable, gentle and uncle-ish; he fitted his ‘family entertainer’ image perfectly.

Stu told me, though, that he found dealing with people like XXXXX “was all counterbalanced beautifully by some of the really nice people I have also had the privilege to encounter and work with… Some of them I literally ‘hated’ on TV before meeting them and I was subsequently gobsmacked to find out how cool and friendly they were in real life… Bob Monkhouse being the most notable.

“He’d been my pet hate for decades with his plastic appearance and gushing superficiality, but he turned out to be really pleasant, courteous and astonishingly supportive to this daft Glaswegian who’d been hired to do his warm-up for the Lottery shows.”

I have never heard anything bad about Bob Monkhouse whom I greatly admired. He was known for his great love of slapstick and his collection of comic silent movies. We had him as a guest on the very slapsticky children’s show Tiswas and his only stipulation up-front was that he should not be custard-pied in the face.

There was no problem with this and he mentioned it right up-front when he was booked; but none of us could figure out why he didn’t want to be ‘pied’ – it seemed perfect for his image and he was in no way pompous; he was a lovely man. Our only wild guess was that he wore a wig – but we had never heard of him having one, I have never read of such a thing and it didn’t look like he had a wig. So, to this day, it remains a complete and utter mystery to me.

I’ve been luckier than Stu Who.

I’ve actually only ever worked with one person who played the “I’m a star” bit.

People told me Chris Tarrant was a bit up himself when Tiswas first hit big but, when I encountered and later worked with him, he was a joy: a total laid-back professional. He was nothing like his image – he was a highly professional, highly sophisticated, cigar-smoking reflective fisherman – and a good bloke.

I’m sure his anarchic image can survive that description.

But you can never tell what people are really like.

A few years ago, at a special National Film Theatre screening of her father Anthony Newley’s indescribably odd film Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?Tara Newley confirmed that her mother Joan Collins had decided to divorce him after attending the premiere of the movie. According to Tara, Joan had never seen the finished film before that screening. And, if you have ever seen the autobiographical movie (in which Anthony Newley, Joan Collins and their children all appear), you can see why she divorced him. I seem to remember reading an interview with Joan Collins in which she loved him but couldn’t live with him.

I am not surprised.

I once tried to book Anthony Newley on Channel 4’s The Last Resort With Jonathan Ross and failed.

I talked to his agent while Newley was in the US and before he came to London to appear in a West End stage show. The agent was happy for him to appear on The Last Resort and Newley was keen to appear on the show. The trouble was that our TV show transmitted live from 10.30pm in Wandsworth and Newley was on stage until around 10.30 in the West End.

It would probably take him at least 10 minutes of show over-run, applause and rushing out of the theatre (still in costume and make-up) to get out onto a street where a car could pick him up. He was even prepared to ride pillion on a motorbike to do the journey. But there was no way to guarantee at that time on a Friday night in London that he could be got to Wandsworth and into the studio in time for any meaningful appearance on The Last Resort.

So we had to abandon the idea. No problem.

We had wanted him on the show. He had wanted to appear.

We were all the best of chums and no-one was to blame. It was just one of those things.

A couple of weeks later, I got a phone call in the Last Resort office.

“Hello, it’s Tony Newley,” the voice on the other end said.

He was phoning from his shower in a Park Lane hotel. I could hear the water in the background.

“Can you believe they have a telephone in the shower?” he asked me.

He said he wanted to apologise for not being able to appear on our show.

I said there was no problem because it was just the timing which had proved impossible. We would have him on in future in a flash if we could.

But he wanted to say sorry.

There was no need for him to make the phone call and certainly no need to make it to me – I was merely the show’s researcher, not the producer.

But he made the call.

I always thought very highly of him after that.

I still don’t know if Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? is a good film, though. And I have seen it three times. It is certainly bizarre.

But Anthony Newley, on the basis of my one phone call with him, seemed a good man.

On the other hand, though, on the basis of two brief meetings, XXXXX seemed OK to me.

Who can tell?

Gossip is an in-exact art.

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NB… I should point out that XXXXX, a well-known entertainer, is definitely not any of the people named in this blog and I have never mentioned him in any previous blog.

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