Jimmy Savile writer in tabloid storm labels my blog as ‘revolutionary’ and drunken UK comic Slayer as ‘political’

Nick Awde as he wants to be seen on his Facebook page

Writer Nick Awde wanted to interview me for a book he is currently writing.

UK comedian and Edinburgh Fringe venue runner Bob Slayer told me that Nick had received a death threat because he has written a play called Jimmy Savile: The Punch and Judy Show for the upcoming Fringe in August. The truth is more complicated than that. And it is not the first time he has been threatened.

“I did an anthology on Women in Islam and got at least one death threat out of that.,” Nick told me this morning, when I Skyped him at his home in Paris.

“So are you actually doing a physical Punch & Judy show in Edinburgh?” I asked.

“No,” he told me. “No puppets. No-one wants to put their hand up Jimmy Savile.”

“So how are you doing it?” I asked.

“It will be live actors,” Nick explained, “playing all the characters in a Punch & Judy way.”

“Dressed as Punch & Judy?” I asked.

“Still don’t know,” said Nick. “Budgetry constraints.”

“Will you be making a guest appearance in the show at Edinburgh?” I asked.

Nick laughed: “What? So the audience can beat the crap out of me? No.”

“You could be the policemen or the crocodile,” I suggested.

“Well, trying to get the crocodile into it is difficult. I don’t think there were any crocodiles supporting Jimmy Savile although, God knows, everyone was in on it. Maybe he was given the keys to the zoos as well.

Jimmy Savile: The Punch and Judy Show

“Jimmy Savile was there because Society put him there and Society’s problem after his death is trying to deal with the fact that we all put him there, especially all the pillars of Society – but we support the pillars. We all looked at him and thought There’s a creepy old man and probably a lot of people did think There’s a dirty old man. But we still went along with it.”

“So why Punch & Judy?” I asked.

“We take our children – we encourage our children,” explained Nick, “to go see Punch & Judy like we did as children and our parents and parents’ parents did before them. We go off and we laugh and joke and are wowed and throw money at the puppet master afterwards… but we are watching a man who is a wife-beater, a child-killer and who also takes on every single pillar of Society. Even if he does get beaten up by them, he ends up beating them up or avoiding them or avoiding the issue entirely. This is Jimmy Savile. He did exactly the same thing. He bullied his way through Society.”

“And,” I said, “the press reaction to the show’s imminent staging has been what?”

“The tabloid reaction so far is interesting,” said Nick. “Oh! What about the victims? they ask. Well, in fact, this format avoids the victims. The format of Punch & Judy is a great way to avoid anything to do with the victims. The match is perfect. You concentrate on Jimmy Savile and his dealings with Society.”

“But it’s not a puppet show,” I double-checked.

“Everyone said they did not want to do it as a puppet show,” said Nick. “I think it should be done as a puppet show but I don’t have any money to put it on because – guess what? – I won’t personally profit from the show. So I can’t be accused of trying to cash in.”

“So the tabloids at least can’t accuse you of that,” I said.

Nick Awde talking to me from Paris this morning, via Skype

“The tabloids who are going to come gunning for me,” said Nick, “indeed gunning for anyone who wants to try and address things that they don’t want to be addressed or which they don’t want to be addressed in their way… These are the same tabloids who are sitting on the files which they have on people like Jimmy Savile and a lot of other people in Society, a lot of whom are big names, who are still alive and still doing it.”

“You mean in showbiz or politics?” I asked.

“Everything,” said Nick. “There’s no conspiracy about it. You and I, we understand this. We understand why they do it. Like me, I think you are very much up for the independence of the press. We don’t want the government being able to force people to hand over things like the Obama government recently did to Associated Press in America.

“I’ve seen these files. Anyone who’s worked for a long time on national newspapers will have come across a file somewhere and it’s not Da Vinci Code stuff. It makes perfect common sense that people will come to a newspaper for whatever reason. Some will come wanting money. Some will come because the police or institutions have put them down and they will go to a newspaper and say Please help me. It could be whistleblowers or victims themselves. In this case, it’s child abuse or institutionalised child abuse.

“The newspapers put it on record. They think about whether they have enough to publish and also whether it’s a juicy-enough story. Very rarely do they hand the files over to PC Plod because you never know… You could use it one day for one reason or another.”

“And these,” I said, “are the same tabloids who have been attacking your upcoming play without having seen it.”

“Yes,” said Nick, “these are the same tabloids who’ve been sitting on these documents and possibly also have files on a lot of victims – a lot more than we think – accumulated over the years. These are the same ones who want to criticise someone for trying to address Jimmy Savile’s relationship with the institutions which kept him in power for sixty years.”

“Surely,” I said, “being attacked by the tabloids is great because it’s publicity for your play?”

“Sure,” said Nick. “But incitement to violence is something different.”

“Who was inciting violence?” I asked.

“The Daily Star,” he replied and held up a double-page spread headlined:

Nick holds up Daily Star double spread for me this morning

SICK NICK DESERVES A PUNCH FOR SAVILE PLAY

Nick has written, edited or illustrated more than 50 books.

He has freelanced as a feature writer and critic for The Stage for more than twenty years, as well as being a political journalist and, more recently, a book publisher.

“What sort of books do you publish?” I asked him this morning.

Things like phrasebooks for non-European languages spoken in countries where people have been generally fucked around by things like oil politics,” he replied. “Places where it’s the ordinary people who lose out, like Chechnya, Somalia, Armenia.”

“So how does a Chechen-Somali phrasebook publisher end up with a drunken ne’er-do-well like comedian Bob Slayer?” I asked.

Nick Awde + Bob Slayer being piratical rather than political

“Because I think he’s very political in what he does,” said Nick.

“Is he?” I asked, incredulous. “This presumably is political with a small pee?”

“Oh yes,” said Nick. “But I’m political with a small ‘p’ too. I think Bob’s Alternative Fringe is extraordinarily political in terms of what it is. It evolves, whereas things like the Free Fringe don’t evolve.

“I write in theatre very much as a political thing, because theatre really gives people a voice. You know that. The way you write about comedy and report on comedy in your blog – not just the young blood that’s coming up, but the old revolutionaries and all the rest of it. I think you can see the effect the revolutionary side of live comedy has had on people over the years.”

“Well, that’ll go straight onto my publicity,” I said. “John Fleming – Revolutionary. I can see it up in lights now.”

“I really do believe it,” insisted Nick.

“I’m all for anything provided there are knob gags in it,” I said.

“I don’t think there will be knob gags in Jimmy Savile: The Punch and Judy Show,” said Nick, “unless there might be a knob gag which would have existed in a real Punch & Judy show.”

Daily Express – ‘Outrage’

“Well, rude bits are part of traditional satire,” I said.

“Yes,” agreed Nick. “Tits, knobs, poo, crap, dicks and farting. In satire, you are literally throwing all that at the people at the top and telling them: You are the same as us! It’s a bit of a rocky road to follow – you will be excoriated by all sides at some points – but the people who have done it well have made people think. People time and time again quote satire.”

“And I gather your Jimmy Savile show is going to be satire,” I said.

“Obviously,” said Nick, “you can’t do the hardcore stuff on television or radio but, live on stage, there can be far more hard-hitting stuff.”

Is “Killer Bitch” worse than hardcore pornography and what does the dead poet William Blake know about it?

The actor Jack Nicholson said of film censorship: “The reality is, if you suck a tit, you’re an X, but if you cut it off with a sword, you’re a PG.”

As if the power of the tabloid press to overcome common sense and logic needed to be proved, consider the case of the movie Killer Bitch. (I was always a fan of early Roger Corman movies…)

This much-pre-publicised modern-day B-movie was attacked before it was even finished as “vile” porn by newspapers from London to Sydney to New York to New Delhi (yes, literally those places) by journalists who had never seen even a single frame of it. Indeed, the attacks started in the News of the World just two weeks after shooting began: subsequent news reports assumed what had been written the the News of the World was true.

Despite this, when the movie was eventually submitted to the British Board of Film Classification (the UK film censors), I didn’t actually expect much of a problem. It was a  low-budget film, so there was no wildly explicit gore – lots of fake blood but no OTT gore, no bullets exploding on bodies, no exploding heads – and the sex, it seemed to me, though much hyped, was not especially explicit – not by current standards.

There IS a sequence in the film which shows actual sexual intercourse but it was edited soft-core and is far less explicit than many a Hollywood studio movie. Almost everything that is seen to happen in Killer Bitch had been passed by the BBFC in a more extreme and more realistic form in previous films and, since 2002, the BBFC have in fact been passing hardcore sex scenes for general distribution. Why the Daily Mail has never picked up on this as a sign of the utter disintegration of British moral culture I don’t know. I think the BBFC started doing it so quietly that, by the time the Daily Mail twigged, it was old news and not worth attacking.

As it turned out, though, there were major problems with the British film censors over Killer Bitch. We were told the BBFC was very concerned at the “content of the movie” and it was screened at least four times to various combinations of censors, eventually including the Chairman of the Board. I suspect it was just a case of a movie with a high-profile tabloid reputation being referred-up because each person was too scared to take the risk of passing it himself/herself…. At one point, a BBFC Examiner sent an e-mail to the UK distributor saying it was “more likely than not” that there would be several cuts.

I was amazed when I found out what they claimed the problem was. We were told there were two areas of concern:

The first was a glimpse of part of the erect shaft of porn star Ben Dover’s penis at the beginning of the movie. This gobsmacked me. Apart from the fact neither the director nor I had ever noticed this and the censors must have gone through it frame by frame with a magnifying glass (no reflection on Ben Dover), I have still never spotted the offending shot in the movie. The BBFC have been giving 18 certificates to hard core sex scenes (erect penises; visible sexual penetration) since 2002. This was, apparently, a glimpse of part of a shaft.

The second problem was the scene which had got the tabloids worldwide into such a tizzy when (without ever having seen it) they had denounced it as a ghastly and “vile” rape scene. What the BBFC was worried about was not the actual sex scene itself (which was not a rape scene at all) but the pre-amble to the sex scene, in which leading lady Yvette Rowland initially resists Alex Reid then melts in his arms.

I understand the BBFC’s worry to an extent though, really, it’s not much more than 1950s/1960s James Bond sexism – a rugged hero takes woman roughly in arms; kisses her; she resists very briefly then melts in his mouth. Arguably sexist, but repeated a thousand times in other movies: hardly a hanging offence. Especially considering what the BBFC have been passing uncut since 2002. This is one description by  critic (not by me) of Willem Dafoe’s 2009 arthouse film Antichrist which was passed uncut by the BBFC:

“After knocking him unconscious, Gainsbourg bores a hole in Dafoe’s leg with a hand drill and bolts him to a grindstone to keep him from escaping. Then, she smashes his scrotum with some sort of blunt object (the moment of impact happens slightly below the frame). We don’t actually see his testicles become disengaged from this body, though it’s implied. Next, she brings him to a climax with her hands and he ejaculates blood (yes, it’s shown). But that’s not all! Later, in an extreme closeup — lensed by Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle! — Gainsbourg cuts off her own clitoris with a pair of scissors.”

The girl’s masturbation of the erect penis is in close-up and is real plus it’s an erect penis that is ejaculating blood.

Killer Bitch and Ben Dover’s imperceptibly-glimpsed bit of shaft should almost get a U if Antichrist gets an 18…

There IS a rape scene in Killer Bitch (which in no way glamorises nor diminishes the horror but it is not the scene the tabloids got into a tizz about). And someone DOES get his cock cut off in vision. But apparently neither of these scenes worried the censors.

What seems to have worried them was the movie’s reputation. It worried everyone. It was, ironically, passed uncut by the BBFC, but banned from display on the shelves of ASDA, Morrison’s, Sainsbury, WH Smith, Tesco and others (although most of those sell it online). It was even withdrawn by iTunes after two days on sale for rather vague reasons. HMV remained a sole beacon of high street retail sanity and online retailers like Amazon and Play.com never had any problem.

Is the movie Killer Bitch really so much worse than hardcore pornography? Or did tabloid perception overcome reality?

William Blake wrote: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is.”

But, then, what the fuck did William Blake know about anything?

Although he did know a lot about dreams… and I do think it’s slightly odd no-one has noticed Killer Bitch can be seen as an OTT surreal dream by the heroine who may or may not awake, terrified, from unconsciousness early in the movie.