#37 Wellbeing Versus Human Being

October 26, 2014

Plumped-up eyelids and pale skin, tippled pink…..

But the Renee Zellweger of Bridget Jones’ Diary has been replaced by a new Renee – let’s call her Wellzeger, who is tanned and taut and athletic enough to be Australian (in an Elle Macpherson kind of way).

When Ms Zellweger premiered her healthy new look at the Elle magazine Women In Hollywood awards last week, there was much talk of the ‘work’ she had (had) done to achieve it; although she said she was looking better simply because she has learned to live better.

Take your pick, but there is no doubt about the demand of the day: by any means necessary, make me an icon of ‘wellness’; let me exude the idea of rude health, or I may never work in this town again.

Meanwhile, in the pages of Interview magazine…..

Wasted. Blasted. Playing at being brain dead. A bevy of expensively attired legs, bums, breasts and pouty lips splayed out on the filthy floor of a concrete bunker. Slack limbed and glassy eyed, models acting as mannequins in a pantomime of silk and squalor.

The flipside of ‘wellness’, but no antidote; rather, Fabien Baron’s ‘Wasted’ fashion shoot only shows that today’s cult of health and wellbeing is capable of moving in mysterious ways – up to and including its opposite.

Cut from the cult to the case Dr Stella Adadevoh, who died of Ebola after she herself prevented the disease from spreading through Nigeria.

When Patrick Sawyer, a recent arrival from Liberia, was admitted to Dr Adadevoh’s clinic suffering from ‘malaria’, she refused to believe him; more importantly, despite his protests and threats she refused to let him leave the clinic until tested for Ebola. Thetests proved positive and the good doctor was duly rewarded with a dose of the deadly virus.

Dr Adadevoh died alone – though her husband and son were nearby, they were obliged to remain behind a closed window – in a disused TB hospital set aside for Nigeria’s Ebola patients. But thousands if not millions more Nigerians have survived because her decisive action succeeded in limiting the spread of the disease. read more

#23 Naming The Unnameable

July 6, 2014

Rolf, you dolt, you’ve put your own name on a par with ‘Adolf’ – never to be used again.

During six whole decades of showbiz, first there was ‘Rolf’, which really said: this person is permanently childish, bubbling over with didgeridoos and other party noises not far removed from whoopee cushions, including a jelly wobble version of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway To Heaven’ and something else – the stylophone – that sounds like a singing birthday card; also, he may be 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 but he still draws and paints like a child prodigy.

Which is to say that he would not, could not ever have a boner because his didger ain’t old enough to do it.

…..followed by ‘Harris’, the second name which has always meant: actually, he’s a straight-down-the-line average guy who’s only pretending to be peculiarly infantile; no fear of stunted development cum sexual fetish on the part of this professional performer. In bed with his wife, he surely acts his age rather than his show size.

We don’t and probably won’t know why Rolf Harris committed the indecent assaults which eventually led to his conviction and the jail term of five years and nine months to which he was sentenced on 4 July 2014. But might it have something to do with a grown man playing a largely pre-pubescent role throughout his entire adult life?

This is not to excuse his actions; only to observe that the continual commute between an excessively childlike exterior and the interior life of a sexually mature adult, must have been a dangerously long stretch, with plenty of opportunity for personal failure and moral failing.

Since he became a children’s entertainer in the 1950s, Harris has been cast in a role categorised as pre-sexual, as noted in a Telegraph feature of 13 years ago:

“Rolf Harris…is, after all, a sexless being….the man who paints huge and wonderful pictures for wide-eyed children while making a comical panting noise, which to him doesn’t sound remotely like someone having an orgasm. He is a man so guileless and innocent and unsullied that he couldn’t see the smutty innuendo lurking within the title ofhis most famous, all time, blockbuster hit-single, ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’. Jakethe Peg was a man with an extra leg to Rolf – nothing more or less, nothing to giggle at. Smut and Rolf just don’t go together – smut and Rolf is an oxymoron.” read more

#22 Freak And Unique

July 1, 2014

Bug-eyed and mock-fiendish, leering at you like he’s just out of Bedlam.

In any number of archive photographs, the FAB Geezer famed for his crazed expression, enormous cigar and court jester hairdo, is cackling and calling to the guys’n’gals: don’t leave your disabled daughter/mother/sister alone with me.

Pantomime villain pantomimes villainy. Except in the case of Jimmy Savile, it was no panto. Unlike Glastonbury, allegedly, here there was less miming than meets the eye.

Hindsight proffers a more pertinent p-word. How perverted he was, it’s doubtful we’ll ever know precisely. You might say some of the latest reports could have been made up – porn-scenes in the mortuary, for example; but it’s difficult to imagine anyone simply imagining them.

Similarly, at first sight the depth of Savile’s private depravity seems impossibly distant from his public role: by appointment to viewers and listeners, purveyor of bite-sized, tea-time packages of zany antics and charitable work; counter culture processed as comfort food and compressed into that characteristic half-laugh, half-yodel.

Howzabout that, then?, Savile would conclude – a magician asking his audience to acknowledge his trickery. But was it a trick, with Savile dressed outlandishly to disguise the real freak underneath? Or did he dress like a freak because that’s what he was, and that’s what he wanted us to see.

Savile groomed the nation, said the police officer in charge of investigating his crimes, as if we were all victims of Sir Jimmy’s secret design. But Savile presented himself tothe whole world as a cartoon fiend. Short of phoning the police to confess, how could he have been more revealing?

(He even described the time spent shut up with the body of his late mother as ‘the best five days of my life.’) read more

On Trial

January 14, 2014

On his way in to Southwark Crown Court today to face charges of ‘historic’ indecent assault and sexual assault, former Radio 1 disc jockey Dave Lee Travis seems bemused by the sight of so many cameras. Having lived so long on the airwaves, perhaps he cannot stop himself associating media attention with professional success. Because being seen and heard – that’s-what-it’s-all-about, folks. Even though he knows they’re here this time to capture him at his lowest ebb.

Dave Lee Travis might have bumped into his old BBC stablemate Rolf Harris, also facing ‘historic’ charges at Southwark; except that Harris was allowed to use a side-entrance so that he could push his wheelchair-bound wife into the building.

Both men deny all charges.

‘DLT’, Travis’ radio moniker from the old days, sounded a lot like BLT: three fillings in just the one sandwich; proof that we don’t have to pinch pennies any more.

In those days, we took it that everyone should have the price of a BLT because DLT says so. Of course he never really did, but you could hear as much in his radio voice.

Nowadays our intrinsic self-worth is not so readily understood. You can hear as much in the spread of Operation Yewtree and the sexual assault trials sandwiched into Southwark Crown Court.

Cast In An Evil Role

September 12, 2013

Free at last, actor Michael Le Vell walks down the steps outside Manchester Crown Court. Left hand in trouser pocket, which says, only a little too loudly: I’m a cool kinda guy. Legs a little further apart than strictly necessary, which says: my balls are big so they do need more room. Acquitted on all 19 counts of child sex abuse, after two years of ‘hell’ who can blame Le Vell for strutting his stuff? Still less for going down the scally pub as soon as he scally could.

Le Vell now lives in Hale (the posh end of Greater Manchester), but hails from Newton Heath, a couple of miles north of Manchester city centre. The area was first industrialised as far back as the 1820s. It would be a hundred years, and more, before L.S. Lowry depicted Le Vell’s recent forebears as matchstick men (going to their wartime work in the Mather Platt factory).

For 30 years Le Vell himself has painted a picture of working class manhood, playing the part of car mechanic Kevin Webster (avec moustache = gay icon) in the longest-running British TV soap opera,Coronation Street. He says he doesn’t let his children watch the show if Kevin is caught up in a racy scene, in case they become confused about who their father is. But after 30 years in character he too must have difficulty distinguishing himself from….himself.

On trial, a.k.a. on stage in a Manchester courtroom, once again Le Vell became two personae in one person: the guilty man and the innocent party. Only the jury had the power to tell them apart. After his acquittal, we all know which of these was real. But there is something about the wider situation today which means that the doppelganger never altogether disappears.

Those now facing sexual abuse charges are drawn from all walks of public life – MPs (thin ones, fat ones); various actors; a host of radio hosts, starting with Jimmy Savile, anti-Christ. Odds are not all of these are guilty men; but it’s a dead cert that we’re all now involved. Even if each of us were to stand trial and be acquitted of anything-you-like, in today’s climate we are liable to remain the man who beat the charges and dodged the accusations – till next time. read more

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#37 Wellbeing Versus Human Being

#23 Naming The Unnameable

#22 Freak And Unique

On Trial

Cast In An Evil Role