Fleapit revisited:The Omen.

"It is by means of a human personality entirely in his possession that Satan will wage his last formidable offence" - Father Brennan

The Omen (directed by Richard Donner and written by David Seltzer) was made back in 1976 and somehow, despite watching a great many of the classic horror movies in my late teens and early twenties, I'd never got round to watching it even if, thanks to The Go-Betweens, I knew the unfortunate outcome for at least one of the lead characters.

It's on BBC4 tonight, in the run up to Hallowe'en no doubt, but I noticed it was already available to watch on the iPlayer so last night I finally dived in. I'm very glad I did. It's a brilliant story and it's genuinely scary in places. Which most of you lot already knew.

Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) is an American diplomat living in Rome with his wife Kathy (Lee Remick). When their child dies, Thorn is persuaded by one Father Spiletto (Martin Benson) to take on another child whose mother has died in childbirth. That child is Damien (Harvey Stephens) and Robert doesn't tell Kathy that Damien is not their real son.

Both the child swap premise and the idea that a mother wouldn't recognise an imposter posing, or being posed, as her son requires quite a lot of suspension of disbelief but it's worth going with it because things soon start to get very interesting.

Robert and Kathy move to London and, at first, their life seems idyllic. Walks in the park, boating lakes, cowboy suits, and birthday cakes. Everything a normal family would do. But when a menacing dog turns up at Damien's fifth birthday party it seems to trigger a series of strange and disturbing events which begin with Damien's nanny, Polly (Holly Palance), hanging herself in broad daylight and in front of Damien and his little friends at the party.

Soon after, Father Brennan (an excellent Patrick Troughton) arrives at Robert's office and urges the ambassador to accept Christ as his saviour immediately so that he can defeat the son of the devil. "He's killed once, he'll kill again. He will kill until everything that's yours is his" Brennan desperately warns Robert before telling him he was in the hospital in Rome the night Damien was born.

Robert has him removed by security - but it won't be last he sees of Father Brennan. When a new nanny, Mrs Baylock (Billie Whitelaw), arrives to take care of Damien she seems suspiciously confident and there also seems to be some confusion as to who exactly employed her. Mrs Baylock acts very strangely towards Damien but Damien appears to like it. 

She definitely doesn't want him to go to chuch - for some reason. Damien, for what it's worth, doesn't seem keen on churches either, especially Guildford Cathedral - for some reason. It starts to look as if Damien and Mrs Baylock are together in some sort of unholy, possibly even wicked, alliance.

Soon enough we see the giraffes in Windsor Safari Park running in fear from Damien and the baboons trying to attack him. There's a warning that Kathy's unborn baby is in mortal danger and that that lethal peril extends to Kathy and Robert too. It gets worse. People fall off railings and find themselves impaled by lightning rods, menacing dogs appear (the hounds of Hell?), and there's a VERY nasty accident involving a sheet of glass and a faulty handbrake. These things don't look like accidents.

As surely as these tragedies unfold, Robert Thorn finds himself thrust into a very strange and dark world. A world of very telling birthmarks, LOTS of crosses, a visit to a remote Etruscan cemetery, and a meeting with Antichrist expert (now there's a job title) played by Leo McKern (it's quite a different role to Rumpole of the Bailey), and quotes from the Book of Revelations. There are even references to the Jews returning to Zion which, watching it as the atrocities in Gaza and Israel continue to escalate, seemed uncomfortably timely.

When the photographer Keith Jennings (David Warner) notices clues as to what might be happening in photos he's taken of Father Brennan and Polly he approaches Robert Thorn and the two of them take a trip to Rome together. A fact finding mission with personal significance, and no little urgency, for both of them. The terrible truth slowly, and eventually, begins to dawn on the ambassador but what can he do about it and is too late? Will the forces of evil prevail?

With Jerry Goldsmith's suitably demonic score, the whole film is saturated with looming menace but still a few scenes particularly stand out. Polly's suicide is disturbing and disquieting and the scene where Jennings and Thorn meet in Father Brennan's house was so chilling I had to put the heating on. But there were bigger scares to come and they continued right up to the end. If I'd watched The Omen as a teenager it would have scared the shit out of me. Watching it now it still did - and I bloody loved it. Oh, and if you see your mum this weekend will you be sure and tell her ... SATAN! SATAN! SATAN!

Kakistocracy XLVIII:Ol' Dirty B'stards.

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever" wrote George Orwell in 1984. But if you want a vision of a Tory future, imagine Peter Bone, the Tory MP for Wellingborough, waving his penis in your face - for ever".

Brexit cheerleader Bone remains, for now, a member of the Conservative party and sitting MP despite independent recommendations for him to be suspended due to having been found to have committed various acts of bullying and sexual assault on a male member of his staff. Including one in which his own 'male member' was waved in front of his victim's face.

What is it with these fuckers? They take nominative determinism to the next level. There's Bone - waving his bone about, Chris Pincher - literally going around pinching people, and then there's Boris Johnson who appears to put his 'johnson' into any young intern that moves. Although should he, unlikely - I admit, be reading this I'm merely suggesting he was having some very strenuous IT lessons.

When The New Statesman aired back in the late eighties/early nineties, Rik Mayall's Alab B'Stard was a grotesque caricature of a corrupt and cruel Tory MP. He'd probably be kicked out of the party for being a pinko now. If anyone wanted to revive, or reboot, the show then calling an MP a B'Stard wouldn't work now. It's too soft. He'd have to be called something like Rishi C'ntface or Jacob Rees-W'nkstain.

Watching the recent Tory party conference in Manchester (and not least Priti Patel and Nigel Farage dancing at the GB News disco - the GB News disco must be a song title Morrissey considered before going for The National Front Disco) I was reminded, not for the first time in recent years, of the quote from the American political scientist Francis M. Wilhoit:- "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition. There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect".

In The Guardian a couple of weeks back, the estimable Rafael Behr wrote that "the Conservatives have embraced the {coming} spirit of opposition with the arrogance of a party that is used to being in government. The conference in Manchester was a festival of complaint about the condition of Britain undisturbed by contrition for having presided over its decline. Taxes are too high, they say, and borders are too porous. International human rights treaties are too binding; teachers are not doing enough teaching; police are not doing enough policing; there are too few doctors and too many civil servants. Children spend too long on their phones; benefit claimants are too lazy; speed limits are too low. The Tories don’t like a country that is shaped by thirteen years of their rule but prefer not to take responsibility."

No policies of any real meaning were announced - and the meagre ones that were will probably not happen anyway because if this lot of Tories can be relied on to do one thing it is to not deliver on their promises and pledges. Let's take the HS2 fiasco.

Billions of pounds of taxpayer's money pissed away on a high speed train from London to Manchester and Leeds that now won't go to either Manchester or Leeds - and won't even go to the centre of London. What a waste of money. So much for levelling up. I hope those in the north will respond correctly to this mess by kicking every single brick of the red wall down in the next election.

The gap left by lack of policy and delivery has been filled with blatant lying. Following Sunak's lies about meat taxes and having to have seven bins, we've had Mark Harper (the Transport Secretary) lying that local councils are enforcing rules about how many times people are allowed to visit the shops. Considering his job, and considering the big issue of the time, maybe he could have answered some questions about transport, about HS2, while in Manchester intead. He ignored them all and made up some lies so he could attack straw men. With such a Trumpian approach to politics, he's clearly a future star.

Another Tory MP, Gillian Keegan - the Education Secretary who is keen on boasting about doing "a fucking good job" despite fears that concrete blocks are in danger of falling on kids' heads in hundreds of schools on her watch) going on about Derek Hatton who was the Deputy Leader at Liverpool City Council between 1983 and 1986 and so has not been seriously involved in politics for thirty-seven years.

Toryworld is an upside down world where proven liars and lunatics are taken seriously. Liz Truss is still taken seriously, Boris Johnson is still taken seriously, and Rishi Sunak is still taken seriously (long-term decisions for a brighter future my arse, short-term decisions for a shiter future more like). Suella Braverman is warmly applauded by a room full of Conservatives for getting up and doing an Enoch Powell cover version. When Braverman spoke of a "hurricane of migrants" anyone with any sense of history was able to see a direct echo of Powell's infamously racist Rivers of Blood speech in Wolverhampton in 1968.  The Tories kicked Powell out back then. Braverman will not be kicked out and may well be their next leader.

The leasder of a party that would welcome back, with open arms, Nigel Farage. Farage wouldn't even look extreme in this party so far to the right have they shifted. Yet a very strange version of right wing politics where judges are being told not so send convicted burglars and rapists to jail because the jails are already full to bursting. I've always thought that two things that made a person unsuitable for public office are incompetence and cruelty to others. This current iteration of the Tory party is full of high ranking ministers who manage to combine both those two traits almost to perfection.

That's why people are turning their backs on them in droves. On current polling, only 1% of 18-24 year old plan to vote Tory and just 12% of under 50s. The Tories are a party that will soon die but they may, as tends to happen with horror films, come back for an even more disturbing sequel. Suella Braverman. Kemi Badenoch. Lee Anderson. Your time has come. Let's end with another quote from Rafael Behr about what a 'funny' lot the Tories are(n't):-

"Nothing about it is funny as long as the Conservatives are still in office and able to dictate the terms of national debate. There is something corrosive of democracy in the obligation to take seriously a party that has given up on serious government. And there is something disturbing about a regime that is too ridiculous to trust with power yet is too powerful to be written off with ridicule."

 

Fleapit revisited:Boiling Point (2019).

It's nearly Christmas and an unnamed head chef, everyone simply calls him Chef, is severely stressed out at the busiest time of the year. The relaxed ambience of the fancy restaurant he works for is at complete odds with the hectic kitchen that the one shot short film, less than twenty-two minutes, Boiling Point (BBC1/iPlayer, directed by Philip Barantini, written by Barantini and James Cummings, and originally aired in 2019) is almost completely set in.

We start in media res, at the heart of the maelstrom, as Chef (Stephen Graham) barks out orders to his staff, at times going full Gordon Ramsay as his team drop plates, turn up for work late, and have the gall to ask for time off. There's lots of swearing, staff members are threatened with the sack, and when he's not giving shit to people he's taking shit from his manager (Alice Feetham).

Chef has prepared a bespoke menu of mallard and mackerel but some of the diners, with their party hats on, just want - to Chef's obvious disdain - burgers. It looks like one of the worst places anyone could ever work and just to top it all off, Chef is surreptitiously necking vodka and snorting coke - with predictably disastrous results.

Graham is, as ever, excellent and he's ably supported by Jonas Armstrong, Andrew Ellis, and Hannah Walters as members of his team. I enjoyed this very short film but not so much that I can understand how it went on to spawn a later feature length film and now a television series. More investigation needed. I'll treat this film as a starter and go in for the main course when I'm suitably hungry.

Fleapit revisited:Little Richard:I Am Everything.

"Awopbopaloobopalopbombom" - Tutti Frutti, Little Richard

"It was a Saturday, it was one o’clock, and it was a sunny day - and this woman was going 'and now, from America, we have Little Richard'. And it was this fucking black guy with this fucking ridiculous hairdo and teeth. He was fucking prettier than a woman. And it was Tutti Frutti. What the fuck? There was nothing and then there was this" - AC/DC's Brian Johnson on first seeing Little Richard on TV.

The raw energy, the confidence, the bouffant, the campness, the putting the foot up on the piano, the screaming, and the songs. Oh the songs. Tutti Frutti (of course), Good Golly Miss Molly, Rip It Up, Long Tall Sally, Lucille, Slippin' and Slidin'. Every one a classic. Little Richard was, as he never tired of telling people, the emancipator, the original, the architect of rock'n'roll. He was the man who changed music forever. As Brian Johnson said "there was nothing - and then there was this".

Of course, it's a little bit more complicated than that but Lisa Cortes' excellent film, 'Little Richard:I Am Everything' - shown last night on Channel 4, didn't shy away from showing that but neither did it (and neither should it or could it) throw shade on the extraordinary music made by Richard Wayne Penniman (1922-2020) from Macon, Georgia.

The standard of talking heads alone make it clear just how widely admired Little Richard was. There's Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Nile Rodgers, Tom Jones, Nona Hendryx, Valerie June, John Waters (who admired Richard so much he copied his pencil moustached and has now worn it for half a century), Lloyd Price, Lee Angel, and Dorothy LaBostrie. But there's also family members, neighbours from Macon, scholars, historians, booking agents, ethonmusicologists, and LGBTQ+ activists who discuss how Little Richard was a pioneer of intersectionality long before anybody had even heard that term.

The film tackles Richard's obsession with his legacy, his sexuality, and his complex relationship with his Christianity but it starts with Richard as a young man in Macon. One of twelve children, he ate rice and collard greens and lived in a world of medicine shows, white lightning, and segregation where people listened to blues and gospel.

He was called a cissy, a punk, and a faggot because he wore make up but it seemed to only strengthen his resolve to be himself. Music was the route and he became a huge fan of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Ma Rainey as well as Ike Turner's piano playing on Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats' Rocket 88.

 

In the early days, and at a time when both homosexuality and cross dressing were illegal, he'd perform in drag as Princess Lavonne. In Atlanta, he was inspired by the flamboyant R&B performer Billy Wright. He liked Billy's clothes, he liked Billy's hair, and he liked Billy's music, and he liked that Billy was openly gay. Another early influence was Esquerita who was also completely out of the closet and used to stand up when he played the piano.

 

All of this would later go into Little Richard's act but, at this point, he'd yet to really make it and was working as a dish washer at a Greyhound bus station (where, because of his colour, he was not allowed to eat or even use the toilets). Early producers wanted Richard to model his sound on the likes of Ray Charles and BB King but he was tired of that sound and he figured out a lot of other young kids were too so he gave them something edgier and that something was Tutti Frutti.

 

The only trouble was the lyrics were, obviously, about anal sex. "Tutti frutti, good booty. If it don't fit, don't force it, you can grease it, make it easy". Nobody wanted to be the person selling that to America so songwriter Dorothy LaBostrie was called in to tone it down a bit. She did so by cleaning up the lyrics but the primal power of the song remained - and remains to this day.

 

It was too much for some record company types who immediately got the white guys to knock out covers of it. Elvis Presley's wasn't bad (if still not close to Richard's) whereas Pat Boone's version is simply embarrassing. It didn't stop him. Little Richard would go out on tours as support and end them as headliner as nobody would want to follow him. He'd played a blacks only show one night and a whites only show the next but the white kids would come to the black show too. The black kids, of course, did not have the option of going to the white show.

While the young white kids of America were going mad for Little Richard, some of their parents' generation were burning rock'n'roll records, moaning about juvenile delinquency, and using some very unpleasant racist terms to slag off the music and the people making it. Little Richard was arrested, and beaten up, on multiple occasions.

Again, it didn't stop him and the 1956 release of The Girl Can't Help It spread rock'n'roll around the world. Little Richard met Lee Angel in Savannah, Georgia. She was a she so not really his thing but he asked her to marry him anyway. She said no though now she describes herself as being the love of his life.

 

Little Richard began to worry that his critics were right. Was he making the devil's music? Would he go to hell? He started to think so so he burned his own records, asked his fans to send him the records of his they'd bought so he could burn them too, cut his hair, and started carrying a bible with him everywhere. As other rock'n'roll stars fame grew, Little Richard - the original - was turning his back on it all.

 

 

He married a woman (Ernestive Haven - the marriage lasted five years) and he continued to put out records but the gospel sides he released were pretty uninspiring. Then, in something that becomes a pattern in his life, he returned to rock'n'roll. Touring the UK with Jet Harris and Sam Cooke. Playing such venues as the Adelphi in Slough and the Gaumont in Doncaster.

 

It was the full on Little Richard experience again and when he played Liverpool he met a new band that had yet to make a record and had never before met anyone famous. Little Richard told The Beatles to go to Hamburg and they didn't need telling twice. Still today, Paul McCartney suggests that the whooping and hollering he does in early Beatles songs is a complete take off of Little Richard.

 

Not long after The Beatles met him, he played a gig where he was supported by fellow admirers The Rolling Stones (Bo Diddley and The Everly Brothers were also on the bill - oh. to have a time machine) but there was a sting in the tail for Little Richard when the British invasion succeeded where Pat Boone had failed and started to turn rock'n'roll into a white person's music.

 

It was neither the fault of Jagger or McCartney that the white artists were starting to replace the black artists in the US charts and Elvis Presley took Little Richard aside to tell him he considered him to be the "true king of rock'n'roll". Which he was.

 

 

It got worse in the seventies and Richard started taking heroin and PCP (and anything else going it seems). He'd witness friends overdosing, other friends got murdered, and his nose got big enough, as he joked often later, to park "diesel trucks" in. So he went back to God, his soft landing, and started to refute his own homosexuality and denounce all homosexuality very loudly and very vocally.

 

It's not sure he ever fully came to terms with the person he was but it does seem he came to peace with the music he made even if he remained understandably bitter about the lack of respect he received for everything he'd achieved - "shut up" became a regular catchphrase on chat shows. There are scenes near the end, footage of Little Richard looking very old, that I'd never seen before and there's also lots of wonderful archive footage of the likes of Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Janis Joplin, David Bowie, Elton John, Culture Club, Fishbone, and Bad Brains.

 

Some of the footage I'd seen before on YouTube (though I'd not had the pleasure of hearing Lucille's Bogan filth filled classic Shave 'Em Dry before - check it out, it's pure smut) but it was all put to great use by Cortes and her team to tell a truly fascinating story. In places it reminded me of Brett Morgen's Moonage Daydream (fast cuts, seemingly unconnected imagery popping up at random times) but, like Little Richard, itself it was something of a true original.

 

Towards the end of his life he did at least appear to find some kind of way of living with his music, his homosexuality, and his Christian beliefs. I hope he found some peace. After all the noise he made he certainly deserved it. Little Richard:I Am Everything is a brilliant film about a brilliant, and complex, man. With a subject like Little Richard how could it not be? Awopbopaloobopalopbombom.

 

 

He's Only Being Jimmy:The Reckoning.

Why did the BBC choose to rake over the most shameful part of their history? Netflix had already put together a brilliantly dark and excoriating take down of Savile and his career so why did the BBC go there? I believe the BBC had decided to make their show before Netflix but there was a danger that, whatever they did, however they approached it, they'd be criticised - and they were.

Primarily, among friends I've spoken to and published critics, there's a feeling the BBC let themselves off too easily but I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. While the programme, The Reckoning (BBC1/iPlayer, directed by David Blair and Sandra Goldbacher and written by Dan Davies and Neil McKay) is not the full mea culpa some would have liked, or expected, but neither is it a complete absolvement from guilt.

I think they've got it, just about, right (after getting it very very wrong for a very very long time). Ultimately, many in the BBC were groomed by Savile just as surely as he groomed Margaret Thatcher, Mary Whitehouse, Lord Longford, Louis Theroux, much of the royal family - including the now King Charles III, and, ultimately, the countless girls and boys who became his victims. Savile, from his early years as a DJ in Manchester, even had the police in his pocket.

Steve Coogan, it must be said, is fantastic as Savile - playing him as he ages across five decades. He's creepy, he's chilling, an ogre of a man, and when he 'turns' on his victims it's absolutely horrifying - the camera tracks away out of respect. With what we all know now, it's only too believable but therein lies another problem. Everyone knows the story of Jimmy Savile, his horrific crimes while 'hiding in plain sight' - so why tell the story again? Even if watching it, grey and depressing though much of it is, it remains compelling.

Each of the four episodes are bookended by testimony from Savile's real life victims. They talk of their mixed feelings on hearing of his death. The joy they all felt at his passing was tempered by the anger/sadness they felt at the fact he would never be made to pay for his crimes. He ruined so many people's lives at such a young age. One of his victims even committed suicide. It's unclear if she was the only one.

It's hard to know if the victim's testimonies justify the show or are being used as justification for the show so I'll reserve judgement on that and give a brief precis of how it all plays out. The elderly Savile is tapped up by budding author Dan Davies (Mark Stanley) who wants to write a book about him but wants Savile to tell the truth. Savile insists he is telling the truth as he narrates his life to the man he patronisingly calls Dr Wordsmith but, we all know, he's not telling the whole truth - and soon Davies begins to suspect as much as well.

We see Savile DJing and running nightclubs in Manchester back in 1962. We see him having gatecrashers beaten up by his goons and we see him, and his equally horrendous understudy - another abuser and later a convicted rapist who called Savile 'father' - Ray Teret (Robert Emms), taking young girls back home with them and forcing them into sexual acts.

This, of course, will be a recurrent theme. Savile attacked girls, and sometimes boys, everywhere he could. At discos, in his car, on the promenade at Scarborough, at Stoke Mandeville, in his house, in his mother's house, even backstage at Jim'll Fix It. These scenes are even more disturbing than when Jimmy Savile introduces Rolf Harris on Top Of The Pops or poses for photographs with Ronnie Kray and Peter Sutcliffe.

Savile could never resist attaching himself to a celebrity. Ingratiating himself with them made for good cover so we see photos of him with The Beatles, Elvis Presley, Muhammad Ali, and Margaret Thatcher (who had him knighted, spent many Christmases with him, and is played in The Reckoning by Fenella Woolgar) and he boasts to teenagers about having egg and chips with The Kinks and meeting The Four Seasons, Pope John Paul II, and The Black & White Minstrels!

We see his career as it progresses. Shows at Radio Luxembourg, touring the country in a camper van, running the Leeds Mecca, inveigling himself into a position of trust at the Leeds General Infirmary and getting The Beach Boys and Roy Orbison to play there, buying his mum a house in Scarborough, joining the BBC and presenting the first ever (and part of the last ever) Top Of The Pops, running marathons, suggesting (and failing) to launch a show called Savile's Travels (!), Broadmoor, Stoke Mandeville, 'clunk click, every trip', being made an OBE (and later knighted), presenting Songs of Praise, Jim'll Fix It, publishing a book called, and about, 'Stranger Danger', and appearing on Through The Keyhole and Celebrity Big Brother when his fame started to wane - though only slightly. His funeral was almost a state occasion.

We see Savile's complicated relationship with his mother Agnes - or The Duchess as he called her (Gemma Jones). The Duchess didn't approve of pop music and felt Savile should have settled down and started a family. In a confession booth, she admits to the priest she's worried he may have a dark side and, as the youngest of seven children, she may not love him as much as she should. We see Savile in the confession booth telling the priest (James Quinn) that he has sinned. He accepted a free meal from a local cafe. When he hints at far far darker transgressions he does it in an "asking for a friend" way that the priest doesn't appear to fully buy.

While Coogan is excellent throughout there are superb supporting performances from the likes of Jones, Quinn, Stanley, and Emms as well as Mark Lewis Jones who plays Charles Hullighan - the head porter at Leeds General Infirmary, Siobhan Finneran as his wife Beryl - a woman who doesn't trust Savile from the off and has good reason not to, Peter Wight as Peter Jaconelli, a paedophile ice cream vendor who also happens to be Mayor of Scarborough, Fode Simbo as Victor - a porter at the infirmary, Michael Jibson as assistant head, and then head, of light entertainment at the BBC Bill Cotton, Julian Rhind-Tutt as BBC producer Johnnie Stewart, and Barbara Wilshere as Anna Instone, head of the BBC's gramophone department.

Cotton and Stewart are won over by Savile and the success he makes of his shows and, it seems to me, they turn a blind eye to both rumours about his behaviour and, in a couple of instances, some very blatant clues as to what he's up to. Instone, however, is clear from the off that she doesn't like the man and that they shouldn't be working with him. It's a recurrent theme in The Reckoning that it is older women who seem to be able to see what's right in front of their eyes yet it is older women who are ignored or sidelined as easily as young girls and boys.

Whenever 'Dr Wordsmith' gets close to the dark truth about Savile, Savile bats it away by saying he has no "side" and "what you see is what you get". He blames "naysayers" and journalists who want to pick up the metaphorical toilet seat and have a look at what's beneath. The famous catchphrases - "now then, now then", "how's about that, then", "guys and gals" - and a new one - "unsolicited testimonial" if somebody says something nice about him in a meeting - come across as creepy rather than charming and just to add to the already horrific picture of a 50+ year career of sexual abuse, rape, and paedophila it's suggested that Savile was also a necrophile. That he may have even violated the corpse of his own dead mother. 

So there's not a lot of laughs. I felt a bit hollowed out watching it yet compelled to continue. There are some genuinely sad scenes (a mother mourns for one of Savile's victims) and there are chilling ones. Not least the ones when Savile reveals his true self to his initially unsuspecting victims. The terrified look on the faces of young victims like Kevin (Tommy Finnegan) and Sara (Tia Dutt) tell the story in a way the written word perhaps could not.

You can see how, in a moment, they have had the best day of their life turned into the worst. Their innocence has been stolen forever. Their lives will never be the same again. Worst of all, they will have to watch their abuser on television for decades after. They will have to hear the royal family, the Prime Minister, and most of the country sing his praises. The more fame and success Jimmy Savile achieved, the more he cultivated his eccentricity, the more he cultivated his eccentricity the more those he had under his spell remained under his spell, and the longer they remained under his spell the longer he was able to rape children. In the end he was never caught. When the world finally came to realise who the real Jimmy Savile was his grave was destroyed. Considering all the lives he destroyed it doesn't even feel close to justice. Jimmy Savile always claimed to be a deeply Christian man. I wonder how he's doing in Hell.

Dancing about Architecture:Herzog & De Meuron @ the RA.

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture" is a quote that is often used to show how difficult it is to explain music using the written word. I've written about music (many times) but I've never, to the best of my knowledge, danced to architecture - despite loving a lot of it.

 

Sao Paulo Cultural Complex Lux (2009-12)

If, however, I was the sort of person who DID dance to architecture I'm afraid to report that the Royal Academy's Herzog & de Meuron show would have found my guilty feet to have no rhythm. I'd have remained, resolutely, a wallflower.

It's not that the Swiss firm haven't made some amazing buildings (they have) and more that there's really little you can get from looking at little models of them that you couldn't get from looking at photos on the Internet. Or, better still, actually visiting the buildings. There's some nice photo art from Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff (many showing Herzog & de Meuron creations) to pad out the show but that doesn't tell you much about Herzog & de Meuron really.

There's also information boards on the wall that you give you such mind numbingly dull facts that you start to glaze over after about three sentences. Herzog & de Meuron, apparently, don't just think about what a building looks like but how its users can interact with it. They think about space and green issues. But of course they do. They're architects. That's what architects do. This information is hardly a revelation.

Thomas Ruff - Signal Box, Basel (1994)

Thomas Ruff - Hongkong (2009)

Some history. (Jacques) Herzog & (Pierre) de Meuron began as an architectural partnership in 1978 and now employ six hundred architects. Based in Basel, Switzerland, they have built all around the world but they came to my attention when they converted London's former Bankside power station into Tate Modern in 2000. It's quite amazing as I'd lived in London for four years by then (and had been visiting for many more) and yet I can't even remember the power station before it became a gallery. How did I miss it?

The RA show includes models as well as material samples, tools, drawings, and films. Most of which, sadly, aren't very interesting when presented as standalone attractions. Some of the models represent buildings that were built. Others designs that were never realised. Frustratingly, they don't always tell you which is which.

There's a Lego House built for the Centre Pompidou in Paris (that's quite good, everyone likes Lego), a signal box from Basel, an unbuilt Greek Orthodox church that would have stood in Zurich, and an Italian stone house. They all look like they'd make fine buildings. But as models they don't impress. They serve more a practical use.

Lego House:One Specific Room (1985)

Central Signal Box (1994-99)

Greek Orthodox Church (1989)

Stone House (1982-88)

Andreas Gursky - Beijing (2010)

London is represented by the Tate Modern extension, Deptford's Laban Dance Centre, a Serpentine Gallery Pavilion from about a decade ago, and Chelsea's Stamford Bridge stadium and there's also a couple of models of the National Stadium in Beijing which Herzog & de Meuron built in collaboration with Ai Weiwei for the Beijing olympics in 2008. It got the nickname "the bird's nest" but looking at one of the models it could just as easily have been "the glazed ring doughnut".

Tate Modern Project (2005-16)

Laban Dance Centre (1997-2003)

 

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion (2011-12) 

Stamford Bridge (2013)

National Stadium Beijing (2002-08)

National Stadium - Beijing (2002-08)

Andreas Gursky - Centre Pompidou (1995)

Andreas Gursky - Prada Tokyo (2004)

Tai Kwun, Centre for Heritage and Art (2006-18)

I'm forever impressed by how architects create entire buildings. It seems a superhuman feat to me. So I should have enjoyed looking under the hood, so to speak, and seeing how it all works but it just felt cold. I didn't come away from the exhibition with much more knowledge about Herzog & de Meuron than I went into it with.

There's a film by Beka & Lemoine that told me precisely nothing at all and there's another by the architects themselves that wasn't remotely interesting either. It went on for half an hour. I couldn't watch it all. It was too boring - and I normally like (some) boring things.

Herzog & de Meuron - Project Observer (2023)

The first room was given over to the architectural models (and the Gursky & Ruff photographs), the second to the two rather unedifying films, and the third (and final) one to one specific project the architects have been working on:- the Kinderspital (Children's Hospital) in Zurich.

There's some vacuous guff about how hospitals have to "combine the highest levels of public accessibility with our most private personal moments" (no shit Sherlock) and how they are "places of comfort and care for patients, visitors and staff" - which suggest neither Mr Herzog or Mr de Meuron have ever had to spend eight hours sitting in A&E at King's.

Anyway, the room was crap. The caption boards were either full of platitudes or read as incredibly patronising and the few models they had up didn't look very interesting. But a crap room seemed the right way to end a crap exhibition. Which is a shame. Because as architects Herzog & de Meuron are great. As exhibitors, though, they're crap and this show felt a complete waste of time.

After I finished it I went for a walk round St James's Park to look at the pelicans, swans, geese, coots, and moorhens and even saw a man fall off the bridge into the lake. That made a much bigger splash than this disappointing exhibition did.

Kinderspital Zurich (2015)

Kinderspital Zurich (2019)