Last Of The Summer Grime.

Yesterday was almost certainly the last time I'll visit the Museum of London at its home in the Barbican. It's moving. In four years time it will reopen a few hundred yards down the round in the former Smithfield meat market. If the plans Mo and myself saw yesterday are anything to go by the building, with huge neon lettering on the roof, looks more like a nightclub.

But I trust it will still be good. This old place certainly has been. The last two exhibitions they're running are on grime and the footballer Harry Kane! Kane's obviously a pretty good footballer and with fifty goals for the England national team it's surely only a matter of time before he breaks Wayne Rooney's record. But I can't imagine an exhibition devoted to him being all that interesting to anyone except the Tottenham hardcore.

I mean, he's not mega-interesting, is he? So grime it was then. Neither Mo nor myself profess to be anything like experts on grime music but I do, at least, like much of it. I can't say I roll particularly deep but I enjoy the music of artists like Stormzy, Skepta, Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, Lethal Bizzle, Kano, Afrikan Boy, and Meridian Dan. I was gonna say J Hus too but Wikipedia has him down as British hip hop/afroswing (?)/road rap!

 

I know what grime sounds like (most of us do) but if you were to come to this exhibition to learn about the music, its influences, and its lyrical themes you may have walked a way a little bit disappointed. I get that they can hardly have the likes of German Whip, Big For Your Boots, or Numbers blasting out of the speakers while others nearby are trying to learn about the Roman conquest of London or the Great Fire but my main gripe (and it's a very minor one - the exhibition was free after all) is that the show was not so much about grime as a genre but the environment grime grew up in and the way it's been policed and racially profiled.

That still made for an interesting (if small) show. The exhibits weren't particularly thrilling but the films were hugely illuminating. There's a short video of Skepta's 2003 song DTI in which he mocks Department of Trade and Industry officials and there's another segment from a 1996 BBC documentary, First Sight:Radio Renegades in which those DTI officials and pirate broadcasters in the East End of London talk about the cat and mouse game they play. 

Studios are set up in unremarkable looking flats, transmitters and aerials are installed on the top of the highest available block of flats, DTI officials go up to the roof, pull them down, twist them so they can't be used, and, sometimes, take a hammer to the vinyl records (or vinyls!) that the DJs have played. Then the pirates start again. It seems an enormous waste of time.

And for what? To try and prevent people illegally circumnavigating broadcast laws, for sure. But also to try and stop young working class people, often - but not always - black, getting their creative efforts out there. Britain should be proud of grime. Though it borrows, sometimes steals, from American hip hop and Jamaican dancehall culture, it is a truly homegrown scene.

The most authentic working class culture since the house music revolution or the punk scene. Possibly their equal. There are clips at the Museum of London of artists like JME, Tinchy Stryder, and Skepta performing sets for pirate radio stations like Rinse FM and Raw Blaze and whereas some of the lyrical concerns are regionally specific (to the degree that if you don't live in the boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Newham, Waltham Forest, or Barking and Dagenham you probably won't have a clue what's being referenced) the energy, and the sonic innovation - often achieved at very low cost, is undeniable.

The theme of the censorship of black creativity is one that runs through the show. There was no place for grime in the mainstream so that necessitated the use of pirate radio. In the year 2000 alone there were 1,300 DTI raids on unlicensed pirate radio stations in London. Fed up with this, Rinse FM vowed to go legal in 2006. It took them four years.

In 2005, the infamous Form 696 was introduced. Form 696 was a risk assessment form aimed specifically at events that featured DJs and MCs and potential promoters were asked to submit information regarding the ethnicity of performers and the likely ethnicity of audience members. It's hard to imagine someone promoting an indie night above a pub having to do that. Interestingly, Feargal Sharkey (ex-singer of The Undertones and then head of UK Music) sought a judicial review against this obvious injustice but it took until 2017 before it was scrapped. 

The story doesn't end there though. In 2019, drill artists Skengdo and AM received prison sentences for breaching an injunction and performing their song Attempted 1.0. It is believed to be the first time in British legal history that somebody has been sent to prison for singing a song.

Gentrification is the other major theme of the exhibition. Areas like Shadwell, Stepney, Globe Town, and Bow sit in what's almost a valley of comparatively low rise buildings between the skyscrapers of both the City and Docklands. Huge, unimaginable, wealth is stored in these glass and steel monsters - much of it owned by people who may never have even set foot in London.

Many of the luxury flats in the region sit empty as they're used as trading chips by rich Chinese, Arabs, and, until recently, Russian oligarchs. The myth of the trickle down economy that is peddled by the ultra wealthy is just that - a myth. Most of those who live between these two super rich areas see nothing of the money that is stored there and though most agree renewal and investment is needed in these areas there's an overwhelming sense that the political classes see the locals as a problem to be moved on and not as people who need help. People who may benefit from some of the wealth that the Olympics, for example, brought to the area.

Not least when the grime artists themselves have brought people into the area. On a trip to Kyiv nearly fifteen years ago, a young man, Artem, who was showing me and my friend Shep round (and got us free tickets to Dynamo Kyiv v Zaporizhzhia) asked us about Hackney and Bow because he'd heard it on grime tapes, DJ Slimzee's Sunday afternoon show would have people travel in to the city just so they could pick up the signal and, of course, Stormzy (admittedly from Croydon, not Bow) has headlined Glastonbury and become something of a national treasure.

For his troubles, Slimzee received an ASBO that, for five years, stopped him from accessing the roof of any building over five storeys high. Other pirate stations would sometimes disappear over the night once the law closed them down and politicians would try to win over the hearts of middle England by being tough on grime artists. Even though David Cameron once suggested we should try hugging a 'hoodie'!

Alongside RiskyRoadz's handwritten storyboard (signed by Kano), Rhythm Division record bags, photos of 'grime gran' Margie Keefe (RiskyRoadz' grandmother), and Trinity Korg keyboards, we get a chance to take a video tour, in a black cab, of some of the locations that were pivotal to the early days of the grime story.

RiskyRoadz (Roony Keefe) is both an early enthusiast and advocate of grime who went on to document the scene's early days. But he's also a black cab driver and with various figureheads of the early scene his passengers he takes a spin round places like Stratford, Leytonstone and the Isle of Dogs and stops so his fares and him can reminisce about such locations as Jammer's graffiti strewn basement (or 'dungeon') in E11, the EQ club in E15, and the Crossways Estate in Bow. 

The Deja Vu FM pirate radio station is now the site of the Copper Box Arena in the Olympic Park. From grime to handball in a few short years! That's the kind of gentrification that Dr Joy White is on hand to both disseminate and dismantle. In the last decades the number of youth centres in London has nearly halved and Covid has only made things worse. In Newham alone the number has fallen from eighteen to thirteen since 2019.

That makes it more difficult for emerging new artists (be they grime, drill, road rap, or some genre I am yet to even hear of) to make the connections they need to realise their dream, to find the space to write and rehearse, and, ultimately, to come through and end up, like Stormzy, headlining Glastonbury.

Despite this though, I am all but certain new (and, for some, challenging) forms of music will emerge because that's our human nature. It is impossible for creative people not to be creative. Grime is one of London's, one of the UK's, most impressive cultural movements ever. It was long overdue that it was celebrated by a major institution like the Museum of London. My only regret is the show could have been much larger. Thanks to Mo for joining me for this story of grime and punishment.

Get In The Sea:The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe.

I vaguely knew the story of John Darwin. I remember that he went missing off the coast near his home in Seaton Carew, County Durham in the early 2000s (2002) and that it was later revealed he'd faked his own death in a canoe accident. But I hadn't realised just quite how deep the deception went or how complex the series of events that unfolded became.

I'd certainly put time aside to consider how it must have affected his family. ITV's The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe (created and written by Chris Lang, based on a memoir by David Leigh, and directed by Richard Laxton) did all that for me. It seemed correct, also, that the story came from the viewpoint of John's wife, Anne, for while John was essentially a fantasist and something of a control freak and their sons Mark and Anthony were completely innocent victims, Anne's story, as narrated by her, was far more nuanced and, at times, powerful and upsetting.

The story begins in Seaton Carew in 2000. John (Eddie Marsan) and Anne (Monica Dolan, excellent as always) are struggling. John, as usual, has been spending way beyond his means. Buying things he can't afford. A Range Rover with ludicrously expensive personalised numberplates and not just one house, but two houses, to convert into a B'n'B.

The Darwins are in massive debt and the bailiffs are regularly heard knocking on the door. Anne wants to file for bankruptcy but John's got a different solution. He thinks he should fake his own death and they can cash in on his life assurance. Initially, Anne refuses to go along with this - for all the reasons any sane person would refuse to - but John blackmails her with suicide threats and soon enough he's heading off into the grey waters of Tees Bay in a knackered old canoe.

While, of course, making sure lots of neighbours and passers-by see him doing so. Anne dutifully reports him missing to the police and soon there are boats and helicopters out looking for him, the story is in the papers and on the television news, and there's nearly as many press people outside the house as there are police.

When, after four days, the search is called off and John reconnects with Anne, his plans for the next stage get crazier and crazier and life, for Anne at least, complicit now in John's crime, becomes near unbearable. There is trouble with the life insurance claim, there's the heartbreak she feels about lying to her grown up sons - Mark (Mark Stanley) and Anthony (Dominic Applewhite), and there's an intense gnawing fear that the police will come knocking at any moment.

Yet, she's in too deep now - and struggles to see a way out of the mess. She means to do well. She loves her family but she feels trapped and, sometimes, she seems to have faith that John will miraculously turn things round. He's the only man she's ever loved, and - it's implied - the only man that's ever loved her, so she desperately needs to believe that.

The skill of this programme is that you find yourself sympathising with her. With John, it's not so easy. He likes to call himself "a man who thinks outside the box" but he mentally controls his wife, he's incredibly selfish, and he's about as able to execute a cunning plan as Blackadder's Baldrick. While he's in hiding he takes to reading Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal and it's not Charles de Gaulle he's identifying with.

This bizarre story fills four episodes far easier than I thought it would have done. While it touches on themes of marital coercion and how some people feel they lack an identity without a partner, it is the all too human scenes which elicit the strongest emotions.

Anne's powerful love for her sons, their eventual feelings of betrayal, and the first Christmas dinner without John present. Even though he's not actually dead. All these normally resonant occasions remain resonant and are portrayed tenderly but are all clouded by the one big crime, the one huge lie, that underpins the entire drama and shapes the entire family dynamic.

When it all comes crumbling down, for Anne - and I didn't know this - in Panama, we are, inevitably, treated to a series of interviews in nondescript police station offices. Despite the huge web of deception, I still found myself feeling sorry for Anne and, very occasionally, even John. Most of all I felt for Anthony and Mark who had had their entire world pulled from under them.

As so often, I had a little cry towards the end. But what a journey it had been. It had taken in a rather wry Mrs Merton reference, a role for David Fynn as David Leigh - the Daily Mirror reporter based in Miami who flew to Panama in an attempt to become the first to tell Anne's story, and an unexpected appearance (for me) by Karl Pilkington as DC Phil Bayley.

He was rather good but he was, as was everyone else, eclipsed by the brilliant Doolan, the incredible story of the Darwin family, and a really rather gripping telling of it. Faking your own death in a canoe accident is a terrible idea. For you, for your wife, for your children, and for pretty much everyone really. But it turns out it does make for good television. 

An Actor's Life For Me:Toast Of London.

A Nigerian woman whose cosmetic surgery leaves her looking like Bruce Forsyth, journalists who throw shopping trolleys in canals, loyalty cards for high class hookers, thugs who reference Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, a director who boasts of cupping Benedict Cumberbatch's balls, and a story of Margaret Thatcher drinking Heineken from a can at Lionel Blair's house.

The world of Steven Toast is both a surreal one - and a very silly one. It's also a highly enjoyable one to watch and though I'd seen a few episodes I'd never sat down and watched them all end to end - so that's what I'm doing. Series one of Toast of London (created by Matt Berry and Arthur Mathews, directed by Michael Cumming) first aired on Channel 4 in 2013 but it's now up, with all other series, on the BBC iPlayer. 

Toast himself (Matt Berry - who seems to irritate many but I find him amusing) is a struggling actor in London with delusions of grandeur. He's going through a divorce (wife Ellen - played by Amanda Donohoe - briefly appears, committing an act of violence at a crazy golf course), he drinks in The Colonial Club, and he thinks himself something of a ladies man despite the fact that he insists on keeping his 'sports vest' on for sex. To be fair, most of his 'conquests' seem more than happy with that state of affairs.

He shares a flat with Ed Howzer-Black (Robert Bathurst). A man who is pretty much never seen away from the kitchen table or wearing anything other than some kind of smoking jacket that doubles up as a dressing gown.

Toast's agent Jane Plough (pronounced Pluff), played by Doon MacKichan, has an office on Wardour Street and from there she sends Toast out on various, usually unsuitable and disappointing jobs, in a very recognisable Soho (in series one alone I spotted the market cross building in Soho Square and The Coach and Horses pub). Not that Toast is incapable of getting himself into trouble alone.

That's the gist of the story really. There's very little to it - and there doesn't need to be. Toast rehearses a play, he wins an award, he loses money playing poker with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Elaine Paige, he visits a submarine called the Penetrator, advertises laxatives, writes a book (without an ending), and he takes a part in the film Prince Philip Scoundrel Dog!

Oh, and he tries to 'have it off' with pretty ladies. Including Mrs Purchase (Tracy-Ann Oberman), the wife of Toast's eternal rival Ray Purchase (Harry Peacock) - a man seemingly permanently dressed in a cream suit and white polo neck and referred to, variously, by Toast as "a massive idiot", "a complete tool", "a total pratt", "a fucking prick", or, quite simply, a "cunt".

While Purchase is Toast's major nemesis, his life is also hampered by a couple of hipsters, Danny Bear (Tim Downie) and Clem Fandango (Shazad Latif), who work in the booth at a studio in which he records various ridiculous voiceovers.

The scenes where Bear and Fandango humiliate Toast shouldn't really work. But they do, and that could be said for much of Toast of London. There's a phone book's worth of ridiculous names to snort at (Derek Sibling, Susan Random, Hamilton Meathouse, Strawberry Rathbone, Martin Aynuss, Sheryl Whelk, Sookie Houseboat, Yvonne Wryly, and Beezus Fuffoon), enjoyable cameos from the ever reliable Geoffrey McGivern and Morgana Robinson, and a running joke about how out of touch with popular culture Toast is.

He doesn't know who Ben Elton or Harry Potter even are. The running jokes about Benedict Cumberbatch don't really add much to the whole thing, the songs (one in each episode, including one sung by Michael Ball who is doubling up as a mob style debt collector) are passable if not particularly hilarious, and there's a couple of jokes that fall a bit flat (some slapstick ten-pin bowling and one about beekeepers) but, for the most part, each episode zips by pretty quickly and provides plenty to grin about as well as a handful of outright chortles.

The jokes about Boris Johnson one day taking 'the top job', in retrospect, seem more like warnings than quips although Ed's obsessing over how Iain Duncan-Smith's doing at 'Work and Pensions' possibly dates the show a little more. But the humour hasn't dated - and how can it when much of the best of it revolves around something as ridiculous as Steven Toast saying the word 'underpants' in a ludicrous German accent and pronouncing Nigel Mansell's name incorrectly. 

Kakistocracy XXXVI:Are You Still Here?

"When Alexander of Macedon was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer. Eric Bristow is only 27" - Sid Waddell

When Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was 58 years old, he was (eventually) deposed from his position as Prime Minister. We don't know if he cried salt tears or if he cried any tears but we do no he reluctantly agreed to (and not until September) leave the post in a style that was completely befitting of him.

He tried to be funny (the "them's the breaks" and the "hasta la vista" lines), he lied about his achievements, he claimed it was "eccentric" for the Tory party to be getting rid of him, and he boasted "mission accomplished - for now"!

Not only does that suggest, like the Terminator he so hilariously quoted, he'll be back but it's worrying too. What's truly 'eccentric' is how he could lie that his mission was accomplished. Unless his mission was to divide and destroy the UK.

A disastrous bodged Brexit that he never really believed in anyway (he campaigned against it until he saw a crowd running behind Nigel Farage which he then joined - at the front shouting "follow me") and the country will argue about for decades to come, a disastrous response to the Covid pandemic that left the UK with the 7th worse global death toll, a falling in global status because the government's lack of seriousness and ability to stand by its promises, and, perhaps worse of all, a list of contenders to take over that are pretty much all as shit as Boris Johnson.

That's because they've all, to more or less, degree stood behind Johnson. When Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak began the downfall of Johnson's government by resigning fifteen days ago (surprisingly, the Chris 'Ass' Pincher affair - yet another Tory groping people and yet again Johnson lying how much he knew about that before promoting the sex pest) they set in chain a series of events that have left us with a final two of Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss. Both of whom, like all the others, are talking about the last three, or even twelve years, as if the Tories have not been in power!

Javid, Grant Shapps, and Rehman Chishti (yeah, me neither) all resigned when they saw they had no chance of winning and over the last two weeks the likes of Jeremy Hunt, Nadhim Zahawi, Suella Braverman, Tom Tugendhat, Kemi Badenoch, and - today - Penny Mordaunt have been knocked out leaving Sunak and Truss as the last two standing.

Either of them, or any of the others mentioned - would essentially be a Boris Johnson continuity candidate (even Hunt or Tugendat who didn't have the decency to leave the party as it was taken over by a criminal gang) but out of the two remaining Truss is definitely the worse. As a friend observed, she can't read, she can't talk, she can't listen, and those who saw her preference saw that, much like the party she hopes to represent, she has no sense of direction. She couldn't find her way to the press room and got lost again looking for the door on her way out.

That would come to sum up a Truss tenure (which probably wouldn't last long anyway) but we should be only marginally more welcoming of a Sunak leadership. He stood by Johnson right up until the bitter end, he lied about his wife's non-dom status, he jokes about working class people (not knowing any), and he was, like Johnson, convicted of partying during Covid lockdowns.

The reason it's such a shitshow is that any half-decent Tory left the party and refused to serve under Johnson and those who reached the highest ranks only did so through loyalty (never ability) and fealty to a failed Brexit project.

I'd expected, in this blog, to write about a Tory donor (possibly Lord Brownlow) being contacted by Johnson to build his six year old son a £150,000 tree house in Chequers (while at the same time his party was voting against free school meals), Steve Bray becoming one of the first people to feel the strong arm of the new anti-protest laws, the UK government acting like a Bond villain and announcing - in advance - plans to break the law, and of course the rumours of BJ receiving a BJ while at work. But, of course, things moved pretty quick.

Chris 'Ass' Pincher (a man who'd already resigned for such things and had even been assigned a minder to check he doesn't get drunk and start molesting people) will go down in history as the scandal that finally tired the unshockable Tory party but don't imagine there won't be more crap in the last couple of months of Johnson's reign and beyond. 

While all this backstabbing and politicking (yet virtually no policy making and certainly no concern for the country rather than the party) I have been up, I've been down, I've been mucking around, and I've been meeting some odd people and acting odd. 

I had a great night with Pam and Kathy at LCD Soundsystem at Brixton Academy, a visit to a not particularly impressive Zaha Hadid exhibition in Clerkenwell, I've chatted to both my parents, I've attended an interesting talk about Aleister Crowley's time in London, I've met Valia for drinks in Camden, and Vicki for drinks in curry around the South Bank.

Best of all I had a great time at the Lambeth Country Show with Pam and others (Horace 'Sleepy' Andy and Heatwave the stars - and the queues to see the vegetables incredible), a lovely TADS walk from Cosham to Portsmouth, and went to Cheryl's 50th birthday party in Farnham which, despite my DJing, was great (Tina, Tony, and Darren made up for it with their sets). Not least because so many lovely people attended.

I've also finally started taking Allopurinol for my gout and experienced heat of 102F yesterday as Britain had its warmest day ever. A COBRA meeting was called but, true to form, Johnson didn't bother to attend. There was a party on at Chequers or something.

So his damage will continue to, and beyond, the end. He'll carp from the sidelines, he'll try to make whoever follows him fail (they won't need much help in that but he'll still try), and the stories about his criminality and lying will continue to come to light. Sunak or Truss? It doesn't matter much. What we need is not just the end of Boris Johnson's political career but the end of the political career of every single politician who supported, enabled, or defended him. Hasta la vista indeed. Fuck off you lying piece of shit.

No More Love On The Run:Noughts + Crosses S2.

Series two of Noughts + Crosses (BBC1/iPlayer, directed by Koby Adom and based on the series of books of the same name by Malorie Blackan) begins with what appears to be a contented Sephy (Masali Baduza) and Callum (Jack Rowan) in a contended and happy embrace but anyone who watched the first series, screened during the very early days of the Covid pandemic, will know it won't stay like that for long.

We soon learn that Sephy is registered as missing and that she, and Callum, are actually on the run together. She pregnant with his child. Meanwhile, Sephy's father, the Prime Minister of Albion Kamal Hadley (Paterson Joseph) has been re-elected and is threatening to extend the death penalty. Kamal is happy to spread the lie that Sephy has been abducted and that the suspects, Callum and his brother Jude (Josh Dylan) are 'at large' while at the same time secretly supporting a growing 'cross' vigilante group called The Ofa Brotherhood who claim to be 'For Sephy' but in reality seem more interested in violently attacking, and even killing, noughts.

As these attacks increase, Kamal plays them down as "high spirits" but that's far from the only time you'll be reminded of our recently resigned, but still in position, Prime Minister and the right wing support he commands. There's talk of 'biased media', of 'optics', of preservation of heritage, and of cross culture being under attack.

There's even talk of Albion "taking control" of its own "destiny". If these references seem obvious and almost crudely political then that's more a reflection on the world we live in today than it is on Noughts + Crosses. Series two touches on themes of trafficking (which looks as bad on screen as it probably does in real life) and it shows, very skillfully, how extremist thought can lead to extremist action and potentially isolate people from their friends and family.

There's even repeated references to a neighbouring empire that is the enemy of Albion. It's called Muscovy! Although it seems Albion is doing a pretty good job of destroying itself from within anyway. Lekan (Jonathan Ajayi) is still dating Sephy's sister Minerva (Kike Brimah) but he's joined the Ofa Brotherhood and found a clearer focus for his deepening anger and, elsewhere, the Liberation Militia (or, simply, LM) led by Morgan Green (Morgan Watkins) is upping its own violent game.

Both in response to the Ofa Brotherhood and for its own very partial reasons. A former minister of Kamal, Shashi Bandara (Mayuri Naidu), has formed a new political party - Atunbi claim to be "for both noughts and crosses" - and is gaining ground in the polls as more of Kamal's ministers resign in disgust and a formerly compliant media (including a great cameo by Judi Love) begin to turn on the man.

 

Remind you of anyone? Callum and Jude's mum, Maggie (Helen Baxendale), still works in a food bank and still tries to do the right thing by everyone but is often put in seemingly impossible and desperate positions. Some of which stem from Jude's own anger. Jude, unlike Callum, doesn't trust, or like, crosses but his position becomes more complicated when he meets Cara (Jasmine Jobson), a 'halver' who first of all helps Jude out of a tight spot and then seems to begin to fall for him - as he does for her.

Where that will end is an interesting side story to the main theme, the ever deepening and ever more troubled love story of Sephy and Callum. Although series two didn't begin with as much impact as the first series it gained pace and momentum via some very tense action scenes and some very moving conversations between the chief protagonists (Maggie and Jude's mother and son chat on a park bench particularly stood out) and by the end of  the whole thing I was, you'll not be surprised to read, in tears.

The devastating decisions faced by Sephy, Callum, and many others, a profoundly moving scene in a packed court room, and a most impressive state visit from the Empress of Aprica (Iretiola Doyle) combine with a wonderful soundtrack (Oumou Sangare, Fatoumata Diawara, Songhoy Blues) and wonderful performances all round. Baduza, Joseph, and Bonnie Mbuli as Kamal's conflicted wife Jasmine are all excellent but perhaps best of all is the excellent Jasmine Jobson who as Cara fills the screen with intensity whenever she appears.

It's, possibly, a bit harsh to single individuals out when Noughts + Crosses is, at heart, an ensemble piece and not just that but an ensemble piece that shows that working together, rather than at crossed purposes, is better for not just others, not just society, but also for ourselves. That shouldn't be so difficult to achieve yet human history has a way of demonstrating that it is. 

 

The Beast of London:Oh, Mr.Crowley.

"Mr. Crowley, what went on in your head? Oh Mr. Crowley, did you talk to the dead? Your lifestyle to me seemed so tragic with the thrill of it all. You fooled all the people with magic. Yeah, you waited on Satan's call" - Mr. Crowley, Ozzy Osbourne

The London Fortean Society's recent talk about Aleister Crowley, City of the Beast The London of Aleister Crowley, was probably a bit too much for some. For others it was possibly not enough. Those who were already experts on Crowley or those, like one woman there, who make claims they wish to participate in group sex before offering themselves up as a human sacrifice!

Er, no thanks! For me the talk was pitched just about right. In truth I'm more interested in London and its various histories than I am in Crowley per se but I thought the two would make an interesting mix and the LFS rarely let me down. 

I was right. Philip Baker (who's also written about Dennis Wheatley, Austin Osman Spare, Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, and absinthe) proved an interesting, authoritative, and amusing speaker and he wasn't even put off by the, admittedly quite funny, GPS announcements that someone in the audience's phone kept broadcasting to the upstairs room of The Miller pub.

Crowley, we learned, styled himself as the Great Beast, the Great Transgressor, the Wickedest Man in the World, or, quite simply, 666 and he'd lived a life of sex, drugs, and Richard Wagner but by the early sixties he was generally considered to be something of a joke, a bit of a bore.

When The Beatles included him on the cover of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (alongside Bob Dylan, Marilyn Monroe, Mahatma Gandhi, and Marlon Brando among many others) his star began to rise again. Or at least people became interested in him.

By that time he had been dead twenty years but that didn't stop film director John Waters revering him as a "filth elder" and others seeing him as "an icon of libertarian digression":- "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" had been Crowley's motto and mantra.

Born in 1875, Crowley was, along with Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, a product of the absinthe soaked 1890s. The next three decades saw him travel around such far flung destinations as China, India, Mexico, Egypt, and Tunisia and what he got up to in all those places would keep us in talks for a year so we didn't really touch on that. Baker was there to talk about Crowley's time in London - the 1930s.

Psychogeographically speaking, different parts of London had different nuances for Crowley and at one point he found himself living in what was known as Bedsitland (now near where Paddington station is) - an unruly area of poverty and vice. He also enjoyed the faded gentility and sexually ambiguous areas of Notting Hill, Bayswater, and Pimlico.

Despite being bankrupt ("I am what St Francis of Assisi calls fucked on the financial front" - AC), Crowley still tried to live like a gentleman and he still continued relationships with various 'scarlet women'. Soho and Hyde Park were important for Crowley as he enjoyed the 'hunt' for prostitutes. In his diaries, he'd write about these sex workers and particularly enthuse about the 'fat' and 'ugly' ones. One 'coloured girl' isn't even afforded the dignity of a name.

Railway stations, too, were good spots to hang out because there were both lots of prostitution and a transient population Crowley enjoyed the cosmic gloom in stucco squares near Victoria station and believed the now rather bland Shakespeare pub nearby was an important centre for sex magick. Although he was clear to point out that he was not into tantric sex and that he wanted real world change, not just a change of consciousness.

Not sure how his lifestyle was really affecting that but he seemed to be, mostly, enjoying himself. He'd hang out in the 'pleasure zone' area between The Strand and Piccadilly Circus where he became a regular at both the Cafe Royal and Oddomino's. He'd drink in The French House and Dog & Duck pubs in Soho and he'd drink a lot too.

Three triple absinthes before Burgundy, brandy, and some snails at L'Escargot. He seemed to enjoy his food as much as his booze and almost as much as sex. He was an early adopter of curry (then very rare in Britain) and he made his own spiced lentil and lobster (with ice!) version as well as another that contained chicken, chutney, almonds, and bamboo pickle. Mexican food too. Apparently 666 used to love a nice chili con carne.

What he was less impressed by was the first Nazi bombs to fall on London during World War II ("the entertainment value of these raids is rather low" - AC) although he did offer his services to the military in the fight against Nazi Germany. Well into his sixties, it's perhaps no surprise he was declined and by 1947 he'd moved to, and died, in Hastings.

In a roughly forty-five minute talk I'd learned a reasonable amount about Crowley and, perhaps, even more about the London of the 1930s (I've not even included the bits about Christopher Isherwood, the Whore of Babylon, Constance Lambert, Peter Warlock, and Anthony Powell's novel Casanova's Chinese Restaurant). For which I thank both the London Fortean Society (nice to catch up with Dewi, Scott, David, Tim et al) and Philip Baker.

On the way to the pub I'd heard that Sajid Javid, Rishi Sunak, and Bim Afolami had all resigned from Boris Johnson's rotten, cruel, corrupt, and criminal government setting in place a chain of events that would see him insincerely and without an ounce of humility announce his retirement in less than forty-eight hours. I wondered if Aleister Crowley would have put this down to the power of magickal thinking and then decided - nope. He'd probably be too busy soliciting women in train stations, glugging back absinthe, and putting ice on his curry.

Minefields:Sherwood.

"What else is there to do round here but remember?" - Fred Rowley

There are no coal mines left in Nottinghamshire these days but, if Sherwood (BBC1/iPlayer) is to be believed - and much of it does feel very believable, the former pit villages of that county contain more than enough metaphorical minefields to create both palpable tension and serious danger for those that still live there.

While Sherwood (written by James Graham, directed by Lewis Arnold and Ben A. Williams) is, on the face of it, a fairly standard police drama/murder hunt, it is also, quite clearly, a portrait of a village that, somewhere along the line, lost its identity. Of a people abandoned, or used as pawns, by a political class that have no genuine interest in their well-being.

It's a masterclass in peeling back the COAL NOT DOLE stickers to show the bruised body of a once proud community and it tackles, over its six hour length, themes as important as family, loss, betrayal, guilt, work, grief (specifically in its unexplored form), and toxic male pride. It shows how a place can carry its scars for years, decades even, and how, given adequate provocation, those scars can still tear open and bleed.

Vintage footage of the miner's strike, Arthur Scargill, Margaret Thatcher (alongside some heavily redacted print) show where this all started but Sherwood refuses to be either schematic or doctrinaire and boldly tells the story from all sides. Which means there's a lot of characters to get to know. That starts off a tiny bit confusing but ends up working brilliantly to the show's benefit.

Gary (Alun Armstrong) and Julie Jackson (Lesley Manville) live on a pleasant enough terrace. They've got their grandkids, Cinderella (Safia Oakley-Green) and Noah (Lance O'Reilly-Chapman) staying with them and Gary, a proud man who joined the strike and has never been able to forgive those who didn't, enjoys the odd pint of 'mix' before returning to his adoring, and happy, family.

 

 

Julie doesn't get on with her sister Cathy (Claire Rushbrook) despite her only living down the road with husband Fred Rowley (Kevin Doyle), a miner who stayed in work during the strike - much to Gary's chagrin, and Fred's errant son Scott (Adam Hugill) who is due to be sent to prison for benefit fraud.

It's safe to say the Rowley's home life is less happy than the Jacksons. The Fishers are another lot who, despite their nice house and large garden, seem to have a few problems. Father Andy (Adeel Akhtar) has recently lost his wife and feels he is losing his grown up son Neel (Bally Gill) to Neel's new wife Sarah (Joanne Froggatt).

Sarah is a local Conservative councillor, one of Boris Johnson's proud - and unethical - 'Red Wall' intake. Andy is a Labour man through and through and he's also something of a nerd. He not only works as a train driver, it seems that trains are pretty much his sole topic of conversation and he struggles in almost all social interactions.

Despite this, he appears to be a kind man - if one lacking in self-awareness. Then there's the Sparrow family. There's something of the Snells from Ozark about them. They're painted as wrong 'uns from the get go. Father Mickey (Philip Jackson) and mother Daphne (Lorraine Ashbourne) run an archery and axe throwing business, and eldest son Rory (Perry Fitzpatrick) drives taxis but it's quite clear that most of their earnings are made illegally.

To further muddy the waters, the Sparrow's youngest son Ronan (Bill Jones) has started dating Cinderella Jackson. Then, halfway through the first episode, one of the chief protagonists is murdered - by an unseen man with a bow and arrow. That sets in motion a series of events that will reopen old wounds, reanimate restive enmities, and threaten people's marriages, livelihoods, and even lives.

DCI Ian St Clair (David Morrissey), a local copper, is called in to investigate but St Clair, despite being something of a straight arrow (pun half-intended), receiving a special commendation, and living in a nice big house with his wife Helen (Clare Holman) has his own demons to deal with. The fact him and Clare have not had children seems to be a sore point and there's a brother who St Clair doesn't want to talk about.

His team, DS Cleaver (Terence Maynard) and DI Taylor (Andrea Lowe), are soon joined by a Met officer whom St Clair has history with. DI Kevin Salisbury (Robert Glenister) is more maverick than St Clair and he's been in Notts before - during the mining strike. Salisbury's going through a tough divorce, living with his son, and is in financial difficulty.

He's also in trouble for assaulting another (racist) police officer. The memories of a youthful affair that haunt Salisbury, and what he gave up for love, become key to untangling some of the mysteries of the past and that is done with no little expertise. It's a gripping watch and as soon as one episode ends you find yourself firing up the next one immediately.

Sherwood does a good job of showing the prosaic side of life in Britain:- there are people drinking in dingy pubs and clubs, sitting at home watching Antiques Roadshow, car radios and jukeboxes blast out Nik Kershaw and Franz Ferdinand and there's the occasional joke about old people making references to things young people don't know about. Trevor Francis for example. Or Rod Hull and Emu.

But fizzing away beneath this ordinariness (and regional specificism - people say "daft apeth" and "fuck this for a game of soldiers") there is rampant suspicion (often of the police and definitely of the Met - but sometimes simply of one's neighbours), there's themes of hacking and 'spy cops', there's a character who goes on a Raoul Moat style odyssey, and there's even a bit of a Romeo and Juliet thing going on with Ronan and Cinderella.

At times, the show hews towards Scandinavian style television like Mikael Marcimain's The Hunt For A Killer or Tobias Lindholm's The Investigation in that it focuses on police numbers, time restraints, and pure logistics. When senior officers ask St Clair not to pursue a particular avenue of investigation you are reminded of Line of Duty. With several cast members appearing in both shows, it's not the first time.

But, at all times, you are carried along by the story and you're never quite sure what direction it will take. There is a bizarre, funny yet awkward, speech at a wedding reception and then an even more uncomfortable display of generational differences that results in a very embarrassing bluetooth wanking incident, there are great cameos from Sean Gilder as former 'scab' Dean Simmons and Nadine Marshall as Jenny Harris - a woman from Salisbury's past, but there is also a genuinely chilling scene where a character's true identity is revealed to us.

There are fantastic performances all round (praise specifically to the likes of Akhtar, Oakley-Green, Glenister and, most of all, to Manville and Rushbrook who provide the beating heart of the drama) and these all help in creating what is far more than a simple whodunnit police drama. Sherwood is that but it is also an exquisitely rendered paean to lost youth and to lost opportunity.

In the facial expressions of the younger characters we see the confusion as to why so many in their community, in their country, carry so many historical prejudices with them. There is a deep and troubling sadness at the heart of Sherwood, at the heart of Britain, that as I grow older I lose hope of ever seeing lifted. We are, it seems, doomed to fight the same old battles over and over again. If Sherwood does nothing else, it should make us question just how healthy that is.