Can You Tell What It Is Yet?:Rolf Harris:Hiding In Plain Sight.

Like all British people of my generation, Rolf Harris was everywhere when I was growing up. Rolf's Cartoon Club, public information films about swimming, singing Jake The Peg (with his extra leg) and Two Little Boys, playing wobble boards, Stylophones, and didgeridoos. I saw him perform at Basingstoke carnival in the mid-eighties. It was an event for children but he made a joke about a Tasmanian killing his wife in a bath of acid.

As I became an adult he was still around. Painting the Queen's portrait, presenting Animal Hospital, and enjoying some kind of ironic revival that got him booked at Glastonbury. My dad appeared in a photo with him in a local paper when Harris turned up to open a branch of Staples in Reading. Later on, I'd top that by meeting Harris at WoMaD and posing for a selfie with him. That was AFTER a friend of mine who'd attended Keele University had told me what, in retrospect, was quite a disturbing story about him.

Harris was at the peak of his ironic revival (it was the time that student union bars were changing their names from Nelson Mandela to Keith Chegwin or the like) and had been booked to play an SU event. He'd been asked if there was anything he needed. Meaning tea, coffee, beer, or sandwiches. Harris requested the girl with the biggest tits be brought back stage for him. A girl (breast size unrecorded) was procured for Harris and it is believed he had sex with her.

She would have been of legal age and also been willing so that wasn't a crime. But it was, in the words of Phillip Schofield, "unwise but not illegal". I can see now that it was a complete abuse of his power and fame but as it turned out it was far from the worst thing Rolf Harris ever did. Rolf Harris:Hiding In Plain Sight (ITVX) looks at the scandals that came out and the man behind the scandals but, crucially, it also gives voice to some of Harris's victims. The fact it aired during the week of his death last month was an irony - but not a cruel one.

The show begins with Harris appearing on Jim'll Fix It (shudder, just missing Gary Glitter to complete the ultimate triumvirate) where a young girl is left in his "capable hands" as he hums away to himself while doing one of his paintings. Harris is described as creative, talented, kind, and safe. A man who touched millions of hearts. But it wasn't just hearts he was touching.

He first became a star in the late sixties and soon became one of the most famous people in the country, with due respect to Clive James and Germaine Greer, certainly the most famous Australian in the UK. There he is singing Music To Watch Girls By with a dance troupe, doing Jake The Peg, competing in Star Games. Everybody's "favourite uncle". A respectable man. A loving husband to Alwen and a devoted father to Bindi.

Karen Gardner was sixteen, appearing on Star Games, when she became one of Harris's victims. Older than a lot of his victims but still much younger than Harris who at forty-eight was ten years older than her dad. Gardner described Harris as being lovely for the first couple of hours they were together. Before he described her as "irresistible" and assaulted her three times in thirty-five minutes.

In plain sight of others. Gardner eventually told him to "fuck off". Others felt less able to do so. Soon we see Harris making a video called Kids Can Say No complete with a jaunty little ditty with the same title. He even flies off to Australia to take part in an international conference on prevention of child abuse.

The year was 1985 and make up artist Suzi Dent, 23, talks about being molested by Harris multiple times while he was attending that conference. Again in plain sight. Not one man in the room stood up for Dent. Harris had been given a green light to do whatever he wanted to whoever he wanted.

Mark Lawson, one of the talking heads on the show along with Chris "Bear" Brosnan who was in Harris's band and once lived in his large Thames side house, talks about how there were huge numbers of rumours about Savile but virtually nothing about "cuddly and safe" Harris.

In 1994, Animal Hospital, which ran for over a decade and attracted over eleven million viewers, helped Harris become an even more trusted and loved figure. He came across as compassionate as he held old ladies hands as Tiddles was put down or Rover had a thorn pulled out of his paw.

Then came the ironic phase of his career. (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction on a wobble board, Glastonbury, and THAT Keele incident. At home he'd kiss other women (regardless of whether or not they wanted to be kissed) in full view of Alwen and he'd make jokes to band mates like Bear about "fucking" fourteen year old school girls.

He was more brazen than ever but he really crossed the line when he started acting inappropriately towards Bindi's best friend, a thirteen year old girl referred to during this programme as Victim A. With her full permission her story is told by her psychotherapist Chip Somers.

The abuse she suffered, for FIFTEEN years, at the hands of Harris led her to have serious issues with alcohol. Harris went from touching her knee to touching her thigh to "a very overt sexual insertion into her vagina of a finger". He didn't stop there but we'd heard enough. It's worth repeating that this continued, in both her home and in the Harris family home, for FIFTEEN years.

Harris told Victim A it was their "little secret". The trauma thrived in the darkness and Harris made sure the lights never came on. In 2005, Harris again visited Australia and appeared on a television show called Enough Rope. On it he opened up about his father's death, about not telling his mother he loved her until it was almost too late, and he broke down in tears as he spoke about how he'd been an absent husband and an absent father.

What would have been taken at the time as admirable and courageous honesty and regret now looks like Harris trying to control the narrative. The fact that straight after the show he groped the producer Alison Jacoby suggests he wasn't feeling quite as remorseful as he had pretended to be in front of the cameras.

Back in the UK, he was given a CBE, a BAFTA fellowship (applauded by a room full of celebs), and he painted the Queen's portrait. National treasure status was assured - if it hadn't been already. His victims had to watch him constantly on television being treated almost as if he was a living saint. He was "lauded and loved". It was too much for some. One victim talks of turning off their television as soon as he appeared on it.

As an aside at one point he's interviewed by the loathsome hacker of dead children's phones Piers Morgan. Morgan says to Harris:- "you were once voted the world's most famous painter. Beating Rembrandt and Constable". I don't know how to break this to you Morgan you thick cunt but Rembrandt died in the 17th century and Constable in the 19th century. At least do some basic research.

The second of the two episodes focuses, quite rightly, on the victims and their stories as well as Harris's crimes coming to light. When Jimmy Savile died in 2011 he was lauded and his funeral was virtually a state event. In the summer of 2012, Harris played the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II outside Buckingham Palace. It was his last big gig.

Later that year the Savile allegations, that had existed for decades, got very very real. Operation Yewtree was launched and it soon became apparent that Savile was not the only paedophile/sexual abuser who'd been using their public profile to hide behind. Stuart Hall (famous for It's A Knockout), Max Clifford (famous for being a complete wanker), and the already convicted Gary Glitter were the big names that came out first. They were all arrested. In the case of Glitter, re-arrested.

Detectives working on Yewtree interviewed Harris, by this point eighty-two years old, but at first his name was not made public. He spent a huge amount of money on lawyers so that his name was not revealed and, at first, it worked. Detectives who worked the case describe Harris, at first, as being monosyllabic and "massively arrogant" but, quite bizarrely in the circumstances, singing a full rendition of Sun Arise to them in the interview room.

They talked to him about his music and about his career and that got him to open up. Victim A's story would be key to the case and Harris said he'd had a consensual sexual relationship with her but that it didn't start until she was eighteen. He claimed the relationship had ended badly and that now she was being malicious. That, people, is what we call victim blaming.

Many others came forward to report being abused by Harris over the years but Harris turned his trial into a performance. He boasted, played the wobble board in court (wtf?), denied all allegations, and presented himself as a wholesome family man. Supporters of Harris actually attended the hearings and all but cheered him on while his victims received abuse, often of a sexual nature, on social media.

But the jury, eventually, reached a verdict. Two of the jurors were in tears as the verdict was read out. Harris had been found guilty on all twelve charges of sexual assault and he was sent to prison. They weren't the last allegations or charges brought against him (though due to being unable to make a majority verdict he was not found guilty of later allegations).

In 2017, after three years in prison, he was released. Allegations continued to dog him throughout the last six years of his life but none of them stuck. Harris's career, though, was over and his reputation was damaged beyond repair. If Rolf Harris had died fifteen years ago there would have been an outpouring of grief and television programmes celebrating his legacy. When he died in 2023 there was nothing.

Jimmy Savile used to joke "my case comes up next Thursday". Harris had a catchphrase too. Not one of his most famous ones but he'd often turn to camera and say "I never touched her, your honour". But we now know beyond doubt that he did touch her. He touched many hers. Can you tell what he is yet?

Real To Real Cacophony:Guilt S2.

"A man like me .... needs some heavy fuel" - Max McCall

"You are still falling, Max. You've yet to land - and if you're looking for salvation you should aim a little lower" - Roy Lynch

The second series of Guilt (BBC Scotland/iPlayer, written by Neil Forsyth, directed by Patrick Harkins, and originally aired in October 2021) could easily have taken a different noun as its title. Revenge. Because the second series of Guilt is far more about revenge than it is about guilt. Luckily it's just as good as the first series. Well, nearly.

It begins two years after series one with Max McCall (Mark Bonnar) being released from a 'dispiriting' spell in prison sharing a cell with a 'lunatic'. It's not changed him much. He's still entitled, he's still selfish, and he still has barely controllable anger issues. He claims feelings of guilt, love, and happiness "don't touch the sides" and the heavy fuel he needs is fear.

He'll get plenty of it. Roy Lynch (Stuart Bowman replacing Bill Paterson in the role, in football parlance that'd be called a like for like substitution) has completely taken over Max's business and when Max visits Roy to ask for help, Roy tells him he's already helped him by allowing him "to continue to breath the rich air of Edinburgh".

Roy, for his part, remains as threatening and quietly psychotic ever, even if he does confess a love for the western films of John Ford and Howard Hawks - "men that knew their way around a story". Max, on the other hand moves into brother Jake's (Jamie Sives) flat, Jake having moved to America, before asking the man he once sacked, Kenny (Emun Elliott) if he can become a partner in Kenny's legal business in Leith.

A turn of the tables, for sure. But Max has been disbarred so can no longer practice law. Kenny gives Max a trial run as a painter and decorator but it's not long before Max has insinuated his way into the firm in a typically self-serving fashion.

Kenny's still off the pop and he's still attending AA meetings. At one of them he meets Yvonne (Rochelle Neil) and she invites him out for tea. He clearly likes her but he declines her offer because - for obvious reasons - AA tend to frown at such things. But the attraction is strong and eventually Kenny and Yvonne start seeing other romantically.

Unbeknownst to Kenny, at least initially, Yvonne works for the police and she works alongside bent copper Stevie Malone (Henry Pettigrew) who, coincidentally - either Guilt thrives on coincidence or Auld Reekie is tiny - has been assigned the case of a missing person, Adrian McKee (Robin Laing).

Adrian was a well to do cocaine addict whose wife Erin (Sara Vickers) was in the process of walking out on when he was shot in the head and killed. Adrian had turned up at their large house, high as a kite, with £100,000 in a kit bag. It's not clear where the money came from but it seems highly likely somebody will want it back. Hence Adrian's murder.

With Erin looking likely to suffer the same fate, she shoots the murderer to protect herself. In a panic, she calls her long estranged father for the first time in years. Erin and her father concoct a plan to cover up what happened to the two dead bodies. Erin's father seems very skilled in this area and that's because he is .... Roy Lynch.

Which, of course, brings Max's story and Erin's story together nicely. But in what way and how much trouble will that cause? A lot of trouble, of course. The plot unravels, ties itself up in knots, and then unravels again multiple times. It can sometimes get a bit convoluted. The amount of double crossing that goes on can be exhilarating but it can also be confusing.

It takes in money laundering, property development, historical acts of murder, spaghetti hoops, shell companies, tracking devices, Irn Bru, You've Been Framed, and West Highland terriers but mostly it takes in anger, redemption, and revenge. If very little actual guilt.

All set to another great soundtrack which features The Clash, Skids, Cigarettes After Sex, Ghostpoet, Fat White Family, LA Priest, Mud, Working Mens Club, Wolves by Phosphorescent (sounds very much like Bonnie "Prince" Billy), F-Oldin' Money by The Fall, Crimson & Clover by Tommy James and the Shondells, and Father John Misty's cover of Leonard Cohen's Anthem.

The music works in service to the drama rather than the other way round and though there are a lot of new characters they are introduced gradually so the mystery of who is who only occurs when the makers of Guilt want it too. We meet Erin's mum, Maggie (Phyllis Logan), who's in an "assisted living" facility and we meet Teddy McLean (Greg McHugh), a man who talks about Papillon a lot, and asks Max and Kenny to help him look for his lost brother. Teddy got to know Max in prison and you can't help thinking he's the very lunatic Max had earlier spoken of.

We also meet Sandy (Ian Pirie). A priest, known as Leith's Billy Graham, who helped Kenny during one of his many rock bottoms. Then there's Jackie (Sandy McDade), a contact of Max's whom he meets on park benches and seems to have her own plans for Roy Lynch. All of these people, as with everyone in Guilt, may or may not be exactly who they first appear to be.

There's plenty of humour. When Max is told by Sandy he's wearing a cheap suit he points out it's not cheap only for Sandy to counter by telling him "it looks cheap on you, son". There's a very funny line about lawyers (much better than those round robin emails of twenty years ago with titles like 20 Great Lawyer Jokes) and there's an amusing anecdote about, of all things, My Boy Lollipop.

Elsewhere, Guilt can be moving. Yvonne's speech to her AA circle is touching, enlightening, and articulate and the scenes between Kenny and Yvonne as they learn to live and love without the crutch of booze are sweet and tender. Then there's Max, as before the heart of the drama, played by Bonnar almost like a chameleon looking out for prey. Edgy, darting eyes, nervous energy to spare. It's hard to work out if Bonnar is an absolute maestro or a total ham.

Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say he's the right man for the right job when it comes to Guilt. I enjoyed the first series, I enjoyed the second series so you can probably guess I'll be watching the third, and so far final, series soon.

Don't Be A Sinner, Be A Winner:Chris Ofili @ Victoria Miro.

"Don't be a sinner, be a winner" - Phil Howard

 

The Swing (2020-2023)

In the early noughties, for a well over a decade, a youngish man by the name of Phil Howard would stand, sometimes with a megaphone, in Oxford Circus at lunchtime imploring the crowds streaming into the tube station, H&M, and Niketown to "forget about vanity and check out Christianity" and, most famously of all, imploring them "don't be a sinner, be a winner".

It's not recorded how many people he converted (I'd estimate the number to be small, possibly non-existent). The artist Chris Ofili takes a more nuanced approach to pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth in his new show, titled The Seven Deadly Sins, hosted by Victoria Miro in their expansive Wharf Road gallery.

 

The Great Beauty (2020-2023)

 

To be honest, if the show wasn't called The Seven Deadly Sins you wouldn't know it was about sin at all. You'd probably just think that they're rather beautiful oil paintings somewhat reminiscent of artists like Pierre Bonnard or Maurice de Vlaminck. They're riots of colour - but then everything Ofili does is a riot of colour. Even when he used to use elephant turds in his work. Come to think of it, I miss the elephant turds.

 

The titles don't even really give clues to the sinful subject matter. I'd assumed The Swing to be named in tribute to Jean-Honore Fragonard's iconic Rococo painting, I'd guessed The Great Beauty got its name from Paolo Sorrentino's wonderful 2013 film, and The Harvesters sounds like something Van Gogh may have called one of his paintings. You know, like The Potato Eaters.

 

The Fountain (2017-2023)

 

The Crowning (2021-2023)

 

The Fall From Grace does have biblical overtones but even then it sounds like the sort of title William Blake may have used and Blake very much created his own mythology. Thinking about it there's something of the William Blake in these paintings. Ofili has imagined, defined, and designed an alternative world, one that looks a bit like ours but one that also looks nothing like ours.

 

He's imagined a heaven, or perhaps a place of purgatory. An Eden of wild birds worthy of John James Audobon, strange plants and flowers that sometimes defy gravity, crepuscular rays falling from above, radiant stars, liminal beings dancing at the edge of time and space, and floating angelic beings. You could sit and look at these paintings for a long time and continually see different things in them.

 

The Fall From Grace (2019-2023)

 

The Pink Waterfall (2019-2023)

 

Ofili himself certainly spent time with them. The entire project took him six years and he invited writers like Marlon James and artists like Lynette Yiadom-Boakye to write about the feelings the works invoked in them. James took an interesting approach:- "sometimes I think sin is merely a good thing taken too far" before reassessing the concept of one particular sin through a racial lens:- "sloth is relaxation if black people relaxed like white people".

Yiadom-Boakye was a little more traditionalist in her approach, "sin can fill your mouth and belly and loins but not your heart", but more interesting still was Attilah Springer's idea that "sin is something that powerful people do for which powerless people have to pay the price" and Hilton Als:- "in real life our sins are often as unclear as our nicer motivations; often they're jumbled together, a ball of spores that shoot off in all directions whenever another human, or life event, enters our consciousness and heart".

You can, like James, Yiadom-Boakye, Spinger, and Als consider the nature of sin when you take in Ofili's free show or you can, as I did, simply enjoy his very beautiful paintings. Best of all you could do both. Don't be too proud about it though, don't buy them and hoard them, don't get angry about it, don't feel jealous of Ofili's talent, don't have rude thoughts about the people in the paintings, don't eat too much afterwards, and don't, whatever you do, be lazy. Non-existent God wouldn't like it.

 

The Harvesters (2019-2023)

It's A Mystery.

"It's a mystery, it's a mystery, I'm still searching for a clue. It's a mystery to me" - It's A Mystery, Toyah

Last night's London Fortean Society talk (at The Bell in Whitechapel) was something of a mystery for me before I attended (there wasn't much information on the website) and it was still a mystery to me after I'd attended it. I reckon that even if I read speaker Neil Nixon's book 'Why Mystery Matters' (co-written with E K Knight and also the name of last night's talk) the whole thing would still be a mystery.

That's not to say it was a bad talk. It wasn't. It was very good. It just had a very loose narrative. There was a lot of digression, lots of going off on tangents. Discursion came very easily to Neil Nixon. The basic premise, that - in recent years and definitely since the Internet started to take over our lives - we have underrated the role of mystery in our lives, seemed sound to me but I'm not totally sure how that related to the idea that Elvis Presley was generated by AI in the future and sent back in time to entertain us or how we will soon be sending credit card sized spaceships into outer space to search for extra terrestrials really fitted in with it.

Nixon teaches creative writing and he spoke about that point when his students reach the end of the course, when they've become really good writers, and how that is the point when the mystery kicks in. It's not a mystery to do with UFOs, Bigfoot, or conspiracy theories (though Nixon certainly had things to say on all those subjects) but it's a mystery to do with our own lives.

We don't know our future, we can't know our future, so we need to try and make sense of this chaotic world and our place in it. So we ask ourselves questions, we use dialectic methods, to try and find a role for ourselves. This involves plunging ourselves into a mystery of sorts. Anyone who thinks they know the answer to everything (something which is impossible) is closing down the possibility of mystery in their life.

The difference between a scientist and a conspiracy theorist is that scientists are asked questions, asked to solve problems, and they do their best to answer those questions and solve those problems as best they can while accepting that in the future people may find better answers and solutions. A conspiracy theorist, and Nixon cited Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, will basically say they have the answer so we no longer need to talk about it anymore. I'm right. You're wrong. End of.

Nixon compared it to bolting the doors of the upstairs room of The Bell we were all sat in closed until everyone in there agreed he was right. I was with him here but I wasn't totally sure I was when he spoke about watching his beloved Carlisle Utd. One day he was watching them play against Barnet and it was a rare occasion because his father and his eldest son had joined him.

Their star player picked the ball up near the centre circle, ran it through the Barnet defence and slipped it past the keeper to score. Nixon claimed he knew as soon as the guy got the ball he'd score and felt that was because he was with his dad and son. But, as he pointed out, Carlisle were top of the league, this player was on fire at the time, and Nixon (who writes about football - as well as music and mystery) knows a bit about the game.

I think he knew it was likely he'd score. When he told this anecdote I turned to my friend Dewi and we pulled faces at each other as if to say "nah, mate - not having that one". It reminded me of some of Gary Lachman's less impressive claims when he spoke for the LFS in April 2022.

Elsewhere, Nixon managed to include references to such a disaparate cast of people as Studs Terkel, Charles Fort (always a popular choice of the London Fortean Society), Boris Johnson (a far less popular choice and the only mystery about him is how one person can be such a total and utter cunt), and Matthieu Ricard - the happiest man in the world, and when he told a story about watching a team of morbidly obese footballers beat a team of much slimmer footballers by virtue of their reading of their game he claimed that he'd never heard of that happening before. I couldn't help reminding him of Jan Molby.

It was a confusing, sprawling, and - yes - mysterious talk but it was an enjoyable one and Neil Nixon was a very good speaker who was generous with his time and even joined us downstairs in the pub for a pint afterwards. I'm glad I went. You're probably not glad you bothered to read this.

Thanks to Dewi, Michael, Tim, Jackie, and Paula for keeping me company last night, thanks to David and the London Fortean Society for putting this event, and thanks, most of all, to Neil Nixon. It's Jeremy Harte next month. That'll be even harder to get a blog out of.

Read It In Books:Downriver.

In Iain Sinclair's 1991 novel Downriver, Henry Milditch and his wife Sabella's house overlooks Victoria Park. Set during the time of the Wapping riots and when the narrator was reading lots of De Quincey, Milditch "haunted the dead zones of the city looking for connections that only he could activate", his "survival depended on his anonymity", he dabbled in property, sold cold fish, and dealt in books, and he persuades our narrator, presumably Iain Sinclair himself, to join him on a train from Fenchurch Street to Tilbury. His own motives, he admits, "opaque and spiritually unsound". 

Regarding plot, that's as far as I got with Downriver. For the most part I had no idea whatsoever what was going on. I recognised many of the names mentions. Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Zurbaran, Francis Bacon,William Burroughs, William Blake, Canaletto, Turner, Rimbaud, Anthony Gormley, Harold Wilson, T.S.Eliot,  Clement Attlee, Joseph Conrad, Paul Klee, Ken Loach, Lindsay Anderson, John Minton, Julie Christie, Terence Stamp, Chips Channon, Mantegna, Peter Ackroyd, Gilbert and George, Mack Sennet, Peggy Ashcroft, Waldemar Januszczak, the Elephant Man, Anselm Kiefer, and Captain Kidd. 

But I'm not really sure what they had to do with Milditch and Sinclair's ever more obscure vision. Other things I simply didn't understand at all:-  Blodeuwedd's Invitation to Gronw Pebyr, Gelert the Faithful, hermetic sexuality, Tupperware Buddhism, Although a digression into the world of the New Apocalyptic poet Nicholas Moore and his bath full of "lumber and detritus" proved reasonably interesting.

Often it's hard to understand who the characters are and what they represent. Edith Cadiz, the actor Roland Bowman who owned Oscar Wilde's old fireplace, William Gull the masonic Magus, and what of the nineteen year old computer operator Paul Green who simply spontaneously burst into flames while walking through De Beauvoir Town?

The book worked best as some sort of esoteric travelogue of a London, and the surrounding areas, that has changed much, and yet not changed at all, in the last three decades. Canvey Island is described as "a gulag of sinking caravans, overlooked by decommissioned storage tanks", Tilbury as a place so full of minicab offices that its "chief industry" is "providing the means to escape from" itself. A place where blue collar mansions take in panoramic views of Essex's most expansive rubbish dumps - usually full of broken washing machines (Hoover, Bosch, Zanussi, Hotpoint) - and where the legions of Claudius once arrived from the Kentish shores to the south.

Ferries head back across the Thames to the "decayed Regency splendour" of Gravesend. Further upstream where the Princess Alice went down in 1878 - over six hundred people lost their lives - pensioned trading hulks rot in the docks, their days of international travel gone forever, and cranes are culled for scrap. Bombed huts, dereliction, "bald stone flags", the loss of Empire is keenly felt in these areas.

Rotherhithe looks "foreign, and somewhat estranged from itself", places in Wapping (Tobacco Dock, Sir Thomas More Court, Anchorage) "plated nostalgia" and sold shares in "our maritime history". North Woolwich is a "graveyard of engines", "a Museum of Steam", or a "tamed mirror-version that would deny its own madness".

Spitalfields "is a zone of 'disappearances', mysteries, conflicts, and 'baroque realism'". It meant "gay vicars swinging incense" and "New Georgians promoting wallpaper catalogues", "bulldozers, noise, dust; snarling angry machines" with a "hair gelled noddy in a pin-stripe suit at the controls", "Aztec fantasies of glass and steel lifting in a self-reflecting glitter of irony from the ruins". Most of all it "meant lunches". The Hawksmoor church there is a "magnificent threat", its staircase an "inaccessible ladder in time".

Interestingly, Hoxton, back then, is described as "dead ground:botched social experiments, beyond the wildest fantasies of developers" and Leyton is "complacent ruralist calm" though its High Street is "an embolic flutter of muddied Transits, resprayed Cortinas, and an angry boil of citizens scouting for the first rumours of the bus pack". Stratford "stagnant pools, car dumps, and portakabins".

The area around Devons Road DLR station was, to Ackroyd then, "the final killing fields of the welfare state, bleak towers, mud gash, red cliffs of hospital charity", Silvertown "makes little attempt to live up the glory of its name" where "inspissated droplets fall without fear or favour, like a sleet of poisoned nostalgia". and, of course, the costive Thames itself, can be seen "flaunting the posthumous brilliance of its history"

Other interesting turns of phrase includes a person who squeaks "like a cheeky cartoon mouse being dubbed by a seventy year old actor who has not yet been told the polyps in his sinuses are malignant", there are "weasel-twitching Goebbels clones who breakfasted on razor blades and seven week embryos" and "bum faced nonentities in Savile Row" as well as a man whose teeth "dazzled like Mexican bone dice".

But did I understand what was going on in the book? Not really but it still made, initially, for a pleasant and interesting, if often challenging, read - as long as I broke it up into bite sized morsels. Which I did. I dipped in and out as if going on short daily walks to see how things change with the weather, with ageing, and with the passing of time in general.

Although, as with a long walk, eventually I tired of it. About halfway into the book I found it hard to motivate myself to even pick it up and read a few pages. I'll think I'll leave Iain Sinclair alone for a while now and read something different.

Kakistocracy XLV:We're Going On A Witch Hunt.

"Why not go the full way, put Boris in the stocks and provide rotten food to throw at him. Move him around the marginals so the country could share in the humiliation" - James Duddridge

Great suggestion, James. To which I can only add "it'd be a start". The strange thing, however, is that James Duddridge, the outgoing Conservative MP for Rochford and Southend East, is one of Johnson's (let's never call him Boris again) key supporters and he actually said this in support of our lying and criminal toerag former PM. If that's what his supporters have to say about him, imagine how (most of) the rest of us feel.

Johnson, since I last wrote, has been found guilty of not just having parties during lockdown but knowingly misleading the house and would probably have been forced to either resign or face a by-election if he didn't stand down. Don't worry about him though. He's making lots of money, millions of pounds already since leaving number ten and now he's been given a Daily Mail column or, as News Thump put it - rather succinctly and accurately - "arsehole to write bollocks in shitrag".

Has Johnson been apologetic? Has he shown remorse or even a basic understanding of what he did was wrong? No, of course he fucking hasn't. Him and his supporters have attacked the Privileges Committee that they agreed to because they didn't like their 109 (ONE HUNDRED AND NINE) pages of findings about Johnson's terrible behaviour.

The committee was headed by Labour's Harriet Harman so, obviously, that's one of the angles of attack they took. But the committee of seven (which also featured the SNP's Allan Dorans and Labour's Yvonne Fovargue) had a majority of Tories. The four being Bernard Jenkin, Alberto Costa, Charles Walker, and Andy Carter so to accuse it of leading a "witch hunt" seems a bit rich.

One of the main Johnson supporters accusing it of being a witch hunt is Nadine Dorries. The woman who some years ago worried about tidal wave of immigrants from Yugoslavia (a country that ceased to exist in 1992) 'coming over here' has, over the years, claimed the Telegraph's investigation into MP's expenses was a witch hunt and she called the investigation into her appearance on I'm A Celebrity when she was supposed to be serving as an MP (and being paid for doing so) a witch hunt.

Perhaps, when you're an actual fucking witch, everything starts to look like a witch hunt. In the shitrag Daily Mail, Dorries wrote about the "sinister forces" that stopped her, "a girl born into poverty in Liverpool" from reaching the House of Lords. The level of entitlement is completely insane. The only reason she got anywhere near the House of Lords is because she's spent the last few years defending the indefensible behaviour of Boris Johnson. Ultimately, as he does to everyone, he fucked her over - and not in the way she wanted him to.

Dorries is an embarrassment to British politics. She loudly announced her resignation but, of course, she hasn't actually resigned yet. She's waiting for the time it will cause maximum damage. Not just to Rishi Sunak but to the Tories and, ultimately, to the country. She has only bothered voting in the House of Commons six times in the last years and has spoken once, constituents in Mid Bedfordshire say she never answers their letters or emails, never holds surgeries, and is never seen in the area.

Instead she prefers to stay in her country retreat in the Cotswolds where she does far more interviews with the media than she does actual work. It'll be a blessed relief when she finally leaves - hopefully forever - frontline politics. But, like Johnson, she will carp away from the sidelines for as long as she can, a thorn in the side for anyone who wants to use politics to do some good for the country.

Boris Johnson should never return as an MP, he most certainly shouldn't have an honours list (which includes many of those who partied while the rest of us couldn't even hold the hands of dying loved ones), and his name should have a black cross attached to it in history books forever as the man who poisoned British politics with his lies, corruption, and criminality.

But it's not just Johnson, it's those who supported him - and that includes our incumbent PM Rishi Sunak. There are several up coming by elections (including in Johnson's Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat). It is imperative, existentially imperative, that the Conservatives are not returned in any of these seats. It is vital that their vote share is utterly annihilated. They've done too much damage. They must not be allowed to do any more.

We Are All Guilty:Guilt S1.

"Nothing is more wretched than the mind of a man conscious of guilt" - Plautus

All of us, sociopaths excepted, feel guilty at times. We may feel guilty about relatively small things like forgetting a friend's birthday, not calling our parents enough, or being late for work. We may feel guilty about more important things like failing in relationships and work. A very small number of us will feel guilty because we have committed criminally transgressive actions.

In Guilt (BBC Scotland/iPlayer, written and created by Neil Forsyth and directed by Robert McKillop - originally aired back in October/November 2019) the action focuses far more on that more serious form of guilt. We begin with brothers Max (Mark Bonnar) and Jake (Jamie Sives) driving home from a wedding in Edinburgh. While they're arguing about the morality of heated car seats they hit a man who has wandered into the road and kill him.

They decide not to call the police but to cover it up. So they drag his body back into his house and prop it up in an armchair. In the house they discover a letter which informs them that they man they've just run over, Walter (Joe Donnelly), had terminal cancer.

Walter appears to live on his own but when Max and Jake drive away from the crime scene, the upstairs lights in Walter's house go off. It's the first sign that this will not be the end of this. Not least because Max seems to find it a lot easier to move on from what's happened from Jake.

They may be brothers but they're cut from very different cloth. There's not a lot of love lost between the two of them. Jake is a romantic at heart. A failed rock star, he lives alone above a chip shop, he runs a record shop in Leith, and he's one of those guys who likes to 'educate' women about music. A pain in the arse perhaps but a well meaning one. Max despairs of his "fuckwittery".

Max, though, is a different kind of fuckwit. He rants about them having a cash bar at a wedding, he plays golf, he's selfish, he's arrogant, he's greedy, and, of course, he's hugely successful (running a prestige law firm). He lives in a nice big house with his beautiful wife, Claire (Sian Brooke) who, it soon becomes apparent, is less happy with how things are going. 

Things become trickier still for Max and Jake when Jake reveals he accidentally left his wallet in Walter's house. He attends Walter's wake to retrieve it and there he meets Walter's niece, Angie (Ruth Bradley), who's come over from Chicago to mourn the uncle she barely knew. Jake and Angie bond over a shared love of Bowie and making lists, become friends, and then become lovers. She doesn't even seem to mind Jake's constant mansplaining.

It doesn't seem very wise of Jake and when Angie becomes concerned that Walter didn't have an autopsy/post-mortem and that he had severely bruised legs despite apparently dying from cancer things become even more desperate. Very quickly, everything seems set up to unravel spectacularly.

Which it does - but not in obvious ways. In Guilt, nobody ever tells the whole truth (maybe that's how life is), hardly anybody is who they seem to be, and people turn out to have links to others that you would never have suspected, and everyone, for some reason - product placement, uses a very dated looking Alcatel phone. It's quite a ridiculous premise but it's a very enjoyable watch.

New characters are gradually brought in. There's Kenny (Emun Elliott), a seriously alcoholic private investigator who cleans up and takes a bit too much interest in Walter's story, there's Sheila (Ellie Haddington), an old lady who was Walter's neighbour who seems to know something but doesn't say what, and there's Tina (Moyo Akande), a fitness instructor whose classes Claire attends and then befriends Claire before making a pass at her. What are Tina's intentions?

Soon we're in a world where lie is piled upon lie and deceit upon deceit. As the story unravels it takes in garden gnomes, condescending comments about Rod Stewart's oeuvre (Jake of course), unswerving loyalty to Hibernian FC, dummy cameras, prescription drugs, creative accounting, double crossing, blackmail (both emotional and financial), arson, and violence.

Max and Jake find themselves coming into contact with some very shady businessmen in the shape of Roy Lynch (Bill Paterson, an old hand at playing Scottish baddies) and Cameron Lovat (Noof Ousellam). One of their accomplices, Stevie Malone (Henry Pettigrew) works as a policeman. What's going on there? Is he a bent copper or is he carrying undercover police work?

What do you think? As we delve into this tale of sibling rivalry, loyalties tested to the point of destruction, sordid pasts, dimly lit bars, and an incredible number of twists and turns we find ourselves gripped by a tense, addictive, and often chilling (as Sheila, Haddington does chilling brilliantly) tale.

There's great supporting roles for Michael Nardone who plays Henry McKinnon, the man tasked with enacting Walter's will, Tom Urie as Sheila's son Gordie, and Anneika Rose as Stevie's police partner Nicola and there's an atmospheric and sometimes, intentionally, jarring score courtesy of Arthur Sharpe. The soundtrack seems to reflect Jake's record collection (all vinyl of course) and features Can, Steely Dan, The Rolling Stones, The Clash, and Darondo.

Both Sives and Bonnar are great in the two main roles. Sives has a forlorn look borne of a lifetime of disappointment but Bonnar's performance is a masterclass in edge, manipulation, and desperation. There's two more series of Guilt ready to go on the iPlayer as I type. I look forward to digging in. I won't feel guilty about that.