Summer Is Icumen In:The Legacy Of The Wicker Man.

"Sumer is Icumen in, loudly sing, cuckoo! Grows the seed and blows the mead and springs the wood anew, sing, cuckoo! Ewe bleats harshly after lamb, cows after calves make moo, bullock stamps and deer champs, now shrilly sing, cuckoo! Cuckoo, cuckoo, wild bird are you, be never still, cuckoo" - Summer Is Icumen In

Last year I wrote two blogs about 1973's The Wicker Man. One about the film itself (which I had recently watched again) and another about a small, but enjoyable, exhibition in Bloomsbury's Horse Hospital pertaining to the film. So when I saw that the London Fortean Society would be hosting a talk about the film, The Legacy of The Wicker Man - at The Bell in Whitechapel, there was no way I'd be missing that.

But what would there to be say about a film that has already been written about in such depth? Quite a lot as it turns out. The talk was excellent. Enjoyable, funny, entertaining, and enlightening and, on what was probably the hottest day of the year, it wasn't, as my friend Dewi had joked, like stepping into a fucking wicker man when we headed into the upstairs room of the pub. They had the aircon on though the aircon in The Bell seems not to have been used for about twenty years and soon developed a leak meaning it had to be turned off again. A couple of nice cold pints of lemonade kept me cool though.

Speaker David Bramwell, sporting a rather lovely shirt I must say, is an author and performer who has, since 2010, been playing the part of Lord Summerisle in the rather camp sounding Sing-Along-A-Wicker-Man (a subject we'd return to later) and claims to have watched the film over one hundred and fifty times which certainly makes him qualified to speak on the subject. Thankfully he was as funny as he was knowledgeable. The hour flew by.

Bramwell's almost obsessive interest in The Wicker Man started to take shape in 2003 during a holiday in Wales with a group of friends. They decided, for a laugh, to make a low budget super eight version of the film called The Weaker Man with Bramwell playing Edward Woodworm. Somehow, this film ended up being viewed by both Peter Strickland (director of Berberian Sound Studio) who liked it and even The Wicker Man's director Robin Hardy - who was confused by it.

Thirty years earlier, the idea of somebody making a spoof of The Wicker Man would have seemed highly unlikely. On its release, the response was so poor that Christopher Lee (Lord Summerisle in the film) offered to pay journalists to come out and review it. The popularity of the film grew as it became a cult classic in the eighties and nineties and now it is considered by many to be the Citizen Kane of horror films.

Bramwell ran us through of his favourite curios from the film. The penis topiary which features (very briefly) was actually filmed in the garden of Blowup star David Hemmings' house about three years before the rest of the film was made, Lindsay Kemp's (Alder MacGregor - the pub landlord) crap Scottish accent (all ochs, ayes, and wees) is down to the fact that Kemp was so drunk during the making of the film that he can't remember anything about it except for his audition, and there was a study of how Christopher Lee's hair gets wilder and wilder as the film goes on as well as the line that Bramwell considers the best of the entire film:- "animals are fine but their acceptability is limited".

But where did the original idea of The Wicker Man, of a wicker man, come from? Bramwell points to the Britannia Antica, a 1676 compendium of British curios which was replicated, and seen by screenwriter Anthony Shaffer, in George James Frazer's 1890 book The Golden Bough, a comparative study of mythology and religion. But it seems the idea dates back even further to Roman times. Between 58 and 49BC, Julius Caesar wrote a first hand account of the Gallic Wars, Commentarii de Bello Gallico, and some kind of crude wicker man features in that.

Caesar himself had been inspired by the earlier Greek historian and astronomer Posidonious who had written about ritual sacrifice among Celtic cultures. Either way it seems the idea of putting somebody in a giant wicker man and burning them to death has been a cultural idea for a very long time. Despite the sheer impracticality of ever being able to do it.

Of course, The Wicker Man itself has gone to inspire a lot of different things. From films (Midsommar) to music videos (Radiohead's Burn The Witch mixes up The Wicker Man with Trumpton though why Captain Flack wasn't dispatched with Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, and Grubb to put out the fire we'll never know) and from television shows (The League of Gentlemen's Edward and Tubbs) to cartoon strips like Viz's The Alan Whicker Man and, perhaps even better, Paul O'Connell's A Muppet Wicker Man.

A spoof in which Kermit plays Sergeant Howie sent to search for his missing nephew, Robin. Miss Piggy's in the Britt Ekland role as the landlord's daughter and Gonzo is a more than able Lord Summerisle. As Kermit burns to death in the stomach of a wicker man, one can only agree that "it's time to put on make up, it's time to light the lights".

So Sing-Along-A-Wicker-Man is far from the strangest, or least respectful, spoof. Bramwell and his friends, including Eliza Skelton (whose father Roy Skelton was not only the voice of the daleks on Dr Who but also provided the voices for Zippy and George on Rainbow), started the singalong sessions in a small restaurant in Brighton about fifteen years.

Initially, there'd be a crowd of about twenty-five people but that has since grown and they now attract upwards of three hundred and fifty Wicker Man fans to performances. They've played on bills with Buzzcocks and Back To The Planet (!) though they did receive a scathing review from Danny Leigh in The Guardian back in 2010 who, despite not having seen Sing-Along-A-Wicker-Man, wondered if its flippant approach would detract from the eerie menace of the film itself. As the review went on, however, Leigh seemed to convince himself he quite fancied going along.

The Wicker Man has that kind of power, the ability to change minds, to change things. Bramwell made a point about how the UK folk music scene in the fifties and sixties was incredibly austere. Nobody wore costumes, nobody created performances, everything was serious and authentic to the point where Bob Dylan was called Judas for plugging his guitar into an amplifier and Shirley and Dolly Collins were turned away from folk clubs for wearing pretty dresses and lipstick.

When he composed the soundtrack for the film, Paul Giovanni was very much not part of the British folk scene. He was a gay New Yorker on the cusp of his fortieth birthday and though he did his research, including a visit to Cecil Sharp House, and dived into tradition he bought something new to it. An irreverence that, prior to The Wicker Man, had perhaps only been seen in the folk scene with The Incredible String Band and, specifically, their brain frying, acid frazzled, album The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter. To my mind, one of the greatest albums ever recorded.

Some of the lyrics didn't leave much to the imagination either. In Gently Johnny:- "I put my hand all on her thigh. She says to me do you want to try? I put my hand all on her belly. She says to me do you want to fill me?" and towards the end of Willow's Song:- "how a maid can milk a bull and every stroke a bucketful". My word.

Songs from The Wicker Man were later covered by the likes of Doves, The Go! Team, King Creosote, and Gazelle Twin which just goes to show how much its cultural currency has risen. The film is often mentioned as part of an "unholy trinity of British folk horror" alongside Blood On Satan's Claw and The Witchfinder General but David Bramwell had some thoughts about that.

His contention was that The Witchfinder General is, ending aside, a pretty terrible film with far too much time devoted to Vincent Price riding around on a horse and that Blood On Satan's Claw is only marginally better. Neither of them holding a candle to The Wicker Man. Instead, the argument went, a new unholy trinity should be considered of The Wicker Man, Straw Dogs, and Penda's Fen. A rare film in which pagans are portrayed positively. Something Julian Cope picked Stewart Lee up on during an interview in which Cope made clear his unhappiness about cinematic negative portrayals of pagan lifestyles.

So, considering these negative portrayals, and it's worth remembering that the islanders in The Wicker Man are murderers, why do pagans (and druids) identify with The Wicker Man so much? When performing Sing-Along-A-Wicker-Man at Glastonbury in 2022, Bramwell took the chance to ask some?

He considered how the film contains a celebration of capitalism (Lord Summerisle, ultimately, is driven by commercial gain), it looks at women through what we would recognise now as 'the male gaze', and all of the sexual abandon the film celebrates is firmly heteronormative. At the same time, the film has, by modern standards, problematic issues regarding colonial narratives.

None of which, of course, ruins the film. Some of which, I'd argue, make it even more fascinating. But I'm neither a pagan nor a druid. They, according to Bramwell - like me, celebrate the complexity of the film. Christianity has suppressed and crushed paganism and druidism for two millennia in Britain and any pagan heritage, even fictional murderous heritage, is celebrated.

Blood sacrifice is not a real part of pagan culture but present day pagans, on the whole, seem able to overlook what is clearly fictional and celebrate the elements of the film that ring true with them. The ritual, the communal singing, and the respect for nature. Watching The Wicker Man can be a ritual, attending Sing-Along-A-Wicker-Man can be a ritual, going to the cinema can be a ritual, and, for me, attending the London Fortean Society can be a ritual.

A Q&A took in Wake In Fright, Equus, Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Matrix, George Lucas and Star Wars, Alfred Hitchock's Spellbound and Marnie, Amadeus, The Devils, Ben Wheatley, Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring, Leonard Cohen, the Greek gods and Dionysus and Apollo as well as a question about Donald Trump's similarity to Lord Summerisle. Both being charismatic capitalists with wild hair who force their own will on their slavish followers. Thanks to Jade, Dewi, Michael, Paula, and Tim for joining me, for David Barrett, the London Fortean Society, and The Bell for hosting, and thanks to David Bramwell for a really fun and interesting talk. Some things in their natural state have the most vivid colours.

Fleapit revisited:I Saw The TV Glow.

Remember how much your favourite TV shows used to mean to you when you were a kid? Especially, if you were a kid that didn't fit in. You could find solace and comfort in that half-hour or so per week, pre-streaming, when the show aired. Sometimes the show could feel more real than life itself. At least for some people.

Two such people are students Owen (Justice Smith, Ian Foreman-Young as his younger self) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine). In Jane Schoenbrun's new film, I Saw The TV Glow, they find themselves attracted to each other (platonically, Maddy's into girls, Owen's not into girls - or boys - just TV shows) when Maddy turns Owen on to her favourite programme, The Pink Opaque.

Which Owen isn't allowed to watch because his mum, Brenda (Danielle Deadwyler), says it's past his bedtime and his dad, Frank (Fred Durst, yes that one, don't worry, he doesn't do much actual acting), says it's "for girls". So Owen devises a cunning plan to kid his parents into thinking he's having a sleepover at a friends' place while actually watching The Pink Opaque with Maddy. Later she tapes episodes and passes them on to him. It is the nineties.

It must be said, however, that The Pink Opaque looks utter shit. The premise is that two young women, Isabel (Helena Howard) and Tara (Lindsey Jordan - who records as indie rock artist Snail Mail), are connected via a 'psychic plane' and must evade the capture of Mr Melancholy (Emma Portner, who plays a few other minor roles too) who sends various foes, killer clowns for example - plus an evil ice cream cone man that turns children into lollipops, out to fight them each week. Mr Melancholy's regularly thwarted plan is to trap them in the 'midnight realm' and force them to drink 'luna juice'. Though, to be fair to him, he does up his game as The Pink Opaque reaches season five.

Mr Melancholy himself is a gurning lunar buffoon. The Moon from The Mighty Boosh as if reimagined by David Lynch after ten bottles of cough mixture. It's hard to see what the obsession is for Maddy and Owen with The Pink Opaque but the obsession is most definitely there. While Owen is your everyday oddball, Maddy is a stronger brew. She's allowed to stay up as late as she likes but her stepdad (whom we never see) apparently beats her and she's desperate to escape the generic suburbia that her and Owen share.

Which, eventually, she does. She tries to persuade Owen to go with her but after careful consideration Owen decides he actually quite likes his life. So Maddy disappears. On the night she goes missing a burning television is found in her garden and the last ever episode of The Pink Opaque airs. Are the snow globes a clue? What about the Pink Opaque logo that looks like one of the ghosts from Pac-Man?

Eight years later, Owen is working at a movie theatre when he runs into Maddy. She's back but where has she been for the best part of a decade and why has she come back? They're the questions he has for her but she has questions for him and they're not quite so easy to answer? Maddy reveals what happened in those missing years and what she wants from Owen now (at a goth club on the outskirts of town where a Marilyn Manson wannabe performs as well as the actual Phoebe Bridgers).

Much of it is, quite frankly, ludicrous though a lot of it is, also - simultaneously, pretty disturbing. At one point, and during one of the most ridiculous scenes of all, I actually felt a chill shoot up my back. I'm not sure you could describe I Saw The TV Glow as a straight out horror but it certainly has horror elements and these work pretty well after a fashion.

It's an uneven film but it's an unpredictable one too. It's never boring and you can never quite guess where it might be going next. I'd recommend a watch of I Saw The TV Glow but as for The Pink Opaque? It might be best to leave that one consigned to fictional history.

Read It In Books:Of Mice And Men.

John Steinbeck's novella Of Mice And Men came out in 1937 (that's eighty seven years) ago and, according to Nick Hornby on the blurb on the cover, is "such a perfect book" although, according to Wikipedia, it "has been a frequent target of censorship and book bans for vulgarity, and what some consider offensive and racist language" which could, in the age of the culture wars and 'woke', make for an interesting/challenging read. It'd been on my bookshelves for many a year and looking for a shortish book to read, it seems its time had come.

George and Lennie are looking for work in California. They're poor - piss poor. They've got nothing but the (double denim) clothes on their backs and they're living off beans (without even any ketchup). The work they're looking for is on a ranch but George is worried that they won't get it if the employers realise Lennie is a "crazy bastard"

George is a small man, the brains of the outfit it seems. Slack jawed Lennie is a big man and very much not the brains of the outfit. He appears to rely on George for directions, not just geographical ones but directions in life as well. Which seems about right for a man who carries a dead mouse around in his pocket and a man who works better than he talks or thinks. To put it mildly, he tests George's patience. Always wanting what he can't have.

But George dreams of a better life, a brighter future, and Lennie is drawn in by George's dreams as is Candy, an older rancher who has lost his hand in an accident. The three of them wile their time away imagining this better life. Running a small farm, visiting travelling carnivals and ball games and, for Lennie specifically, looking after rabbits. Lennie likes their soft fur, he likes stroking them. It's suggested Lennie has never 'known' a woman.

Curley, their bosses son and a former boxer with anger management problems, seems determined to ruin this wistful bonhomie. Curley doesn't trust his wife (the feeling's mutual), he's always spoiling for a fight and sure he gets one soon enough. Poor Lennie gets teased by most of the others but that doesn't seem a very wise move on their parts considering Lennie's physical strength. A physical strength that is quite at odds with his gentle nature. But don't make him angry. You wouldn't like him when he's angry.

It always seems as if Lennie and George, between them - or perhaps separately, are heading for trouble and that trouble is a train that ain't never late. It's big trouble too, but the way it's handled, and the way Steinbeck writes about it, makes it all rather matter of fact. Which is often how it is when bad things happen. Other life continues around you. Think of your worst days. While you're suffering, others are going about their day to day business, smiling, laughing, working. Some are possibly having the best day of their life as you have the worst day of yours.

Of Mice And Men gave me cause to do some research about parts of California that I had to look up on a map (Soledad, Weed, the Gabilan mountains) and it sounds like an area worth visiting. Yellow sands, golden foothill slopes, willows fresh and green with every spring. A fauvist painting come to life and one full of life too. Skittering lizards, water snakes, coyotes, rabbits, raccoons, herons, and deer. Though maybe not while suffering in poverty like George and Lennie.

That offensive and racist language? There's the use of the n word to describe a stable buck (used more than a couple of times too) but that just seems fitting with how characters like this would have actually spoken at the time. Offensive but accurate and surely no need to be censored, a trigger warning at best (but then I'm not black so that's easy for me to say). In fact, if anything Steinbeck imbues Crooks, the black character, with a lot more humility than almost anyone else in the book and has Crooks address racism both in its then present form and in a more historical context. Except, perhaps, in one instance when Steinbeck describes a cowed Crooks retiring into "the terrible protective dignity of the negro". Not sure what to make of that but it doesn't sit well.

There were also more poetic sections. A jerk skinner's hands are described as being "as delicate in their actions as those of a temple dancer", air in a barn is "dusky in advance of the outside day", and a man's slow speech "had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought".

Of Mice And Men is a short story but it packs quite a punch. To use a cliche, an iron fist hidden in a velvet glove. The setting, and the characters, feel almost as if from ancient history reading it now but the emotions, the events, the humanity, and, indeed, the inhumanity are, of course, timeless. The water snakes, herons, and dogs that populate the story. They're not so different to the people in the book at all really. Everyone just trying to get along. Some managing it better than others.

Everything Everywhere All At Once:Summer Exhibition 2024.

Man, there are a lot of artworks to look at the Royal Academy's 2024 Summer Exhibition. 1,710 in fact. That's way too many to take them all in. If you looked at each one for thirty seconds you'd need to spend at least fourteen hours in there and the Royal Academy isn't even open that long so me and Mark, who kindly used his RA membership card to get me in for free, decided we'd take a more carefree approach than normal and just pick a few favourites in each room.

It turned out to be a good plan. We spent about 2-3 hours in there and that was probably the right amount of time (though if we'd been tempted by the predictably expensive gin bar halfway round - which we weren't, many were) - we may have found ourselves staying in there even longer. Various curators have overseen the show this year and most (Hughie O'Donoghue, Ann Christopher, Hurvin Anderson, Anne Desmet, and Veronica Ryan) I'd never heard of. Cornelia Parker was the one exception.

It was busy. The Summer Exhibition (and I'd not attended since 2018), I get the impression, always is. We'd gone along on a Saturday afternoon but I bet if we'd gone at 10am on a Tuesday morning it wouldn't have been anywhere near empty. That means a lot of craning of the neck, brushing past people, and lots of very polite 'excuse me's but it was all very manageable - and the art was of a very high standard. This is just a selection of my personal favourites and some of the bigger names in the show didn't even make the cut.

Carol Hodder - The Found House

John Walker - Black Pond

Carl Hodder's The Found House had an eerie, dreamlike quality as if a still from a yet to be made horror film, John Walker's Black Pond reminded me a bit of Paul Klee, and the late Mick Moon (all works have been made in the last year or so but some artists will have also died in that time) had an appealing abstract expressionist quality that jumped out at me and caught my eye.

The first couple of rooms in the show seemed to have something of an on/off nautical theme. Lots of boats, sea, harbours, and ports (later on cats would take over, after that cars) and my favourite maritime musings included John Ferry's evocative Journey and another by Mick Moon. Outward Bound shows a small boat almost camouflaged against a vast grey sea. Oh, how we sometimes long to merge into the background.

The late Mick Moon - Old Power

John Ferry - Journey

The late Mick Moon - Outward Bound

Sir Michael Craig-Martin - Picture In Picture (Stilleto)

A few big names did stand out. Michael Craig-Martin (no need for honorifics here) and his simplified, geometric, colour fields depicting everyday items always look good. You can buy a lot of the work (some of it is very expensive) and you can buy prints of other works. Mark Denton's puerile (in the best way) Directions To The Chocolate Factory ("milk, milk, lemonade, round the corner chocolate's made) was selling very well in its print form.

I imagine art loving parents were thinking that their smutty minded children would love seeing this. I've never been much of a fan of Gavin Turk in the past but I was very impressed with his Metaphysical Bottle, I couldn't really work out who Paul in Ackroyd & Honey's work was supposed to be but it was quite a looming piece that was hard to ignore, and Richard Chivers' deconstruction of a Hornsey gas holder had me thinking of Bernd and Hilla Becher and wondering if any of the big London galleries will ever get round to doing a large retrospective of their work. I'd be there like a shot.

Mark Denton - Directions To The Chocolate Factory

Gavin Turk - Metaphysical Bottle

Ackroyd & Harvey - Paul/Lawyers For Nature

Richard Chivers - Hornsey Gas Holder, Deconstruction

Joshua Leigh - Still Life With Lemons

Tracey Emin - Did It Ever Get Any Better

Joshua Leigh's Still Life With Lemons could almost be by Chardin and there were a few of Tracey Emin's scratchy works on show. I like them and I like their obscure yet somehow confessional titles. Ignoring the gin bar I found myself confronted by a Richard Serra work that doesn't work quite as well in photographic reproduction and wasn't as much as fun as the sculptural works of his I saw during a visit to Seattle back in 2016.

Frank Bowling's abstract works are always good, Rebecca Salter seems to be riffing on Rorschach tests, and Wolfgang Tillmans has done a picture of a naked man bending over so you can get a good look at his arse and his dangling nutsack. Not so many people were taking photos of that one.

Richard Serra - Casablanca #2

Sir Frank Bowling - Silver Slipper

Rebecca Salter - Untitled JF2

Wolfgang Tillmans - Neuer Ruckenact

Rana Begum - No. 864 L Reflector

David Grinaway - RRS Sir David Attenborough Moored At Greenwich

The more figuration there was in the room, the more I was drawn to the abstract works. But the more abstraction there was in the room, the more I was drawn to figuration. Sometimes of the most simple kind. Like, for example, David Grinaway's RSS Sir David Attenborough Moored At Greenwich and, far more quotidian, Richard Castor Jeffery's cashpoint machines. That could be almost anywhere any of us know - although it's a little bit cleaner than the areas around most cashpoint machines near me.

I kept finding myself attracted to works by Jock McFadyen (who I declare my personal 'winner' of this year's Summer Exhibition) and the first of these was the work where he somehow managed to make a branch of Homebase look like the rising sun. Although, to be fair - and as Mark pointed out - he is actually painting the sun in this too. In its reflected form. There'll be more McFadyen soon.

Richard Castor Jeffery - Cashpoint

Jock McFadyen - Homebase

Peter Uka - Uncle Johnbull

Chris Orr - Cargo

Peter Uka's Uncle Johnbull was the dominant painting in the room it was in, Chris Orr's work reminded me a bit of Where's Wally and demanded closer inspection. There's a lot of detail that my photo can't capture but if you get a chance go and check out some Chris Orr.

McFadyen appeared again with the first of his many paintings of a world, or a London at least, that seems to be slowly disappearing under water. A comment on climate change and rising tides, surely? Architectural studies featured highly in this part of the exhibition. Cathedral interiors c/o Ben Johnson (a topical name to crop up during the Olympics), a slightly haunted metaphyiscal quay side from Katarzyna Chapman, and a vision of Kings Cross that makes it look as it it's made of Meccano from Martin Kirby.

Jock McFadyen - City Life:Goodfellas 2

Katarzyna Chapman - Quayside2

Ben Johnson - Grundtvig I

Martin Kirby - Metal Construct, Kings Cross

Tony Feld - Cuban Car

Tony Field's Cuban Car could almost be something you'd find for sale in Athena (and that's not, in this case, a diss - I like it), Claire Douglass has rendered Birmingham as a futurist dystopia, and Mandy Payne has managed to make London's Golden Lane Estate remind me of Basingstoke town centre in the 1980s. It used to have giant concrete bins like that. 

Melissa Scott-Miller is another who's been drawn to King's Cross (though she prefers an apostrophe) and Google's massive new London HQ there, James Condon has made Oxford Street look like something you'd imagine if listening to a Burial album, and Bill Jacklin's NYC queue doesn't really have anything in it to tell us it's New York but is compelling nonetheless.

Claire Douglass - Souvenir From The Anthropocene

Mandy Payne - Golden Lane Estate

Melissa Scott-Miller - King's Cross With Canal Boats And Google Landscraper

James Condon - Oxford Street

Bill Jacklin - The Queue, NYC

Emily Allchurch - Mirrored Cities II

Amy Dury - Marked Card

Eileen Cooper - Pink Moon

Mick Rooney - The Dream Cupboard

Eileen Cooper's Pink Moon stood out simply because there weren't that many works of that nature on show and I thought Mick Rooney's Dream Cupboard looked like a minor surrealist masterpiece. A last Jock McFadyen (Estuary) made me realise just how much blue paint I'd seen during my visit and Nicholas Archer's beaten up Beetle caught both mine and Mark's eyes as we started to think about resting our feet and getting some food and drink. Lisa Milroy, it seemed, was on hand to remind us about just that.

There's a temptation to list my top three works but I don't think I could fairly narrow it down. There are just over forty works in this short(ish) review and they are pretty much my favourites. Even that feels like belittling all the other fantastic works on show that I've not included here. It must be such a thrill for an artist to be picked for the Summer Exhibition. Most of them, I imagine, will never enjoy such heady days in their artistic career ever again. For that alone, and for the celebration of British creativity in all its weird and wonderful iterations, the Summer Exhibition is an institution that will surely last for longer than most us will be around. Art outlives us.

Jock McFadyen - Estuary

Nicholas Archer - Shattered

Lisa Milroy - Plates No.2

Thanks to Mark for joining me at the exhibition, getting me into it, and debriefing with me over a cup of tea and very sweet red velvet cake in the RA members' cafe afterwards. It was nice also to bump into Jack, Katie, Mat, Penny, and Eddie across the course of the day and walk over 25,000 steps. Less nice was to be confronted with about 40,000 Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson) supporters in Leicester Square who were 'enjoying' a six hour rally, moaning about Islam, woke culture, and democracy and singing the praises of Elon Musk and Nigel Farage. Obviously they want to take their country back but the meatheads don't seem to have any idea what that actually means. They could have visited the Summer Exhibition, took in some culture, and realised we never lost our country in the first place. Art 4 Fascism 0.