Fleapit revisited:Jonestown:Terror in the Jungle.

"Just get on my bus and I'll take you to the promised land" - Jim Jones

"I shall be God and beside me there shall be no other" - Jim Jones

"Don't mess with me. I'll kill you" - Jim Jones

"I am creator of the Peoples Temple and I will have my way or I will tear hell out of everything you've built" - Jim Jones

"If we can't live in peace then let's die in peace" - Jim Jones

What I knew about the Reverend Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ is that they were a cult that set up a community in Guyana in the seventies and that, for some reason, Jim Jones exhorted them all to commit suicide by drinking Kool-Aid (actually an alternative brand, Flavor Aid) laced with potassium cyanide, resulting in nearly one thousand deaths and giving the world the phrase "drink the Kool-Aid" meaning swallowing something, a lie, a world view, or a political position, that, obvious to all around them, is both detrimental and deadly.

BBC4's Jonestown:Terror in the Jungle, shown as part of their excellent Storyville strand (one that's already drilled down into David Koresh and Waco), looked to tell the full story of the events that happened both on and leading up to the "revolutionary suicide" of 18th November 1978 in the Guyanese jungle. It went back decades to Jones' childhood and tried to understand how he became the man he was and how people so willingly followed him to their own deaths. It also wrongfooted me by asking, and tacitly answering, if many of those committing revolutionary suicide weren't, in reality, simply murdered by Jones.

Via remarkable footage taken in the Jonestown complex and interviews with ex-cult members (lost souls whose interracial marriages had been rejected by both families, a woman whose daughter was an addict and was attracted to the rehab programme run by Jones and his church, and a Vietnam vet who was most likely suffering PTSD and found, in the church, a home - a family even) and two of Jones' adopted children, Terror in the Jungle sought to explain how 910 people ended up dead in just one day.

San Francisco 1972 and Jones' temple is full of people of all races singing and dancing. It's a place of acceptance and inclusiveness and Jones, with his white suit, dark glasses, and dark hair is a powerful, articulate, and captivating rock star of a speaker (some even compare his performances behind the pulpit with those of Martin Luther King Jr). It's easy to see how people are attracted but when you throw in the fact that he performs 'healings' as well that becomes too much for many to resist.

Cripples walk again, blind people see for the first time, people with broken legs dance with wild abandon, and one woman even claims Jones has cured her cancer. Jones was tricking his throng into believing he had the power to heal, of course, but he was performing equally mundane acts of sleight that would, as everything he did would, go to furthering his own ends. He created an image of a family man and he and his wife, Marceline, adopted children of many different races to create a "rainbow family".

Jones, it seems, at this point, much like the far more dangerous Donald Trump, simply wanted the attention he was deprived of as a child. One of his children tells of the young Jim Jones being starved of paternal affection growing up in rural Indiana and over compensating ever since.

In rural America, between the wars, the main thing was to fit in. To not upset the applecart. Young Jim Jones, blatantly, did not fit in. His parents didn't nurture him so he looked for attention elsewhere. He held elaborate funerals for roadkill and, during World War II, when other boys at his school fantasised about being allied soldiers, Jones became obsessed with Adolf Hitler's magnetism and his powers of persuasion.

He joins five separate churches and becomes inspired by, and learns tricks from, the preachers there. Soon he's speaking in tongues and slamming bibles down on the lectern like the best of them and at the age of twenty-five he starts his own church in Indianapolis. He calls it the Peoples Temple and soon it's attracting followers from that city's African-American community who have become tired of, and marginalised by, America's Jim Crow laws.

As the church membership expands it grows too big for Indianapolis and Jones decamps to California. Fearful his congregation may not follow him he tells them the apocalypse is nigh and if they stay in Indiana they will die. In 1965, one hundred and forty of them move to the Redwood Valley in northern California. Jones' anti-racist, socialist message attracts many white liberals and, soon, the membership of the Peoples Temple triples.

Communal living was encouraged. Fifteen to twenty people per house may not have been particularly comfortable and certainly made intimacy between members difficult but that was all part of Jones' plan. He didn't want church members expending energy on sex as it should all be used to further the cause of the Peoples Temple. To increase the power of Jim Jones.

Jones propagated the idea that capitalism, even to the extent of buying shares, was a form of slavery but that on its own wasn't enough to shut the rest of the world out so it was espoused that family relationships were also a form of sickness and they were broken up. In lieu of the actual family members they'd cut out of their lives, his followers were encouraged to see Jim and Marceline as their parents.

Although Jones himself certainly had a fairly fluid approach to familial relations when he fathered a child with one of his 'daughters', Carolyn Louise Moore. Sex, it seems, was verboten for mere followers but the rules did not apply to the leader himself. Do as I say not as I do.

Jones had created his own Hotel California ("you can check out any time you like but you can never leave") but Marceline was not happy with him 'carrying on' with Carolyn and asked for a divorce and for custody of their children. As with so many men faced with this Jones turned nasty. He told Marceline she would die before she took his kids away from him.

He wasn't lying. Marceline never did leave and was one of the 910 people found dead in Jonestown in 1978. Back in the Redwood Valley, having used threats of murder to keep Marceline part of the movement, Jones was in need of funds to finance the ever growing Peoples Temple. So he took a fleet of buses around America to attract new recruits. A couple of empty buses follow the convoy and bring some of them back to California. Also on tour, Jones makes more money selling souvenir Polaroids that he has personally blessed.

Money pours in, Jones' narcissism spirals, and he takes further mistresses (occasionally branching out into having sex with some of his male followers too). It seems likely that Jones was bisexual and even though he seems to have had a preference for women another factor in his sleeping with more female than male followers is that he believed he could "fuck socialism into women".

Jones said he wore dark glasses because the spirit of the lord that shone from his eyes was so powerful that it may burn onlookers on the spot but in reality his eyes were red and swollen from taking drugs. He used the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X to promote a not unreasonable paranoia among his African-American followers about law enforcement and government but he wasn't doing it for them. He was, as with everything else, doing it for himself.

Everything was a big act and everything, as with religious leaders throughout history and populist politicians now, relied on those followers having faith in Jones. Should faith in Jones disappear the entire house of cards would collapse. Sadly, for the hundreds of dead and the tens of thousands bereaved, that did not happen soon enough.

In 1972, to  gain more political strength and to insinuate himself into more power, Jones moved the Peoples Temple to San Francisco. Then a hotbed for unconventional lifestyles and a Petri dish that was throwing up all manner of unorthodox solutions for changing, and improving, society. In SF, Jones became both a celebrity of sorts and an even heavier drug user. Amphetamines, tranquilizers, and booze being his poisons of choice. Before he got into cyanide that is.

Like so many paranoid leaders, he started to worry he was losing control over the Peoples Temple so a 'planning commission' was formed to try and discover which members were considering leaving and which ones were beginning to have doubts about the direction of Jones and his movement. It was, to all intents and purposes, a spy network and infractions, even minor ones such as nodding off during a meeting and having your ears pierced, were met with severe punishment. By both Jones himself and the mob he whipped up and encouraged to pile on.

To Jones, loyalty (to him) was the greatest value and, thus, defection was the greatest sin. Blackmail was used, people were forced to sign blank pieces of paper to which Jones could add a confession of his choice at a later date, and (if you've seen Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix in Philip Thomas Anderson's 2012 The Master you'll recognise this) people were 'broken'. Both physically and, more importantly, psychologically and mentally.

Jones became so obsessed with loyalty that he devised a test. At a vineyard ranch he offered his followers wine in Styrofoam cups. Five minutes after they've drunk the wine Jones tells them they have all been poisoned and they have just one hour to live - and that none of them are permitted to leave. As they sit there waiting to die Jones reveals, forty-five minutes later, that they had not been poisoned at all. It had all been a test of their loyalty.

What he didn't reveal, however, that it was also a test to see how they'd react to such an extreme set of circumstances. Not a single one of them took their anger out on Jones himself. An idea must have set in his mind that would be lethally allowed to flourish fully in Guyana in 1978.

A country Jones and his followers moved to in 1974 when it becomes apparent that his/their activities are beginning to attract too much attention from the wrong people in the US. The press were chatting to defectors and starting to sniff around Jones so Jones struck a deal with the Guyanese government to buy a plot of unused land in the jungle and soon his followers start building Jonestown. An agricultural community where they grew potatoes, carrots, eddoes, and papaya and, more importantly, a place so remote they won't have to answer any awkward questions from journalists or law enforcement agents.

It's also, handily, a place that is so remote that those who go there will have virtually no chance of escaping. It's a nineteen hour boat trip to reach Jonestown from Guyana's capital Georgetown and it's not a pleasant one. As Jones followers arrived in Jonestown using scattered flights from America so as not to arouse suspicion they soon set about building roads, pharmacies, and even a school from scratch in the jungle.

It does, in some ways, look genuinely idyllic but it was neither idyllic nor was it sustainable. Jones at least understood the latter point. There was not enough food being grown in Jonestown to feed the elderly residents and although Jones himself had amassed enough money to solve that problem he chose to keep that for himself. Jones' often drug-addled voice was piped through the speakers of Jonestown 24/7 castigating his followers for not working hard enough.

It was obvious to his followers that he was hammered and hypocritically not contributing to the work himself. Some even began to see through him but trapped in the jungle they had little option but to stay as Jones' reign become increasingly cruel, paranoid, authoritarian and his messiah complex grew to the point that he claimed he had the power to stop the rain from falling from the sky.

We see footage of followers playing basketball and eating plantain chips and radishes but oddly there's none of The Box. A hole in the ground much like a freshly dug grave that those who angered or displeased Jones were put in as a punishment and covered in leeches. I'm A Follower Of A Celebrity Cult Leader, Get Me Out Of Here!

Many remained devoted to Jones despite of this. All had had their passports and money taken from them, a technique ISIS also like to use, so even those beginning to have doubts are stuck in Jonestown. A group of Peoples Temple defectors back in San Francisco, however, form a coalition with some concerned family members and one, Grace Stone, sues Jones in an attempt to get her son back from him.

This precipitated a siege in September 1977 when Jones misinforms his followers that 'they' are coming for their children. The 'they' in question is the Guyanese army and Jones armed himself and his followers with guns, dynamite, and cutlasses or at least boasted of having these tools at his disposal.

The siege lasted for six days. Six days in which the constant threat of instant death was never lifted and it was during this that the idea of revolutionary suicide took the next step further following on from Jones vineyard 'test'. Jones asked four hundred of his followers who would be prepared to take their own lives and die for the cause. When only three of them responded in the positive he knew he had much work to do to persuade the huge majority who quite simply didn't fancy killing themselves.

When the siege ended, Jones persuaded the Guyanese government to drop all charges and Grace Stone's child remained in Jonestown. Leo Ryan, a Democratic Congressman for California, became interested in Jonestown and, being a man who preferred experience to rumour and hearsay, took a trip out to Jonestown to see for himself what was happening.

A couple of concerned relatives travelled with him. Jones' initial message of "Yankees, go home" soon, apparently, softened and Ryan was permitted a  visit to the complex. Jones warned his followers that Ryan may offer some of them safe passage back to America and that they must refuse his offer, refuse their own relatives exhortations to leave Jonestown, and, under no circumstances, leave the jungle.

The consequence of, the punishment for, conspiring to leave Jonestown is death. No court. No trial. Instant death. Some disillusioned followers, however, do decide it's worth the risk and believe Ryan's position as a US Representative will ensure their safety even as Jones strongly hints that Ryan will come to regret making his visit.

On arrival at Jonestown, Ryan and the other visits, toured the impressive commune and were introduced to devoted followers who told him they loved it there and that they were free to leave should they wish to but had no desire to do so. Entertainment in the form of musical performances and food were provided for Ryan and the guests and an impressed Ryan, eventually, made a positive speech in front of followers who erupted into ridiculously over enthusiastic applause.

The sort of applause that lasts ten minutes and only tends to happen when people are scared to death of stopping clapping. The sort of applause that arouses intense suspicion. One Peoples Temple member, Vernon Gosney - interviewed in this film, attempts to pass a piece of paper to Ryan saying he wants out. Ryan eventually gets to speak to Gosney, and others, and tells them they will leave with him the next day.

No transport is available for them to leave immediately but Gosney knows, even if Ryan doesn't, that time is of the essence. It could be a matter of life and death and so it proves. As Jones' angers at these acts of betrayal the situation in Jonestown becomes chaotic and one group of followers escape and try to make it thirty miles through the jungle to a village called Matthews Ridge.

The mood in Jonestown becomes ever more sour, ever more chaotic, and ever more paranoid as even some of those who have been by Jones' side since Indiana decide they've had enough and they're leaving. An airlift removes one group of defectors while Ryan decides he'll hold on to ensure the second airlift goes smoothly. The second airlift does not go smoothly.

The weather turns and the truck those that are leaving are using to travel to a nearby airstrip gets stuck in the mud. A follower of Jones fails in an attempt to cut Ryan's throat (this is the point that Peoples Temple member Tim Carter, speaking in the film, sees the scales fall from his eyes:- "I've been playing peace and love and he's a fucking murderer") and when the truck finally manages to get moving it is boarded by Peoples Temple member Larry Layton.

Layton is a hardcore, psychotic, Jim Jones loyalist and, other defectors believe correctly, is posing as a defector for terrifyingly obvious reasons. A tractor full of armed Jones loyalists pursues the truck and while Ryan gives an interview on the tarmac of the run down runway the tractor arrives. Guns are fired. Gosney is shot but survives and, operating in survival mode, is able to overpower Layton.

Some defectors play dead to save their lives. Others aren't so fortunate. One woman's body is cut in half - by people she was living in a commune with just hours ago. Congressman Ryan doesn't play dead either. He doesn't have to play. He's very much properly dead. Layton and his accomplices riddle his corpse, both body and face, with bullets to make doubly sure of that. Layton went to prison, in America, in 1987 and was released in 2002.

With a US congressman dead, Jones knows he's in serious trouble now. But Ryan will be far from the last to die that day. In Georgetown, two of Jones' adopted sons, who are there for a basketball tournament, have been told to kill themselves but they're not prepared to die for the (lost) cause). In Jonestown they're mixing up the Flavor-Aid with the cyanide. Jones knows he's going down and like so many morally bankrupt cult leaders before, and no doubt after, him he's not going to go down alone.

Sharon Amos, a hardcore Jones devotee - also in Georgetown that day, cut her children's throats on Jones' orders and, in Jonestown, Jones issues the order that everyone must commit revolutionary suicide - "if we can't live in peace then let's die in peace".

He tries to sell to his followers, and some buy it and some don't, that it's somehow more honourable to take control of your own destiny by killing yourself than it is to wait to be killed by others. First to go are the children. It seems unlikely kids will follow instructions to kill themselves and, as a 'happy' side effect to killing the kids first, it's believed their parents will be so traumatised they'll soon willingly take their own lives.

Over three hundred children have cyanide laced Flavor-Aid squirted down their throats from syringes - and, of course, die. When it comes to the adults, some refuse to take their own lives. Those who do this are forcibly held down and injected by others. In their necks, in their arms, in their skulls. Whatever. As long as they die.

Death by cyanide poisoning is normally a very painful, very slow suffocation. Seeing the pain his followers are in Jones dies of a gunshot wound to his head. A coward, ultimately, to the very last.

When word of Ryan's murder reaches Georgetown the Guyanese army is sent to investigate. Up to this point they, and the rest of the world, have been completely unaware of the mass suicide/murder. When they report back, shocked, from the scene of the crime they're asked what they've found to which they can only reply "heaps".

"Heaps of what?" they're asked. As we all now know it was heaps of dead bodies, a scene not far removed from Auschwitz. Soldiers are dispatched to count the dead and report that, along with crossbows used by guards to prevent people escaping, they've found about four hundred dead bodies.

It's initially believed that about five hundred people have successfully escaped but soon their dead bodies, too, are found scattered around the commune and the death toll is revised, eventually, to NINE HUNDRED AND TEN. Entire families murdered in their own homes.

Although Layton did go to prison for Ryan's murder, Jones' death - and that of other murderers, meant nobody was ever charged with or for the Jonestown deaths. But, to this day, many survivors carry fear, guilt, trauma, and depression with them. Many interviewed in this film seem to have struggled but they have, especially Jones' adopted sons, come to the realisation that life is better, easier, when love is chosen over hate.

Other survivors, now forty-two years on, struggle with the still open scars and the dark shadows Jim Jones and their experiences with him brought to bear on their lives. They lnow they were taken in, hoodwinked, made fools of, made monsters of, and, ultimately, made victims of by Jim Jones and for that they can never forgive themselves. Not least when, as in many cases, it led directly to the death of the people they loved most.

Terror in the Jungle doesn't let it end there though. It makes a very clear, very topical, and very terrifying point. The events that happened in Jonestown aren't some kind of freakish one-off. They've happened before, they've happened since, and they'll happen again. Always in different ways, history's fiendish like that so we think we can see it coming, but almost always for the same reasons.

People who allow themselves to be inducted into a cult of personality will soon be encouraged to make enemies of anybody else who does not subscribe to their increasingly debased world view and once those enemies have been made it becomes exponentially more difficult to ever turn back, to ever have a dialogue.

In this time of Trump, Bolsonaro, and Johnson, we are living in a very very dark age of the personality cult. The three countries presided over by those men have the three highest death tolls in the world relating to Covid-19 (as I write there are 138,358 registed deaths in the US, 75,366 in Brazil, and 45,053 in the UK) and yet many maintain that Trump, Bolsonaro, and Johnson have not been in any way irresponsible or negligent or untruthful but that they are, in fact, great men doing the greatest job of any world leaders.

If that isn't a death cult way way larger than anything that happened in Guyana I really don't know what is. Some who were at Jonestown still can't face telling their stories about Jim Jones and over nine hundred are unable to do because they're dead. In the US, Brazil, and the UK over a quarter of a million people would, if they'd not had to die to prop up the death cults of Trump, Bolsonaro, and Johnson, probably be able to tell you how that feels. Cyanide laced Flavor-Aid and Covid-19 kill without thinking about doing so. Jim Jones, Donald Trump, and Boris Johnson kill without caring about doing so.

I May Destroy You:Consent Provider.

The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime. That's how the saying goes and there's probably a fair amount of truth in that. Not least because many crimes are committed in places the criminal in question regularly inhabits. Places like their local pub, their local shopping arcade, their own house, or their partner's body.

But the victim, too, also returns to the scene of the crime. Sometimes physically. But always mentally. Time and time again. Running events over in their head to try and make sense of them, to try and see if they were, in some way, complicit in their own victimhood, and, ultimately, to try to find closure and move on with their life.

Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You, on BBC1 & the iPlayer, did a fantasic, touching, and, at times, jaw-dropping job of showing just how those situations play out and if it had just done that one thing it would still have been one of the most extraordinary and ground-breaking television shows ever aired. But it didn't. It went much much further and much much deeper than that.

A rollercoaster of emotions. While sexual abuse and transgressions of all kinds and the nature of consent was the show's over-arching theme it also took in issues of race (and how race relations are played out in the media, in the legal system, and in education), social media, male pride, public shaming, friendship, and the difficulty of finding love in both the big city and the modern, permanently on-line, world.

Arabella (played by series writer and creator Michaela Coel) is a young streetwise black woman in an electric pink wig living in Hackney. She sits on the toilet chatting on the phone while smoking a joint, she's got an on-off boyfriend Biagio (Marouane Zotti) who deals drugs from his apartment in Ostia in Italy, and her Tweets and 'Chronicles of a Fed Up Millennial' have made her a minor Internet celebrity and earned her a book deal.

With her friends Terry (Weruche Opia) and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu) she lives a life of hard partying, dating misadventures, and trying to get on in an increasingly busy and competitive city environment. The London they inhabit feels, at all times, utterly real and recognisable. Events don't happen on Tower Bridge or the London Eye but on the streets around Smithfield Market, at hip-hop karaoke nights in the Heavenly Social, and on the 243 bus with Centre Point and other famous buildings on the London skyline a regular backdrop to the often incredibly tense action and the remarkably nuanced and fluid portrayals of human behaviour.

The best, and worst, of it. Well sketched conversations on everything from Grindr, threesomes, and selfies to anxiety, depression, drug use, and the issue of black women's hair are touched on not just in late night, and sometimes wasted, chats between Arabella, Terry, Kwame and others but also via their text messages which appear on our screens via the cracked screens of their mobile phones. When purple hearts appear on Arabella's Instagram posts they're rendered as beating, as vital, as real hearts. The change in Arabella's expression conveys to us just how much warmth they provide her with.

She needs it too. Because punctuating each episode we see Arabella haunted by the dimly, and possibly incorrectly, remembered flashbacks of a sexual assault in the toilets of a bar. It's not pretty, and it's not supposed to be. The viewer, at times, can hardly help but cringe at what they think, or fear, somebody is about to do or say. It says a lot about us, the viewers, that that feels as bad as witnessing somebody doing something that is demonstrably illegal, immoral, and absolutely awful.

Arabella's journey towards understanding what has happened to her also takes in, via podcast advice and the help of a rape survivor's group, a reassessment of previous sexual encounters in her life including those with Biagio and Zain (Karan Gill), a writing partner her agency has chosen for her who removes his condom without telling Arabella during sex and is later exposed, in public, by Arabella, as a rapist:- "not rape-adjacent or a bit rapey. He's a rapist".

Both Kwame and Terry too have to take a long look at themselves, what they've had done to them, and, also - and I think this is key to the genius of the series, what they have done. We're asked questions about how victims can also be perpetrators, about how perpetrators can also be victims, about how consent can still be abuse, and about how abuse can still be consensual.

While most of us, in real life, can square these notions it seems dramatists often struggle to do so. Coel does it brilliantly. I May Destroy You is never boring and it's never hectoring. It doesn't lecture you but creates a dialogue with you by understanding that expression, as with everything else, is nuanced while at the same time understanding, and making absolutely certain, that when it comes to sexual abuse nuance is no excuse.

The script is clever and finessed, it feels to me like Coel agonised over making it sound as realistic and conversational as possible - it takes a lot of hard work to make things sound so natural, and, most of all, it is bold. One fantastic episode drops back a decade and half to look at Arabella and Terry as teenage schoolgirls and an incident involving Theodora (Harriet Webb), a classmate who now works as a rape counsellor and has barely featured in the story up to this point, and it's an absolute masterclass in how to flesh out existing character's back stories while simultaneously weaving a new thread into an already complex whole.

Sometimes the series sends a chill up your back or stops you in your tracks, sometimes it takes potshots at the things that dominate modern life (veganism becomes a race issue and social media manages to, conversely, be both a cesspit and an echo chamber), sometimes it makes you feel a bit repulsed (there's scenes depicting anal rape and images of freshly bled out menses in which I felt I needed, Dr Who style, a cushion to hide behind), sometimes it makes you laugh (a Grindr name of HornyMan808, memories of playing Snake on a Nokia), sometimes it makes you cry, and sometimes it just makes you feel awkward (Kwame's attempts to report a man on man rape show just how uncomfortable even those whose jobs are to deal with sexual assault are with this). Often, usually even, the friendship between Arabella, Terry, Kwame, and Arabella's supportive and self-contained flatmate Ben (Stephen Wight) makes you beam with joy.

The soundtrack too (Grimes' Oblivion, Flowers by Sweet Female Attitude, Nightmares by Easy Life, 3 of a Kind's Babycakes, and DJ Luck & MC Neat's Little Bit of Luck among many other great tunes) is to be treasured. It fits both the action and the personality of the characters and the scenarios they find themselves in perfectly.

While there are, especially towards the end, action scenes and even what one might call a set-piece or two, for the most part it's the dialogue between the characters that does the heavy lifting. A lot of the conversation we're witness to is, like a lot in life, implication, subtext, and expression more than it is explicit. It'd be disingenuous to ask for anything else. Coel's not taking her audience for idiots. She knows not everything needs to be spelled out. She knows she can present us with an impression and our own experiences will paint the rest of the picture.

That she was able to do so with such a flourish was down to her choosing of such an excellent cast. Opia plays Terry as feisty on the surface, hesitant and lacking confidence beneath, Essediu imbues Kwame with such depth and humility that even when he errs, as all do, you can't help but warming to him, and Webb's portrayal of Theodora speaks of a resilience built from life as an outsider. Elsewhere, props go to Aml Ameen as Simon (Arabella's morally bankrupt friend from the City) and Stephen Wright as Ben. Shout outs, too, to Danielle Vitalis and Lauren Joy-Williams as the brilliant teenage Arabella and Terry. But, of course, the major credit has to go to, and has gone to, Michaela Coel. Not just for her role as Arabella which is, of course, just as excellent as it needs to be but for drafting, writing, creating, and, most impressively of all executing, a drama that will set a benchmark in television for years, decades, to come. 

I wrote, at the start of this piece, that I May Destroy You was a "rollercoaster of emotions" but rollercoasters just go up and down, round corners, and, occasionally, loop the loop. I'd chosen the wrong fairground attraction. I May Destroy You was more like a waltzer. Dizzying, spinning the viewer round in so many different directions that it was often hard to tell where we were facing, even if we'd accidentally been turned upside down. Once the ride was over I felt like I'd been shook up more than a little but I also felt completely exhilarated and awe-struck and whatever Michaela Coel comes up with next I'll be joining a no doubt very long queue to have myself spun round as hard as that again. A masterpiece.

Smack My Witch Up:Matthew Hopkins' Tour of East Anglia.

If, in this day and age, a man was to travel around several counties drowning women and burning them to death we might consider that this man has deep and very problematic issues with women. But, during last night's otherwise excellent Matthew Hopkins:The Witchfinder General, this wasn't even touched on and for that I am partially culpable.

I sat thinking about how best I could script a question about gender, misogyny, and abuse and while I ummed and ahhed about getting it right the Q&A session continued under its own steam. I regret it now because I think it would have been a worthwhile contribution to a story that gets bogged down in gore and religious persecution and often overlooks the very real fact that Hopkins' victims, irrespective of whether they were deemed to be witches or not, all seemed to be women.

In the 17th century, or so it seems, this seemed a trifling concern but I can't help thinking Hopkins' murderous misogyny, and society's willingness to indulge it, may hold the key to his, and others at the time's, behaviour. But I didn't ask the question. My bad. Everything else about the evening with SELFS (South East London Folklore Society), temporarily online of course, was, however, excellent.

With George both host and speaker and using Zoom and YouTube we learned how over three hundred 'witches' (I'll stop using the quotes from now on but you get the drift) were executed in the counties of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, and Huntingdonshire during a fourteen month period in the mid-1640s during the English Civil War.

The 1968 Vincent Price film Witchfinder General, our host informs us, is historically inaccurate but does give a realistic sense of what those times were like. To really get the feel, however, we must go back to the Civil War which raged from 1642 to 1651 with the loss of over 200,000 lives as Parliament and the monarchy of King Charles I fought to control the direction of the country.

Matthew Hopkins had been born twenty-two years before the war began. In 1620. In Great Wenham, Suffolk. The son of a vicar. Little is known of his early life but it is understood that he eventually moved to Manningtree in Essex where he is believed to have purchased The Thorn Inn in nearby Mistley for a home.

In 1644 he started witch hunting, or witchfinding, with his less celebrated accomplice John Stearne and in 1647 he retired from the game having been responsible for sending more witches to the gallows in a three year period than had been executed for witchcraft in the previous one hundred and sixty years. 1647 was a busy year for Hopkins. Not only did he retire, he also released his book The Discovery of Witches (the one with my friend Jack's favourite Vinegar Tom in) in which he pronounced himself The Witchfinder General (clearly fed up of waiting for someone else to). His final act of 1647 was to die. Aged just twenty-seven. Probably of tuberculosis. It's not recorded if his death was mourned or celebrated.

Hopkins and Stearne, unlike previous witch hunters, were not aiming to prove the accused had caused harm by witchcraft. No crime needed to have been recorded or committed. They sought simply to prove (and we're using that word very very loosely) that certain women had made a covenant with the devil. Old Roman laws described witchcraft as a crime so foul that it was acceptable, when dealing with cases of it, to suspend normal legal procedures.

This green light for lynchings, kangaroo courts, and extrajudicial murder was juiced for all its worth by Hopkins and Stearne at a time when the Civil War had left the country in chaos, had caused the state to be unable to function, and had resulted in justice being improvised at local levels. Eastern England was fiercely Protestant and Hopkins was astute and skilled at turning gossip and tittle-tattle about neighbours and local rivals into full scale formal accusations of witchcraft.

Many farmers were away from their land fighting in the war so crops rotted in the field and the poor of the time, already dirt poor, were becoming poorer still because of the war. Many of them were angry and somebody had to pay. While many wealthy people were accused of witchcraft the blame also fell, as it so often still does, on those already in parlous circumstances. If you took alms but did not give alms you were highly likely to find yourself under suspicion.

The Calvinist version of Protestantism that many adhered to at the time had it that some folk are simply born pure and others are simply born to sin. God had decided your destiny before you were even born and there was not a single thing you could do to change that. Yours was simply to either enjoy or suffer your predestined fate. It's perhaps no surprise with such a depressing philosophy so dominant and a war raging that many people genuinely believed they were living in the end times.

Sound familiar? Omens underlined these beliefs. The English Civil War was interpreted as a war between Christ and the devil and when, in 1646, a meteorite fell in Swaffham setting a field on fire it was decreed by many that this was proof that judgement day was nigh.

Against this background, Hopkins and Stearne developed their now infamous "swimming test". Women suspected of being witches were tied to chairs and thrown in rivers. If they floated they were witches and would be killed. If they drowned they were deemed innocent. Either way they died.

Inspired by James I of England/James IV of Scotland's Daemonologie and Henricus Institoris' Malleus Maleficarum, Hopkins and Stearne became minor celebrities on the witchfinding circuit and were often invited by towns and villages, and no doubt paid handsomely, to conduct witch hunts (and, more realistically, settle old scores).

Hopkins used sleep deprivation techniques to extract confessions (which all, it was remarked, seemed to be incredibly similar) and he would have his suspected offenders watched for days on end in case an imp should suckle on their blood. This, of course, being absolute proof of witchcraft. He'd also use sharp and unpleasant looking tools to check women for "the devil's mark" while also searching for evidence of familiars (not just cats, but moles, insects, and sometimes even children) who were believed to both drink blood from witches teats and kill livestock, neighbours, and small children.

Not for any particular reason. Just for shits and giggles it seems. Eventually some of Hopkins' 'enchanced interrogation techniques' came under scrutiny. The swimming test was already illegal (and, in fact, deemed to be murder - which, of course it was) but when it came to witch trials the law was rarely enforced. Even less so during a time of conflict.

The Moderate Intelligencer, a snappily titled Parliamentarian publication produced during the Civil War, expressed unease about Hopkins and Stearne's methods and the swimming test was dropped from his repertoire. But the trials, and executions, of suspected witches didn't stop. Quite the opposite. They became both more common and more lethal.

In towns like King's Lynn, Ipswich, Aldeburgh, and Stowmarket those found guilty of being witches were burnt to death on crosses. In 1985 Megadeth chose as a title for their debut album 'Killing Is My Business...and Business is Good'. More than three hundred years earlier Matthew Hopkins could have used that as a slogan but the success of his unorthodox business model eventually proved to be its downfall.

Hopkins began to over extend himself both in zeal and in greed. In 1466 the Puritan cleric John Gaule, then serving as a vicar in Great Staughton, Huntingdonshire, bravely preached openly against Hopkins and his work. Previously many had had misgivings but dared not speak in case they themselves should be accused, and found guilty, and suffered the inevitable consequences, of witchcraft.

Gaule's book Select Cases of Conscience touching Witches and Witchcraft took a legalistic and evidentiary approach to the subject of witchcraft and though Gaule still firmly believed in the existence of witches he was adamant that many, most, of Hopkins' victims had done nothing wrong whatsoever.

The tide began to turn against Hopkins and elsewhere rumours even took hold that if Hopkins knew so well the location of so many witches that could only be because he had a direct line to Satan himself. Perhaps because of this turning tide, perhaps because of ill health, perhaps because he'd made his money and was quitting while he was ahead, and possibly a combination of all three factors in 1647 Hopkins retired to Manningtree, released his book, and, as mentioned earlier, promptly died.

There was, of course, speculation about his death. Speculation about Matthew Hopkins and his activities has not stopped in the intervening four centuries but last night's talk, for me, certainly painted a clearer and more coherent picture of that series of brutal murders than I've been presented with before.

The talk took in Oliver Cromwell, the Battle of Naseby, the Pendle Witch Trials ealier that century, and the theory that witches had the power to make men's penises disappear at will and a fun and informative Q&A after the talk touched on Nicholas Culpepper, Salem, identity politics, Twitter, cancel culture, nationalism, and John Ronson's 2015 book So You've Been Publically Shamed.

Much of which went to highlight how, in many ways, we've not learned so much in the last three hundred and eighty years. We may not burn 'witches' at the stake or throw them in rivers to see if they drown any more but we still hound people for failing to hold orthodox views on a huge and varied range of subjects and people are still mercilessly bullied both online and in real life (which, let's be honest, we really need to start seeing as the same thing) for slights, perceived slights, and even simple honest mistakes. In the case of the TV presenter Caroline Flack, the mob piled on and piled on until she felt she had no choice but to take her own life.

Soon the slogan 'be kind' took hold and, thankfully, many people (and not least those that already were kind) acted upon it rather than just said it. But still too many people, especially in this difficult stage of easing Covid lockdown, are wagging fingers, threatening, and bullying each other. It's hardly a surprise when the country is run by a government of bullies, headed up by a very sinister clown who has journalists beaten up and overseen by the Rasputin figure of Dominic Cummings but we must fight against being dragged down to their level. We must be John Gaule, curious and asking for evidence, far more than we must be Matthew Hopkins and his accomplices, allowing our own blind prejudices and self-interest determine our actions at whatever cost. Even that of people's lives.

A great evening, as ever, from SELFS and one, you can probably gather by my last two paragraphs, that got me thinking not just about the 17c but also about the future. Next month it's an introduction to the Pagan year and a guide to the festivals that make it up. In lieu of being able to attend any other festivals this year I'll be there. Probably in my pajamas again.

Fleapit revisited:Welcome to Chechnya.

"If they don't kill you, you're a winner" - David Isteev, Crisis Response Coordinator for the Russian LGBT Network.

David France's Welcome to Chechnya, shown on BBC4 as part of their Storyville strand is a quietly angry piece of film making that shows how homosexuality in the Chechen region of Russia, and wider in that country, has become so demonised that those who partake of it, or those who are suspected of partaking in it, are being rounded up and forced into mass detention camps, tortured (on the orders of the Chechen leader Ramzon Kadyrov), maimed, and even killed. Often by members of their own families. So deeply ingrained is the societal shame that Kadyrov, wholly endorsed by Putin, has brought on gay people.

The film begins with a gay woman, Anya (names have been changed to protect those whose lives are still in danger and faces have been digitally disguised in a way that you hardly even notice), making a phone call to the Russian LGBT Network in which she reveals that her uncle has discovered her homosexuality and is threatening to tell her father unless she has sex with him. The father, a high ranking member of the Chechen government, will certainly kill her if he finds out.

Sadly, it's not a unique tale in Chechnya. A republic of the North Caucasus of the Russian Federation in which it is said that to be gay is a shame so strong only blood can wash it away. We see people fleeing for their lives and, in video footage intercepted by LGBT activists, we see angry mobs violently assaulting gay people and, like under the regimes of Hitler and Stalin - one commentator points out, getting away with it.

There's a suicide attempt in the shelter. A slashed wrist. We get a long close look at the aftermath and the attempts to keep the man alive. It's not pretty. Even more disturbing is the grainy video footage that shows a family member of a lesbian woman drag her out into the road before attempting to crush her head under a boulder. Thankfully the camera cuts away before we witness the full horror but it chills you to the bone. It is absolutely horrendous.

This is what life is like for gay people in Chechnya. Not because Chechens are more or less homophobic than people elsewhere in Russia or other countries. But because that is what the Chechen leader Kadyrov wants life to be like for gay people in Chechnya. Enough of his citizens are compliant or have been radicalised to do his dirty work for him and Putin not only likes Kadyrov but actually put him into his current presidential position back in 2007.

A Kremlin backed 'strongman', Kadyrov is allowed to make his own rules for as long as he remains vocally supportive of Putin. Which he does. Putin often returns the compliments. Kadyrov promotes the idea that there are no gay people in Chechnya (and jokes about sending them to Canada), he calls them "devils" and "subhuman" and when stories emerge of the torture they've undergone at the hands of his functionaries he accuses them of "slander". Of course, he incites God/Allah in his condemning of homosexuality.

Of course, it's not hard to see how, with a man like Kadyrov in charge, gay witch hunts prosper. We hear stories of parents urged to kill their gay children and siblings urged to slaughter their gay brothers and sisters and we learn about Zalim Bakaev, a popular Chechen pop singer of X Factor style power ballads. Bakaev was suspected of being gay and in August 2017 in Grozny, the Chechen capital, he disappeared.

Nearly three years later he's still missing but many believe he has been killed as part of a systematic purge of gay men (and women) in Chechnya. Via tense scenes at airports and footage of bored youngsters sheltering in safe houses in fear of their lives at just the age they should be out enjoying that life, David France tells a bleak, slow moving, devoid of any stentorian narrator's voice, tale of how the Chechen government are implicit not just in the torture and execution of gay people but in the climate of fear that leads to nothing being done about it.

Welcome to Chechnya's full of understated music and full of scenes of people waiting in kitchens, taxis, and airport terminals. Many of the interviews are carried out over WhatsApp voice calls and the most enlightening contributions come from David Isteev himself who, as mentioned at the start of this piece, works as the Crisis Response Coordinator at the Russian LGBT Network.

Isteev, Olga Baranova and their colleagues run a secret shelter in Moscow and help people whose lives are in danger to escape, first, Chechnya and then Russia. Those staying in the shelter are fully aware that they can be killed at any time (evidenced by a story of someone murdered while taking out their bins). For the most part people stay at the shelter for about two weeks before a safe country can be found for them. We meet one couple who are escaping to Canada and others move to undisclosed addresses in Europe.

Addresses that remain undisclosed because, as demonstrated with Alexander Litvinenko and the Skripal poisonings in Salisbury, Putin's Russia can kill on foreign soil with complete impunity. One of the guys who's starting a new life, in a brief monologue to the camera, realises that once he's crossed the ocean he will never again hear the sound of a single family member's voice.

That's what it's like to be gay in Chechnya. To stay there you risk your life, to leave you lose your family. Nothing seems likely to change until a criminal complaint is filed and even then it seems unlikely to be upheld, Russian courts being notoriously authoritarian and corrupt. Complaints had not been filed about forced imprisonment, torture, and extrajudicial killings because the fear of retribution was so real and so lethal that nobody dared risk registering one.

Maxim Lapunov, eventually, with the support of Isteev, takes his case, he was forced into a car and held for twelve days under the constant threat of immediate death, to the Russian court. He speaks bravely and openly about his experiences and how when he was released he'd been beaten so badly by the police that he could hardly crawl let alone walk.

The Russian authorities, predictably and depressingly, refused to investigate his case and recent intercepted videos show gay people being attacked in the nearby republic of North Ossetia-Alania and Dagestan. The virus of hatred and violence is spreading out across the Caucusus and into wider Russia. A country that already has an astonishingly low tolerance for LGBT lifestyles and a Putin inspired predisposition towards violent 'justice'.

While France's film may have lacked the lachrymose qualities I seem to find (or wallow) in in so many other movies and television shows, it's dispassionate nature made for a very powerful and articulate piece of film making that made it very clear that these injustices, these crimes against humanity, were very real, very lethal, very numerous and very much still ongoing.

Welcome to Chechnya made it absolutely apparent that Kadyrov, and above him Putin, were not just negligently refusing to investigate these crimes but are in fact the direct perpetrators of them. For now, Isteev's message - "if they don't kill you, you're a winner" - is the most positive message you can take away from this film but this story needs, it demands, a more positive coda and whilst Kadyrov and Putin remain in power and remain impervious to justice or even basic morality that's still yet to come. With Putin putting plans in place to stay in power until 2036 that may never arrive.

Home Is Where The Art Is:Grayson's Art Club

Grayson Perry's a nice man. As both a television presenter, a curator, and an artist he's showed he has wells of empathy and time for those less successful or celebrated than himself and he's demonstrated both a kindness and an incisive, yet inclusive, wit that means you just can't help warming to him. I observed in a previous blog that this whole coronavirus business has revealed a lot of kindness in society but that the most generous and altruistic acts of kindness have come from those who, pre-Covid, had already displayed that trait.

Grayson, in his six episode Channel 4 series Grayson's Art Club, fits that billing perfectly. Perry's belief, and one shared by many, is that art can help us through the crisis and each instalment of the show takes a different theme (portraits, animals, fantasy, view from my window, home, and Britain) and asks both celebrity guests and "the great British public" to get involved by creating artworks under lockdown with the aim of, when it's safe to do so, Grayson curating a show of it in IRL. In an actual art gallery. Remember them?

The over-riding sense of kindness, friendship, and love that comes attached with everything Perry does shines through at all times but, filmed in his home with his wife Philippa, his cat Kevin, and his childhood teddy bear Alan Measles, these qualities are amplified. There's lots of hearty laughter between Grayson, Philippa, and the guests they chat to over laptop screens (a portrait of Grayson with his hair made of noodles and soy sauce certainly sets them off), Grayson's Columbo mug features often, as do his socks and tea towel, and by the fifth episode Philippa's even co-presenting. Unsurprisingly, she turns out to be just as likeable as Grayson.

Each week Grayson speaks a bit about the art of the past that he feels best illustrates the theme of the show. We're shown works by Picasso, Van Gogh, Hockney, Vermeer, Botticelli, Hopper, Henri Rousseau, Bonnard, Eric Ravilious, Rachel Whiteread, and Chantal Joffe alongside images of William Frith's The Derby-Day, Elizabethan miniatures, and Banksy's wheel clamped Boudicca statues on London's Victoria Embankment.

These are, often, great pieces of art but the work that Grayson, Philippa, the celebrity guests, and, most of all, that aforementioned "great British public" make often eclipses it. It certainly speaks more to these strange times we're all experiencing at the moment. There are collages, paintings, sculptures (including one of Ena Sharples' head), photographs, and houses made of sweets and, throughout the series (which was made and shown during the early part of lockdown) there are constant artworks made in the image of and referencing Professor Chris Whitty, the UK government's Chief Medical Advisor.

They're respectful and often silly but they're never cruel. Harry Hill makes a ventriloquist's dummy of Whitty and Keith Lemon paints a picture of the Prof (he also, less successfully, dresses up as Pharrell - at least this time he resists the temptation to do it in 'blackface') and Perry includes him in many of his own pieces, including one in which Whitty is reading a copy of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Perry calls his pieces "monuments to domestic imprisonment".

Elsewhere we see Hill carving a dog out of wood, Joe Lycett tells us he likes Edward Hopper's Morning Sun because it reminds him of the time of the day he likes to crack open a beer (!), Noel Fielding parades around as a character called Acid Mouse and hosts a solo comedy club to an audience of faces he's painted himself who still heckle him mercilessly, and Jim Moir, aka Vic Reeves, shows us his paintings of birds and the reggae artists Big Youth and Gregory Isaacs.

There's casual yet enlightening chats with the likes of Jessica Hynes, Lolly Adefope, Anthony Gormley, Kevin McCloud, Martin Parr, Jenny Eclair, David Shrigley, and Liza Tarbuck and Jeremy Deller proves a particularly insightful guest. He explains the genesis of his Acid Brass project (a celebration of the history of various working class cultures) and he talks passionately about how most of the art we've been seeing in recent months is that of children. The rainbows and celebrations of key workers we've all seen in windows of houses near us are, to Deller, wonderful reminders of the awe and creativity of childhood and he even sees the once weekly Clap for Carers event as some kind of national performance.

Deller, like Grayson Perry, is as much a communicator, a teacher, as he is an artist and both of them agree, as do I, that when this is all over "we can't carry on as normal". We can't go back to the levels of poverty, wealth inequality, and homelessness we had before Covid. We must change society and make it better and fairer for all. This, Perry observes as so many of us have also, is a once in a lifetime opportunity to fix what's wrong.

Maggi Hambling is a far thornier guest than Deller, Lycett, or Tarbuck. She demands her interview is not conducted over Zoom, she demands there is no music playing over her parts, she demands to be allowed to smoke, and she boasts her hobbies are watching tennis and drinking Special Brew on a bench before stating that bench is most definitely not a park bench. FFS!

She's incredibly irritating but I did come (slightly) round to her eventually and put her rude and surly manner down not to her artistic temperament and self-importance but to the fact she was stressed out. It was the peak of lockdown so I cut her some slack. But it wasn't the interview with Hambling, and or even the rest of the far more amenable celebrities, that made Grayson's Art Club the delight it was. The real joy, the real emotion, came from him gently eking out the stories behind the art that the public were making and the joyful looks on their faces when he informed them they'd been selected for his exhibition.

Vinny Montag and Kim Li's art fridge was a lovely idea, The Singh Twins' Covid spore flecked dragon being fought by a nurse on horseback while Boris Johnson tries to stop her is a powerful piece, and the moving and kind interview, more of a conversation really, with frontline nurse Hannah Grace Deller and the photo of her dog were all genuine highlights that showed the very best of Grayson Perry and the very best of British. A modest and gentle creativity so different to the bellicose exceptionalism that often rallies round the flag.

The two sweetest parts of the series, and the two that got me - inevitably, crying, were the interviews with Alex Robinson and his mum Rachel and a later one with Mandish Khebbal and her young son Simran. Alex, a grown man who still needs the care of his mother, struggles with the real world at the best times. During lockdown, even more so. He finds, and loves, the normality and order in the play figures he makes and the fantasy world he's created for himself. Perry's empathy and humanity while chatting with the taciturn Alex is later rewarded when Alex sends Perry models he's made of Alan Measles and Kevin the cat through the post.

Mandish and Simran have made a lovely, cute, family portrait. It shows Simran practising kung fu, a grumpy older brother sat on a wicker chair, and the elder Khebbals posing in fancy clothes. There's a portrait in the background of Simran's twin brother Sorian who died when he was just four years old and, wrapped in his mum's arms, Simran talks directly to Grayson and to the country:-

"He died when he was four and also when I was four. Home is where the heart is and my heart is with my family"

As Simran cuddles his mum ever tighter, Mandish takes up the story by telling Grayson how the anniversary of Sorian's death is approaching and quarantine means they may not be able to carry out their yearly ritual of leaving toy dinosaurs on nearby park benches with little signs attached saying "take me home and play with me" so that on an unbearably sad day they can at least put joy into other children's hearts.

Sorian cried, Grayson cried, and I cried. If you watched it and somehow remained unmoved I don't envy you. I pity you for your lack of compassion. Grayson's Art Club wasn't just a show in which Perry could tell us of his love for the fantasy art of Hieronymus Bosch and Henry Darger, it wasn't just a show in which pregnant Laura showed us her fantastical painted belly, and it wasn't just a show in which Grayson Perry could return, time and again, to his Alan Measles statue (all rusty aerials, corroded sheets of brass, and rotten teeth) even though it was all those things.

It was also a lot more than that. Grayson Perry used art, and creativity, as a prism to view not just the extraordinary times we've been, and still are, living through but to explore far more permanent concerns. Those of anxiety, society, family, friendship, and love. He chose not to do it by hectoring us but, instead, by being the change in the world he wanted to see. I can't be the only one who's glad that Grayson Perry's kindness, humility, curiosity, and empathy, even more so than any of the art on his show, continued, and continues, to shine like a beacon and bring light to the darkest of times.