The Culture Blog For Connoisseurs Of Everything

Weather determines mood and this has been a rare weekend of holiday heat, barbecues, paddling in rivers and British sporting dominance. And just as when in the bleak bowels of February we cannot imagine ever seeing summer again, cannot even remember the feel of the sun on a slightly burnt cheekbone, so this weekend  has all but erased memories of rain. Yet, the record shows that just the Thursday before last the rain was pissing down, and in it I walked the mile and a half from St George to the Wetherspoons pub in Kingswood (or the ‘wood ‘spoons as we call it) to meet Al for a drink. A few weeks before that, the East Bristol Imbeciles branch of the EDL had taken the opposite journey, from the Wetherspoons in Kingswood down to the Wetherspoons in St George, where they frank fizzy cider, stood on tables with their shirts off and affirmed, through the medium of song, that they would not at any time soon be surrendering to either the IRA or Sharia Law. Police hovered in helicopters during their ‘march’ and, driving back from the park, we found ourselves roadblocked out of our own street until they passed. Later I watched footage on youtube – the scene was pathetic rather than shocking. A couple of dozen yobbos who’ve never been taught how to behave. Fatherless followers, devoid of ambition, bovine, apelike; in another era, football hooligans. In still another era, front line war heroes. Aka, cannon fodder.

The ‘wood ‘spoons is by far the best pub within walking distance. You can get local ales and single malt whisky at outstanding prices. Halfway through the second pint and just as I was polishing off the last hunk of a vast mixed grill, Al spotted a work colleague. We wandered over to say hello to Steve, who was with his mate Terry. They were drinking fizzy cider. We talked about the cheapness of the ‘spoons, Bristol Rovers and Bristol City, the last soon to be hosting Glasgow Rangers in a pre-season friendly (violence is anticipated). Al mentioned that, by coincidence, he would be spending the weekend in Scotland’s largest city, taking his mother-in-law to lay flowers at a family grave. Alas, the weather forecast was bleak. He would, therefore, be spending the weekend in Glasgow, in a cemetery, in the rain. We paused to sip our pints as we digested that one.

Steve turned out to be an excellent fellow, cheery and open-hearted. He explained that his Thursday nights out round Kingswood with Terry were set in concrete. Hardly missed one in 25 years. It was famous, Steve and Terry Night. The Thursday Club. Everyone knew if you fancied a pint on a Thursday round Kingswood you could find Steve and Terry out. I confess I was slightly incredulous about the idea of having a drink with the same bloke every week for a quarter of a century. As they drained their glasses Steve announced that they were moving on to The Star (even cheaper than this place, ‘s ridickerlous). ‘Come along if you want, you can join the Thursday Club’ he said, leaving. We politely declined, and as we did so I searched Steve’s eyes for a signal of desperation. But I could detect no such thing, just artless warmth and congeniality, and I felt rotten for seeking it.

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You may believe that Russell Brand is the sort of person who is much less clever than he thinks he is. Not so. Look closely and you can see that in fact he knows he’s not very clever but has discovered that his loquacity and gift for ad libbing long and complex sentences is sufficient to fool inattentive audiences into thinking that he is clever, and that furthermore he’s going to milk the con for as long as possible. Nothing wrong with that, Rowan Williams rode all the way to the Archbishopric of Canterbury on the same horse.

Brand is doing Newsnight and Question Time these days and it’s painful stuff. He does inevitably pluck all of his opinions straight from the Student Wanker Starter Pack of received liberal wisdoms, but one senses that, unlike, say, Russell Howard or Marcus Brigstock, he was not handed the pack in a bag marked ‘This is What You Think’ in Fresher’s Week, but stumbled upon it by himself, perhaps in a hedge somewhere or under a table in a pub in Islington, sometime in his thirties. Eddie Izzard and Josie Long give the same impression of the enthusiastic political ingénue, having spent their late teens, when most people get idealism out of their system, wandering around in fluffy little worlds of fairies and jam.

Brand’s latest project is a world tour called Messiah Complex in which he will, apparently, look at how the iconography of such figures as Ghandi, Che Guevara, Malcolm X and Jesus Christ gains a cultural significance at variance from the original intentions of the icons themselves. I’ve been trying to think of a more plonking, studenty premise, but the only one I could come up with would be a lecture comparing 1984 and Brave New World, with the startling conclusion that Orwell and Huxley were providing a critique of their own times as much as they were predicting the future. All that being said, I was cheering Brand on in that video in which he shows the incredibly rude hosts of Morning Joe their workings– watch it, and you will too.

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There is a new biography of Oliver Reed out, but Roger Lewis has saved you the trouble of reading it with this excellent review.

…[Biographer Robert] Sellers seems always to be impressed and tickled by Reed’s nasty pranks: sticking a lit candle up his nose for a bet, chewing light bulbs or putting cigarettes out on his tongue. He loved to climb up a pub chimney and leap into the grate as a demonic Santa Claus. He liked to beat up waiters, hoteliers and chauffeurs. ‘He was always trying to test a person to see how scared they were of him.’ He would dangle people over balconies or insist on swordfights. He said to a restaurant manager in Austria, ‘I’m coming back tomorrow night. If you haven’t got a Union Jack by then, I’m going to trash this place.’ They hadn’t. So he hurled chairs through the window.

There was real violence in him. On location, there’d always be ‘knife wounds, hospital visits and stitches’. Reed urinated on foreign flags, on Mercedes limousines and on anyone standing below him on the stairs. He vomited over Steve McQueen, and Bette Davis said that he was ‘possibly one of the most loathsome human beings I have ever had the misfortune of meeting’ — a wide field in her case. Of the directors he worked with, Reed put laxatives in Michael Winner’s coffee, head-butted Terry Gilliam and on numerous occasions threw Ken Russell across the room in judo tackles.

…Though Sellers tries to argue that Reed was dyslexic and insecure, ‘with a low boredom threshold’, it is surely simpler to say the man had a fascist mentality and was a crackpot.

I always felt nauseous at the sight of Oliver Reed, not just because he was an over-actor in shabby films but because he was a proponent of the lowest, vilest form of comedy, the physical prank. Pranking is bullying – the laughter that accompanies a prank is as humourless as the shrieking of chimpanzees. In schools and all-male groups the prank plays the same role as buggery in prison: it establishes a bestial hierarchy. I can tolerate laddish groups for a bit but the competitiveness rapidly comes wearying. Although I like sport and, to some extent, violence, I also like Jane Austen and my All Time Top Five Movies List includes Merchant Ivory’s A Room with a View. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a stag weekend that I wasn’t glad to get to the end of – and what’s more, I suspect that most ‘lads’ secretly feel the same. Company is only really civilized when it’s mixed.

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Steve Bruce is a man’s man. But he’s also got soul. For ludicrous reasons, I’m typing up the whole of his novel Sweeper! (‘Well somebody has to’ said Frank Key when I told him this.)  Here is a sample paragraph:

The Jag was in its usual place, outside the club reception. It’s an XJ8, 3.2, sports version, V Reg. As I drove fast to the infirmary, following the traffic I wasn’t thinking of power steering and speed sensitive variable ratios. I was considering how life can be sweet, one minute and suddenly, without warning, we are dead. Nobody can foretell the place and hour of their death, which is perhaps as well. The important thing is to make the best of life while we can.

And you can’t say fairer than that. Enjoy the sunshine!

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