On the train the other day I was opposite a creature in thick glasses, who was talking to one of his friends in advertising about accounts he hadn’t landed. And how those accounts were ‘twats’.
When he got off, he left this behind him.
If you’re feeling like this year’s John Lewis ad could have done more to tug your heart strings, here you go:
INT. A DINING ROOM. AFTERNOON
Tinsel. Glitter. Wads of wrapping paper.
Sticky tape tuck to little fingers. Popcorn being strung. Glue spilled across a dining room table.
On the soundtrack: a slow, piano, 6/8 adaptation of a popular song. Perhaps “I Like To Move It Move It”, sung by a breathy contralto with a waver in her voice.
A dining room decorated with lots of pictures of family and pets.
Two children (4 and 6) sit at the table, making things. They are gluing, getting things stuck to their fingers, putting sticky stars on their eyelids, drawing, writing, arguing over the glitter pens. Both are deeply engrossed in construction.
From the kitchen a mother gazes on, smiling. Think Sarah Lund crossed with Linda Bellingham.
She looks out of the kitchen window, where:-
EXT. THE GARDEN. CONTINUOUS
A light frost has fallen. At the far end of the garden stand a little row of crosses. In front of each is a dilapidated tinsel ornament, obviously made by children.
Along the row, the names have been scrawled on the ornaments: Fluffy, Spike, Hammy, Peter The Fish.
INT. THE DINING ROOM CONTINUOUS
The mother looks back at the children, who are now finishing up. She looks across at a picture of the family: father, mother, children. In the corner is a cat.
She wipes a tear from her eye.
IN. FRONT HALL. LATER
The children are pulling on duffel coats, and getting into their wellies. The boy, younger, falls over, as he tries to get his foot in.
EXT. LATER
The children place their new ornament on some freshly dug earth.
We pull back to reveal that we are in a:
EXT. GRAVEYARD
And they are standing in front of a gravestone.
The little girl pulls at her brother’s hand, and they all walk away with the mother.
On the ornament is a sign saying: “Daddy”
CAPTION: Merry Christmas from John Lewis
Now, who wants to help me make this? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week, and here are some things that might be worth bearing in mind.
A couple of years ago we started seeing the edges of the what happens when politicians, the media, and the police collude together. That was the real scandal. That close relationship led to laws not being enforced, criminal activities going uninvestigated and on their being no will to create good laws to govern politicians, the police, or the media.
Many people will remember David Cameron telling Leveson that they wouldn’t find a smoking gun. That there were no emails detailing a deal done between the Conservative leader and the Murdoch papers. And we all howled at the screen “That’s exactly the point!”
The deep corruption of our public life didn’t need accompanying paperwork. The rules were implicit and understood by all. Pursuing the agendas of media conglomerates while in power came with substantial rewards. Looking the other way when the media broke the law also came with substantial rewards. Politicans deliberately made bad laws, the police didn’t enforce those, and everyone retired with a highly-paid column on law and order at the end of it.
Then the cracks started to show. We saw policemen in charge of the investigation into phone hacking taking champagne suppers with News International. Secretaries of State chummily texting those whose mergers they were meant to be overseeing. Prime Ministers going riding newspaper editors’ horses. Which came to them from the police. Every stone that was turned let loose a new waft of corruption.
And to root out the deep corruption at the heart of three of our fundamental institutions, what did we do? We split it up.
Leveson looked at press intrusion, and the failures of the PCC. Operation Elveden is looking at the police’s failure to investigate press criminality sooner. The MPs are pretending that because they put IPSA in place a few years ago they’ve already mead enough culpas.
We heard how the mighty press dwarfed poor old politicans, who only had every arm of the state at their disposal. All that they could do was weep into their cornflakes, and wait to retire so that they could cash in.
The activities of the press weren’t the fundamental problem, though. The collusion of politicans with the media (not wanting to refer the Sky bid to the Competition Commission, say), of media with politicians (bumping a story about the Chancellor’s youthful cocaine use to page 5), of police with the media (taking them for champagne dinners), and of the media with police (reporting disinformation whenever necessary), and the manifest failure of any of those institutions to have any sense of duty to the public were the problem.
I’m not one who is going to shout about ‘a free press’. We already don’t have a free press. D-notices, some of the planet’s most-backward libel laws, and all sorts of laws about speech and communication make any idea that we have a free press laughable. (Also, it’s telling that here we harp on about ‘a free press’. Not ‘free speech’, something quantifiable that applies to all of us and is a fundamental right, but ‘a free press’, which is ‘freedom to speak as long as you own a newspaper’.)
However, the problem isn’t the newspapers. The problem was never the newspapers. The despicable actions of some newspapers were a symptom of the deep sickness that plagues this country’s institutions.
When the problem is bad laws made by bad politicans, and ones unenforced by the police, the solution isn’t more bad laws from more bad politicians, which we shall depend on the police to enforce.
The girl in front of me is about to cry, and I’m not really sure how to deal with this. It’s not often as a performer that what you do move people to tears (it’s certainly not often that what *I* do does) and I’m not sure of the protocol. Maybe I should have stuck to comedy…
Melmoth Darkleigh began his life as just as weird voice. When we were doing the In The Gloaming podcasts I wanted them to have a host, someone like Roald Dahl at the beginning of the early serieseses of Tales Of The Unexpected or the Cryptkeeper from Tales From The Crypt. He was a creepy voice and an excuse to some cackling over the theme tune every month. I can’t resist a good cackle.
The next year we were booked to perform the podcasts as a live show a few times, including in the delightfully spooky Arundel Jailhouse. In the couple of weeks before that show all of the cast dropped out. Some were busy, some were ill, some probably just didn’t feel like going to do a profit-share show in the wilds of the Downs. So, a couple of days before, when the last person got an advert, I was left with a couple of days to write a one-man In The Gloaming show. Which is where Melmoth crept in…
The show took the form of a kind of seance, where Melmoth would summon ghosts from the venue’s past. It was an excuse to wheel out a lot of dark, old character monologues, and hang then together with some new stuff. And the show did quite well, and I did it a few times over the next couple of years.
Magic was always a very minor part of the show. To add to the creepiness I always tried to have a couple of inexplicable moments in the show, to make it really unsettling. This ranged from a bit of cold reading to a Haunted Boggle, which would predict an audience member’s death. Usually ‘drowned whilst wanking.’
This year, however, I decided to raise the stakes. To see if I couldn’t really convince an audience that Melmoth had strange, occult powers. I started doing larger effects, and dropping the monologues.
As I learned and studied more, however, about seances, NLP, hypnosis, mind reading, the occult, and all the other gubbins, a strange thing happened. I found that I had gone from being someone pretending to be a mind reader to actually being a mind reader.
I could reveal words people were thinking of that they had told no one, childhood memories, I could duplicate drawings they had done, and predict choices they were going to make. I became known in my local pub as ‘that weird guy who can read minds’. Which was an improvement on what they had called me before: ‘that weird guy.’
Melmoth would say that this only goes to prove the power of the dark and mysterious forces that surround us (the people of Nutfield and Merstham). I’m pretty sure it’s a combination of suggestion, framing, intuition, NLP, hypnotic language and some good, old-fashioned conjuring. Whichever of us is right, it has been a bizarre few months.
All of which will come to a head on Wednesday and Thursday. Why not come down and see what you think? It will definitely be a mind-f*cking, but I can also promise some mind-cuddles afterwards…
I neeed a DOP for a thing in the next week or two. They need to be awesome at shallow depth of fieldy things, good with single-point perspective, able to work with children, and willing to work for free for a day.
I know. Anyway, if anyone knows anyone, please do send them my way on Twitter or the old Facebook…
I’m friends with all sorts on Twitter. Some are members of that puzzling faction who believe that the real problem with the country isn’t deep and abiding police corruption, but protestors and people wandering around un-tased.
During an argument this morning about this example of assault by police officers (for which even the Commissioner of the Met apologised), one of them opined “Never trust a lawyer unless they’re instructed by you” to which I responded “And never trust a police officer unless you are one.” In the eyes of this individual, one of those statements was reasonable comment, the other was bigotry. See if you can guess which was which…
So, here are just some of the reasons that spring to mind that I consider statements made by the police to be not especially worthy of trust.
(I should probably point out off the bat that I was brought up in the era of Brass Tacks, where high-profile miscarriages of justice were exposed weekly in prime time. Lots of my early memories of the news are of Irish men referred to by a city and a number being let out of prisons they should not have been in.)
Ian Tomlinson – Although this is often glossed over as the work of ‘one bad apple’, it wasn’t that bad apple who briefed the press that officers were pelted as they tried to help Tomlinson. Which was a lie. The IPCC told the media that Ian Tomlinson’s family had known him to be in poor health and worried about him. Which was a lie. The IPCC claimed that there was “nothing in the story” that he had been assaulted by a police officer. Which was a lie. PC Harwood, of course, lied about being pushed to the ground and losing his helmet and baton. He also said Tomlinson was ‘inviting a physical confrontation’ when video evidence showed him walking away. Freddy Patel, the coroner, said Tomlinson died of natural causes. He was later struck off for “a catalogue of dishonesty and incompetence” dating back a decade. And the incident was only ever admitted because video evidence emerged that contradicted police accounts. If you want a good reason why people don’t trust the police, start here.
Police ‘Injuries’ At The Kingsnorth Power Station Protests – Remember the Kingsnorth Power Station protests? You should, because no less than 70 officers were injured trying to police the protests there. 70! That’s the kind of violence the police say they have to deal with at protests. Except that those injuries included: “being stung on finger by possible wasp” and “officer succumbed to sun and heat” and “officer injured sitting in car.” In fact, there were only 12 injuries, and only 4 of those came as a result of contact with other human beings instead of possible wasps or definite mosquitoes. In the apology he was forced to give to Parliament, Police Minister Vernon Coaker said:
I was informed that 70 police officers were hurt and naturally assumed that they had been hurt in direct contact as a result of the protest. That clearly wasn’t the case and I apologise if that caused anybody to be misled.
Hillsborough – Now, although the IPCC investigation is still on ongoing, and we don’t know the extent of South Yorkshire Police’s lies in this case, what we DO KNOW is: statements were altered (“Some 116 of the 164 statements identified for substantive amendment were amended to remove or alter comments unfavourable to SYP.”), and the extent of that is only now becoming clear. The Taylor Report, the initial investigation from 1989, was unsatisfied with police evidence. As Lord Justice Taylor said at the time: “In all some 65 police officers gave oral evidence at the Inquiry. Sadly I must report that for the most part the quality of their evidence was in inverse proportion to their rank.”
Mark Duggan – Remember when we all knew that Mark Duggan had shot at police? And we knew because that’s what the IPCC had ‘verbally led journalists to believe’? Yes, quite.
Daniel Morgan – The case is too long and convoluted to reprise in detail here, let’s leave it at the fact that in 2011, Scotland Yard conceded that for 24 years Daniel Morgan’s killer had been shielded by police corruption.
Jean Charles de Menezes – Oddly, the reasons I distrust the police here have nothing to do with their shooting the wrong person. It’s with the way they handled information afterwards. They “deliberately withheld” the information that de Menezes was not one of the 21st July suspects from their initial press release, officers changed their evidence, lied about having shouted a warning (to the satisfaction of 8 jurors, 2 believed them), and – let’s be generous – added to the confusion over the video evidence, making statements that were contradicted by those who operated the CCTV. Which leads us to:
Andy Hayman – There are lots of things to dislike about the Met officer turned Murdoch columnist, including his reluctance to investigate allegations against The News Of The World at the same time as having champagne suppers with News International, and, well, let’s let him speak for himself:
Forest Gate – In 2006, another Hayman operation involved arresting 2 brothers on terrorism charges, shooting one in the process. Now, although we don’t know that it was the police who briefed the media that one of the brothers who shot the other, we do know that the CPS suggested that there was child porn on the computers seized, although there wasn’t.
Plebgate – This tawdry incident suggests that there is no event too trivial for the police to break rules to deal with it. Whatever the truth of the incident at the gate, the very best that can be said about it, even giving all involved the benefit of some quite serious doubts, is that a senior police officer leaked Scotland Yard’s restricted report to the CPS (the CPS was unhappy with the ‘quality and quantity’ of the evidence provided by that report). Believe me, no one wanted the police to be telling the truth here more than me. I make my living mocking politicans, but as the story has developed, and the key witness for the police’s version of events turns out NOT TO HAVE EVEN BEEN PRESENT, the whole thing becomes much more shabby.
And, of course, we haven’t had a report from Operation Elveden yet.
This is just a small taster, cobbled together quickly, of why I fundamentally mistrust the statements of the police. It’s why I think policing needs to be better. It’s why I don’t have problems believing that much of the police urgently needs reform, and it’s why I won’t be browbeaten by apologists for corruption.
The other day we had a competition to name this owl:
And now we have a winner. After entries like: Ian Jenkins, Sheila, Geoffrey, and Timothy Owlifant, the best name has been judged (by my children) to be…
POOT!
And the winner is James Henry! And here is your poem, written by Poot.
There should be a round of applause and that when we
Nathaniel Tapley 