Trouble in Tinseltown
It is 6.45 am and I am outside CBS studios in West Hollywood with a Writers Guild of America picket sign in one hand and my six year old son Gabriel’s hand in the other. “Dad” he says, matter of factly, ”will we get arrested?” This is in his mind as he’d just seen the film Across the Universe which had Vietnam protesters being dragged off the street.
It is two years to the day since I moved to Los Angeles to write for Craig Ferguson on his daily TV show. With a wife, three kids and a five bedroom house to support I have been waking up early in the morning in a panic.
Many of the cars honk their horns in sympathy, the loudest being the big rigs which have those air horns which are deafening. A number of lorry drivers refuse to cross the picket lines at various studios on principle and do this at the risk of losing their jobs.
Today is Veteran’s day, America’s Day of Remembrance, so a lot of kids are off school and my boy Gabriel is pigging out on the snacks he has found in a box by the signs. He is not so keen on the pounding the pavements for a four hour stretch, a position I sympathise with. “Are we poor now, dad?” he asks, casually, like being poor might be fun. I say not yet.
“Why are we doing this ?”. I feel that explaining the rates of pay for re-use of shows on the net and other platforms might be a bit over his head.
“You know when your big sister won’t share ?” I say, “This is because some people don’t want to share.”
He mulls this over for a bit and says, “If we need money can’t we just go to the bank?” I tried to clear this one up, having tried to live like that myself at times. Each explanation leads on to more questions.
He keeps asking me for the next few days after this, “What was that thing we were doing called?” For some reason the word picketing slips away from him. A couple of days ago he sees me scribbling in a notebook and he says, “Dad are you supposed to be writing while you’re on strike?” The honest answer to that is that I’m not sure.
On the first day a comedy writer at a different lot has his leg broken by some guy who didn’t want to wait for the pickets to clear the entrance. There is a photo on one of the blogs of his Nike under the tyre of the car.
The background to the dispute is that when video came along the studios got the writers to agree to a miserly slice of the profits claiming that they needed an introductory deal as the machines would be expensive and might not catch on. This same rate was maintained for DVDs so that when you buy a thirty dollar DVD the writer’s share is two and half cents. With new technology threatening to render DVDs as obsolete as the abacus, the rates of pay for downloads are a key issue.
I have friends who maintain that by going on strike we are playing into the hands of the producers, like turkeys voting for an early Christmas. The logic here is that after we have been out for eight weeks there is a contractual clause that allows studios to suspend deals that are proving unprofitable, so that this is a chance for them to trim the fat from their operation.
The last long strike was in 1988; it lasted for twenty-two weeks and was when the reality shows like Cops gained a foothold here, so there is also a concern that we may be eroding our own share of the market.
To middle America Hollywood writers going on strike is about as understandable as pop stars going on strike, like Duran Duran circling the stadium and refusing to play Rio unless they’re promised more money.
Yet the truth of the matter is that of the twelve thousand or so members of the guild, sixty per cent won’t make the necessary thirty thousand dollars a year that would get them health insurance for themselves and their families.
Like in the acting profession, a tiny number earn a fortune, a few make a good living and the majority cannot live off their earnings as writers and so take other jobs.
On the Friday before the Thanksgiving holiday there is a rally on Hollywood Boulevard. There are over four thousand of us marching along the walk of fame. The whole thing has a carnival feel to it, as we meander along past the Scientology buildings,’ Come in and take a free personality test today.’
I pass Spiderman or at least a guy dressed up as him, and an African American Wicked Witch of the West, green faced in the middle of it all. Hollywood Boulevard is the place where, for a negotiable fee you can have your picture taken with the movie character of your choice.
It’s not quite Disneyland, it’s a little cracky and turf wars often end in fistfights and the police having to separate Chewbacca and the Hulk then lead them off in handcuffs.
There are dogs wearing t-shirts, and an eighty-foot model pouts down at us from a huge ad which has been draped over the side of an apartment block. There are holes cut in it for the windows of the apartment where people stare down at us or take pictures.
Marching along side us are nurses, actresses, directors, cinematographers, and a blonde model like you’d see at boxing matches holding up a sign that has the number of days we’ve been out.
Outside a shop that sells collectibles from film and TV, an old guy in a beard holds a sign, “Writers, in need of cash? I pay top dollar for film and TV scripts.”
Also marching along side us are the local Teamsters, a union of big rig drivers, those monster trucks, which also bizarrely includes the casting directors. Junior agents from mega agency CAA are on hand to dole out water and scones, the Jarrow marches of the thirties it ain’t.
As we march along there is chanting, “On strike, shut ‘em down, Hollywood’s a union town!” and my own personal favourite “They wanted me to do a re-write, but I said no, no, no!”
Outside the studios of NBC whose CEO is a Mr. Zucker, they chant “Treat us fairly Mr. Zucker, we are not your two bit hooker!”
As motorcycle cops usher us forward behind our banners I see a wooden platform with a dozen photographers on it taking shots of us as we pass, this is not just a rally but also a media event, a photo op. Everyone has a camera of some sort and is taking pictures of everyone else taking pictures of them.
The first person to address the rally is the President of the Guild, Patric Verrone. Rather alarmingly for a public figure in the media age he has what I can only describe as Hitler hair, the trademark long dark side parting, though mercifully not a brown shirt or the Chaplinesque moustache, as that would be playing into the hands of the enemy.
The producers have enlisted the help of one of those ad agencies who proved that cigarettes are not bad for you to make their case, taking out full page ads in newspapers throughout the country.
While the studios insist to us that the net is too new and that it may not pay, one writer has edited together a series of clips of the studio CEOs boasting about how confident they are that they can make money from the internet.
Today is day two of three days of talks at an undisclosed location and everyone in this company town is hoping that a fair deal will be made.
A local councilor addressed our rally and tells us the Munchkins had agreed to move their award ceremony outside Mann’s Chinese theatre to accommodate our rally, so it was good to know that even the lollipop guild were behind us.
At first I thought that this was a joke until I saw the headlines the next day. After seventy years the few surviving Munchkins from the Wizard of Oz have finally been given their own star on the Hollywood walk of fame.
Even if it took a while, it was good to see those little guys getting what they deserved. I’m hoping it’s a good omen.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Sunday, August 26, 2007
sunday times column week sixteen
Soaps, Blond Justice, and Farewell.
Yesterday we shot the last of our sketches for Ford. In the finale Craig pulls up in a sports car with the registration number Ferg # 1, I chase him, bursting into set of The Bold and The Beautiful, a cheesey day time soap on CBS populated by these freakishly attractive day time actors.
Ashley, the lead in the show tells me that she has been doing the gig for twenty straight years and her character has been married a grand total of twelve times, twice to the same guy and once to his father.
At the end of the bit, Craig tazers me, and I’m bundled into the car. The last shot is of me in the back of the Ford Escape with stamps and a sticker saying ‘Return to Scotland’. You can see the sketches on www.cbs/late late show.com
We booked a family holiday in Cancun in Mexico, a four hour flight from LA, the big spring break destination for American college students, only to find that it was directly in the path of Hurricane Dean, as it approached I tried to take out extra insurance but apparently they don’t let you do that. In the end the resort was unscathed.
In an attempt to show that the days of celebrities like OJ and Michael Jackson getting away with breaking the law are long gone here in California ; Lindsay Lohan has been sentenced for possession of coke and two incidents of drunk driving. She was given four days in jail.
Nicole Richie’s sentence for reversing on the freeway out of her head on drugs was a measly ninety hours. She was sent home after an hour and a quarter. One newspaper describes this as ‘Blond Justice’.
One explanation is that LA county’s prisons are so overcrowded that anyone given a sentence of thirty days or less is processed in twelve hours and sent home to do their time, so it seems to me that they are certainly not overcrowded with celebrities.
I imagine that bewigged record producer Phil Spector who is on trial for a murder he actually confessed to, must be rubbing his blood stained hands in glee, thinking it is only a matter of time before he’s out and up to his old tricks.
There are rumours that Britney Spears is planning to move to London to get away from her troubles. Under California law, if you take a kid out of the state without the express permission of the other parent, you can be arrested for child abduction, and besides she’ll never master the parallel parking that London demands.
The rumours of a looming writers’ strike continue to build here with the current writer producer agreement due to run out in a couple of months. The studios boast to Wall St that their record profits will continue, and tell the writers guild that they can’t give them a better deal.
Back in 1988, there was a strike which lasted five months and gave a huge boost to the reality TV sector which has grown so much since then.
Given the huge publicity machine that the producers have access to it is hard for the writers to get their case across, especially since most people think that actors make up their own lines and that all Hollywood writers sit by their pools being fed seedless grapes by their semi naked assistants pausing now and then to jot down a few thoughts on their solid gold typewriters.
The truth of the matter is that only one in every six writers is actually making a living from writing, so that when it comes to a vote, there will probably a lot of guys who are now cutting hair or teaching kindergarten who would rather be telling people that they are a writer on strike than admit that the last thing they wrote was an episode of Flash Gordon.
Another scenario is that we will go on strike along with the Screen Actors Guild a little later. Since this is my last column I thought I’d finish it with an actor joke I just heard.
An actor finishes work earlier than expected, lets himself in the house and goes upstairs to his bedroom to catch a glimpse of a guy’s ass leaping out of the window. His wife is on the bed looking very sheepish.
“What the hell is going on ?” he demands.
“Look, I’m not going to lie to you. I’m sick of your selfishness and the fact that all you care about is your career. I’m having an affair” she hisses, “with your agent !”
The actor thinks about this for a second, catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror and says, excited, “My agent came to my house !”
Yesterday we shot the last of our sketches for Ford. In the finale Craig pulls up in a sports car with the registration number Ferg # 1, I chase him, bursting into set of The Bold and The Beautiful, a cheesey day time soap on CBS populated by these freakishly attractive day time actors.
Ashley, the lead in the show tells me that she has been doing the gig for twenty straight years and her character has been married a grand total of twelve times, twice to the same guy and once to his father.
At the end of the bit, Craig tazers me, and I’m bundled into the car. The last shot is of me in the back of the Ford Escape with stamps and a sticker saying ‘Return to Scotland’. You can see the sketches on www.cbs/late late show.com
We booked a family holiday in Cancun in Mexico, a four hour flight from LA, the big spring break destination for American college students, only to find that it was directly in the path of Hurricane Dean, as it approached I tried to take out extra insurance but apparently they don’t let you do that. In the end the resort was unscathed.
In an attempt to show that the days of celebrities like OJ and Michael Jackson getting away with breaking the law are long gone here in California ; Lindsay Lohan has been sentenced for possession of coke and two incidents of drunk driving. She was given four days in jail.
Nicole Richie’s sentence for reversing on the freeway out of her head on drugs was a measly ninety hours. She was sent home after an hour and a quarter. One newspaper describes this as ‘Blond Justice’.
One explanation is that LA county’s prisons are so overcrowded that anyone given a sentence of thirty days or less is processed in twelve hours and sent home to do their time, so it seems to me that they are certainly not overcrowded with celebrities.
I imagine that bewigged record producer Phil Spector who is on trial for a murder he actually confessed to, must be rubbing his blood stained hands in glee, thinking it is only a matter of time before he’s out and up to his old tricks.
There are rumours that Britney Spears is planning to move to London to get away from her troubles. Under California law, if you take a kid out of the state without the express permission of the other parent, you can be arrested for child abduction, and besides she’ll never master the parallel parking that London demands.
The rumours of a looming writers’ strike continue to build here with the current writer producer agreement due to run out in a couple of months. The studios boast to Wall St that their record profits will continue, and tell the writers guild that they can’t give them a better deal.
Back in 1988, there was a strike which lasted five months and gave a huge boost to the reality TV sector which has grown so much since then.
Given the huge publicity machine that the producers have access to it is hard for the writers to get their case across, especially since most people think that actors make up their own lines and that all Hollywood writers sit by their pools being fed seedless grapes by their semi naked assistants pausing now and then to jot down a few thoughts on their solid gold typewriters.
The truth of the matter is that only one in every six writers is actually making a living from writing, so that when it comes to a vote, there will probably a lot of guys who are now cutting hair or teaching kindergarten who would rather be telling people that they are a writer on strike than admit that the last thing they wrote was an episode of Flash Gordon.
Another scenario is that we will go on strike along with the Screen Actors Guild a little later. Since this is my last column I thought I’d finish it with an actor joke I just heard.
An actor finishes work earlier than expected, lets himself in the house and goes upstairs to his bedroom to catch a glimpse of a guy’s ass leaping out of the window. His wife is on the bed looking very sheepish.
“What the hell is going on ?” he demands.
“Look, I’m not going to lie to you. I’m sick of your selfishness and the fact that all you care about is your career. I’m having an affair” she hisses, “with your agent !”
The actor thinks about this for a second, catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror and says, excited, “My agent came to my house !”
sunday times column week fifteen
Stspiecewk16
This week all of America’s celebrity magazines are full of Kevin Federline’s subpoena spree, his attempts to serve court orders on various employees/relatives and rehabs in the run up to a bid to change the custody arrangements.
Britney Spears is accused of being an unfit mother, of putting fizzy drinks in her kids’ baby bottles, keeping them up all night so they’ll sleep the next day, dating a Vegas magician, and smashing into parked cars in full view of thirty paparazzi then walking away. She has also been photographed snuggling up to various people in pools and hot tubs all around town.
One magazine’s shrink suggests that she might be bi-polar. To give her credit, she’s not devoid of all maternal feelings, she did ask her dentist if he’d whiten her kids’ teeth.
With Lindsay off in rehab in Utah, Nicole Ritchie pregnant and Paris keeping a relatively low profile, someone has to pick up the slack. Even Amy Winehouse who said no, no, no to rehab has elected to address her pharmaceutical intake and is in treatment here. She reportedly overdosed on a large cocktail of class A drugs including ketamine, or special k, a horse tranquiliser.
The obsessive and constantly updated coverage of Britney’s sad demise has a motorway pile up quality to it, you know that you shouldn’t really be staring but you just can’t help sneaking just one more look. I wonder how future generations will view our unsavoury voyeurism.
It makes me think of Bedlam, the Royal Bethelem Hospital in London. This was the Victorian world’s first psychiatric hospital. For a penny visitors could peer into the cells, view the freaks and laugh at their fights and sexual antics. Visitors were permitted to bring long sticks with which to poke and enrage the inmates. We are much more sophisticated, we have the paparazzi with their long lenses.
On Friday my kids went to yet another theme park with their summer camp. This one is called California Big Adventure and the camp suggested they be given twenty dollars each for lunch and souvenirs. My ginger brood insist that this is not enough.
At my high school we once went to Glen Shee in Aberdeenshire for a one day skiing trip, we were meant to wear water proof clothing and I remember that I wore these painter’s trousers on that were too big for me, covered in yellow paint and not actually water proof.
I only got as far as putting skis on and shuffling around in icy puddles. I went to the café where I discovered that I couldn’t even afford a Mars Bar. We went with Mr Connolly the technical drawing teacher who looked like Peter Cushing and was the colour of tracing paper due to his constant smoking.
On the way home along the winding roads some kid threw up, triggering a chain reaction. By the time we pulled up in Cambuslang we were all knee deep in honked up Opal Fruits and regurgitated Curly Wurlies. Thank God for the painter’s trousers.
In a couple of weeks time Grace starts a new school and she tells me that she is nervous about it all. I try to console by telling her about my high school but it doesn’t help as she thinks I’m either making it all up or at the very least exaggerating.
My worst teacher was Mr McGann, a gingery, bull necked psychopath who ‘taught’ technical drawing. He was big on blanket punishments, and loved belting the whole class. There was something so openly sadistic about him that makes me shudder even now . He carried two belts with him and alarmingly gave them women’s names, one was called Wee Ina, the other Big Bertha.
This sounds like a joke, but I promise you this is the truth ; at our school even the janny carried a belt. He was an intense red head with a beard. He once tried to belt me out in the yard for taking a short cut past some building works. I felt that there was something not right about a janny giving you the belt out in the playground after school was over and I ran off. He looked exactly like Van Gogh, if Van Gogh had been an irate janny.
To be fair to the teachers, there were some crazy kids at my school, like Gerry Duffy who spent a morning rolling around in puddles so that he could come back in the afternoon wearing his new Wrangler jacket and jeans. He once stood on his desk and challenged the head of the school to a ‘square go’. He was eleven years old.
He was from the Circuit, an area of Cambuslang which was as rough as a bear’s arse and had one or two crazy families who worked in the Chunky Chicken factory. Every now and then an entire family would show up outside our school to settle some kind of vendetta. They were easy to spot, they were the ones with a couple of dogs, an air rifle and an array of chicken slaughtering equipment.
A TV film crew once went in there to do a documentary on social deprivation but their investigation had to be abandoned when the locals broke into their van and stole all their equipment.
“Excuse me, pal, wanna buy a TV camera ? It’s no knocked.”
This week all of America’s celebrity magazines are full of Kevin Federline’s subpoena spree, his attempts to serve court orders on various employees/relatives and rehabs in the run up to a bid to change the custody arrangements.
Britney Spears is accused of being an unfit mother, of putting fizzy drinks in her kids’ baby bottles, keeping them up all night so they’ll sleep the next day, dating a Vegas magician, and smashing into parked cars in full view of thirty paparazzi then walking away. She has also been photographed snuggling up to various people in pools and hot tubs all around town.
One magazine’s shrink suggests that she might be bi-polar. To give her credit, she’s not devoid of all maternal feelings, she did ask her dentist if he’d whiten her kids’ teeth.
With Lindsay off in rehab in Utah, Nicole Ritchie pregnant and Paris keeping a relatively low profile, someone has to pick up the slack. Even Amy Winehouse who said no, no, no to rehab has elected to address her pharmaceutical intake and is in treatment here. She reportedly overdosed on a large cocktail of class A drugs including ketamine, or special k, a horse tranquiliser.
The obsessive and constantly updated coverage of Britney’s sad demise has a motorway pile up quality to it, you know that you shouldn’t really be staring but you just can’t help sneaking just one more look. I wonder how future generations will view our unsavoury voyeurism.
It makes me think of Bedlam, the Royal Bethelem Hospital in London. This was the Victorian world’s first psychiatric hospital. For a penny visitors could peer into the cells, view the freaks and laugh at their fights and sexual antics. Visitors were permitted to bring long sticks with which to poke and enrage the inmates. We are much more sophisticated, we have the paparazzi with their long lenses.
On Friday my kids went to yet another theme park with their summer camp. This one is called California Big Adventure and the camp suggested they be given twenty dollars each for lunch and souvenirs. My ginger brood insist that this is not enough.
At my high school we once went to Glen Shee in Aberdeenshire for a one day skiing trip, we were meant to wear water proof clothing and I remember that I wore these painter’s trousers on that were too big for me, covered in yellow paint and not actually water proof.
I only got as far as putting skis on and shuffling around in icy puddles. I went to the café where I discovered that I couldn’t even afford a Mars Bar. We went with Mr Connolly the technical drawing teacher who looked like Peter Cushing and was the colour of tracing paper due to his constant smoking.
On the way home along the winding roads some kid threw up, triggering a chain reaction. By the time we pulled up in Cambuslang we were all knee deep in honked up Opal Fruits and regurgitated Curly Wurlies. Thank God for the painter’s trousers.
In a couple of weeks time Grace starts a new school and she tells me that she is nervous about it all. I try to console by telling her about my high school but it doesn’t help as she thinks I’m either making it all up or at the very least exaggerating.
My worst teacher was Mr McGann, a gingery, bull necked psychopath who ‘taught’ technical drawing. He was big on blanket punishments, and loved belting the whole class. There was something so openly sadistic about him that makes me shudder even now . He carried two belts with him and alarmingly gave them women’s names, one was called Wee Ina, the other Big Bertha.
This sounds like a joke, but I promise you this is the truth ; at our school even the janny carried a belt. He was an intense red head with a beard. He once tried to belt me out in the yard for taking a short cut past some building works. I felt that there was something not right about a janny giving you the belt out in the playground after school was over and I ran off. He looked exactly like Van Gogh, if Van Gogh had been an irate janny.
To be fair to the teachers, there were some crazy kids at my school, like Gerry Duffy who spent a morning rolling around in puddles so that he could come back in the afternoon wearing his new Wrangler jacket and jeans. He once stood on his desk and challenged the head of the school to a ‘square go’. He was eleven years old.
He was from the Circuit, an area of Cambuslang which was as rough as a bear’s arse and had one or two crazy families who worked in the Chunky Chicken factory. Every now and then an entire family would show up outside our school to settle some kind of vendetta. They were easy to spot, they were the ones with a couple of dogs, an air rifle and an array of chicken slaughtering equipment.
A TV film crew once went in there to do a documentary on social deprivation but their investigation had to be abandoned when the locals broke into their van and stole all their equipment.
“Excuse me, pal, wanna buy a TV camera ? It’s no knocked.”
sunday times column week fourteen
What happened in Vegas.
There was an earthquake at one am on Thursday of this week. It measured a four point five on the Richter scale. A friend of mine who lives in the Hollywood hills said he was up and could hear the coyotes calling an hour before it happened. I slept through it
The same day Gabriel my six year old constructed some kind of Dr Seuss device to get up to a very high shelf, undid the childproof lid and took a giant swig of a bottle of Calpol. The medics said that he is so big for his age that he was fine.
Back in London we were practically on first name terms with the people at casualty. There was the plate he smashed with a splinter going into his eye, he was fine, there was the plastic ball that he swallowed which didn’t show up on the X rays but was casually coughed up and presented to me a day or so later. Maybe he has a career as a Vegas magician ahead of him.
Out on the street a platinum haired woman buttonholed me and said, “Excuse me, is this your son? he’s cute”, at which point I stopped her as I knew what was coming. I said that I was not looking to get him into show business. She said ‘that’s a pity, we’re looking for kids for ‘The Suite Life of Zac and Cody’. Every time I’m out with my kids someone tries to get me to put them up for commercials. There must be a shortage of red heads here.
My twelve year old Grace is doing ‘Beauty and The Beast’ at Summer Camp. She tells me that she disagrees with the director, he wants her to sound like the voice in the movie, whereas she wants to make the speaking clock character more her own. I suggest she does it his way for now but when it comes to the final performance she can do it whatever damn way she pleases.
On Thursday I went to Las Vegas, an hour’s flight from LA. We are shooting two more sketches for the show. I play Craig’s deranged cousin who is being driven round America by Matt, one of the show’s production assistants.
They have a sign up by the line for security screening which says that it is a crime to joke about the security measures. The cab driver asks me if I’m English and wants to be sure we have enough cash to give him a good tip, because if not he can take us to an ATM en route. Welcome to Vegas.
We shoot one scene in the Red Rock Casino’s “Lucky” suite one of only four VIP suites at the casino, ten grand a night, but usually given to high rollers who spend a lot of money there. The room and everything in it is purple and there are giant plasma flatscreen TV’s everywhere including the shower.
The best part is the loo. I walk in and the lid lifts up automatically. There is also a built in Japanese style bidet, so that after you’ve done your business a jet of warm water shoots up to ensure that you are clean and fresh. Since I’ve been in Hollywood I’m used to people blowing smoke up my ass, but this is a whole other matter.
Matt and I dress up as showgirls for one sketch, fish nets, pink sequined frocks, four inch heels and a massive Vegas showgirl backpack of pink feathers. The make up is put on with a trowel. As Kenny Everett used to say, “it is all in the best possible taste.”
At 2 am at the end of the shoot, a chubby woman in a tight dress walks over and says my friend wants to give you her card. At first I thought she was an actress who had been watching the filming. Her card had two photos and said Nicole: classy, discrete, professional entertainment, private parties, couples, home, office, hotel, and a phone number. She was in a different branch of late night entertainment.
It must be a weird life living in a giant bookies in the middle of a desert. There is something so unforgiving about Vegas, there’s the sun, and the slots, and the way the odds always favour the house. It has a Wild West vibe to it, it is kind of Deadwood on steroids.
The casino management were helpful but there is something so steely about these guys, they all have those secret service things in their ears and a cold glint in their eyes that makes me think of a homicide cop, of someone who seen too much of the dark side of human nature.
As one of them said to me, as long as they keep making people who are not very good at maths, Vegas will just keep on growing.
There was an earthquake at one am on Thursday of this week. It measured a four point five on the Richter scale. A friend of mine who lives in the Hollywood hills said he was up and could hear the coyotes calling an hour before it happened. I slept through it
The same day Gabriel my six year old constructed some kind of Dr Seuss device to get up to a very high shelf, undid the childproof lid and took a giant swig of a bottle of Calpol. The medics said that he is so big for his age that he was fine.
Back in London we were practically on first name terms with the people at casualty. There was the plate he smashed with a splinter going into his eye, he was fine, there was the plastic ball that he swallowed which didn’t show up on the X rays but was casually coughed up and presented to me a day or so later. Maybe he has a career as a Vegas magician ahead of him.
Out on the street a platinum haired woman buttonholed me and said, “Excuse me, is this your son? he’s cute”, at which point I stopped her as I knew what was coming. I said that I was not looking to get him into show business. She said ‘that’s a pity, we’re looking for kids for ‘The Suite Life of Zac and Cody’. Every time I’m out with my kids someone tries to get me to put them up for commercials. There must be a shortage of red heads here.
My twelve year old Grace is doing ‘Beauty and The Beast’ at Summer Camp. She tells me that she disagrees with the director, he wants her to sound like the voice in the movie, whereas she wants to make the speaking clock character more her own. I suggest she does it his way for now but when it comes to the final performance she can do it whatever damn way she pleases.
On Thursday I went to Las Vegas, an hour’s flight from LA. We are shooting two more sketches for the show. I play Craig’s deranged cousin who is being driven round America by Matt, one of the show’s production assistants.
They have a sign up by the line for security screening which says that it is a crime to joke about the security measures. The cab driver asks me if I’m English and wants to be sure we have enough cash to give him a good tip, because if not he can take us to an ATM en route. Welcome to Vegas.
We shoot one scene in the Red Rock Casino’s “Lucky” suite one of only four VIP suites at the casino, ten grand a night, but usually given to high rollers who spend a lot of money there. The room and everything in it is purple and there are giant plasma flatscreen TV’s everywhere including the shower.
The best part is the loo. I walk in and the lid lifts up automatically. There is also a built in Japanese style bidet, so that after you’ve done your business a jet of warm water shoots up to ensure that you are clean and fresh. Since I’ve been in Hollywood I’m used to people blowing smoke up my ass, but this is a whole other matter.
Matt and I dress up as showgirls for one sketch, fish nets, pink sequined frocks, four inch heels and a massive Vegas showgirl backpack of pink feathers. The make up is put on with a trowel. As Kenny Everett used to say, “it is all in the best possible taste.”
At 2 am at the end of the shoot, a chubby woman in a tight dress walks over and says my friend wants to give you her card. At first I thought she was an actress who had been watching the filming. Her card had two photos and said Nicole: classy, discrete, professional entertainment, private parties, couples, home, office, hotel, and a phone number. She was in a different branch of late night entertainment.
It must be a weird life living in a giant bookies in the middle of a desert. There is something so unforgiving about Vegas, there’s the sun, and the slots, and the way the odds always favour the house. It has a Wild West vibe to it, it is kind of Deadwood on steroids.
The casino management were helpful but there is something so steely about these guys, they all have those secret service things in their ears and a cold glint in their eyes that makes me think of a homicide cop, of someone who seen too much of the dark side of human nature.
As one of them said to me, as long as they keep making people who are not very good at maths, Vegas will just keep on growing.
sunday times column week thirteen
Pammy, Swords and Gambling.
‘Pamela will be here in ten minutes’ Doug our slightly creepy stage manager told me, as if this was going to be the highlight of our lives.
Pamela Anderson was coming on to plug a Vegas magic show in which she is an assistant to a Dutch magician called Hans Klok. At key points in the show Pammy leaps out of various types of containers, but he also has a Dutch lady assistant who does the bulk of the getting sawn in half and saying ‘Ta Da!’, or the Dutch equivalent.
Mr Klok wears more make up than Joan Collins and Little Richard combined. He looks like a hairdresser from the eighties. His show is all flames and wind machines and dyed blond hair. In fact if you are looking for a good working definition of the word camp, you could do worse than check out his act.
At one point in the interview with Pammy and Hans, Craig asks them if they made out, and Hans is clearly a little confused by the term, so Pamela leans over to him and says sotto voce, “Just nod your head’. Hans did his best to flirt with her once he got the idea, but as soon as the interview was over he rushed over to his Dutch assistant to explain what was going on. Before the show had even aired, the story was on the internet.
On Wednesday I saw a British film “This is England” set among skinheads in the North of England in the early eighties. It is a powerful movie and brought back memories of growing up in Glasgow in the seventies.
I spent the bulk of my teens running away from complete strangers who wished to do me harm. I was always very tall for my age and every time I left our housing scheme a large group of smallish kids would materialise from nowhere and ask ‘What team do you support? Even if you guessed right on the team, the follow up would be along the lines of ‘I heard you called me a poof’ or ‘I saw you looking at my bird’ these were dubious allegations but the onus was on me to disprove them, so I’d have to start running.
I reckon that the seventies fashions saved my life; because these guys were wearing platforms and huge flairs, I usually got away.
The whole decade had a kind of Lord of the Rings quality to it, a sort of undeclared civil war fought with swords.
A friend of mine was a junior doctor at the Royal Infirmary in Glasgow in the early eighties and he worked alongside a German doctor who had specifically asked to come to Glasgow because he had made a special study of medieval war wounds. When he found out that my native city was one of the few places where people still fought with swords, he immediately applied for a residency there.
One of the first nights that he was on call a guy came into casualty with some kind of broadsword injury, sustained no doubt by looking at someone else’s bird. The wound ran from his shoulder across his back down to his waist. The victim arrived at the hospital pre’ anaesthetized and was a little blasé about the extent of his injuries.
As the excited German medic is sewing the guy up, he looks at the wound and asks “Vat kind of sword vas it, that you were attacked vith?”. The guy on the gurney shrugs and said, ‘Just an ordinary sword.’ This became the title of the piece the doctor wrote recounting his time in Glasgow in a medical journal.
This is a stark contrast to the life my own kids have here in Southern California. I’ve become the Yorkshireman in the Monty Python sketch who keeps banging on about how tough he had it.
The open air cinema in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery is showing ‘Pee Wee’s Big Adventure’. Pee Wee’s career came to an abrupt end when he was caught in an adult cinema, doing something other than looking for his bike. The e mail they send says : ‘Watch classic movies under the stars, and above the stars.’
Hollywood is a surprisingly morbid place. This week the TMZ celebrity gossip website has a link to another website called Ghoulpool.us which as its name suggests allows you to put up money to bet on which celebrities will move on to that big V.I.P. room in the sky in the coming year. It was under a piece about Lindsey Lohan.
There is a complicated formula of rewards depending on the age of the celeb and the nature of their demise. To be fair though, they do stress that if you kill the person yourself, you forfeit the right to any prize money.
‘Pamela will be here in ten minutes’ Doug our slightly creepy stage manager told me, as if this was going to be the highlight of our lives.
Pamela Anderson was coming on to plug a Vegas magic show in which she is an assistant to a Dutch magician called Hans Klok. At key points in the show Pammy leaps out of various types of containers, but he also has a Dutch lady assistant who does the bulk of the getting sawn in half and saying ‘Ta Da!’, or the Dutch equivalent.
Mr Klok wears more make up than Joan Collins and Little Richard combined. He looks like a hairdresser from the eighties. His show is all flames and wind machines and dyed blond hair. In fact if you are looking for a good working definition of the word camp, you could do worse than check out his act.
At one point in the interview with Pammy and Hans, Craig asks them if they made out, and Hans is clearly a little confused by the term, so Pamela leans over to him and says sotto voce, “Just nod your head’. Hans did his best to flirt with her once he got the idea, but as soon as the interview was over he rushed over to his Dutch assistant to explain what was going on. Before the show had even aired, the story was on the internet.
On Wednesday I saw a British film “This is England” set among skinheads in the North of England in the early eighties. It is a powerful movie and brought back memories of growing up in Glasgow in the seventies.
I spent the bulk of my teens running away from complete strangers who wished to do me harm. I was always very tall for my age and every time I left our housing scheme a large group of smallish kids would materialise from nowhere and ask ‘What team do you support? Even if you guessed right on the team, the follow up would be along the lines of ‘I heard you called me a poof’ or ‘I saw you looking at my bird’ these were dubious allegations but the onus was on me to disprove them, so I’d have to start running.
I reckon that the seventies fashions saved my life; because these guys were wearing platforms and huge flairs, I usually got away.
The whole decade had a kind of Lord of the Rings quality to it, a sort of undeclared civil war fought with swords.
A friend of mine was a junior doctor at the Royal Infirmary in Glasgow in the early eighties and he worked alongside a German doctor who had specifically asked to come to Glasgow because he had made a special study of medieval war wounds. When he found out that my native city was one of the few places where people still fought with swords, he immediately applied for a residency there.
One of the first nights that he was on call a guy came into casualty with some kind of broadsword injury, sustained no doubt by looking at someone else’s bird. The wound ran from his shoulder across his back down to his waist. The victim arrived at the hospital pre’ anaesthetized and was a little blasé about the extent of his injuries.
As the excited German medic is sewing the guy up, he looks at the wound and asks “Vat kind of sword vas it, that you were attacked vith?”. The guy on the gurney shrugs and said, ‘Just an ordinary sword.’ This became the title of the piece the doctor wrote recounting his time in Glasgow in a medical journal.
This is a stark contrast to the life my own kids have here in Southern California. I’ve become the Yorkshireman in the Monty Python sketch who keeps banging on about how tough he had it.
The open air cinema in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery is showing ‘Pee Wee’s Big Adventure’. Pee Wee’s career came to an abrupt end when he was caught in an adult cinema, doing something other than looking for his bike. The e mail they send says : ‘Watch classic movies under the stars, and above the stars.’
Hollywood is a surprisingly morbid place. This week the TMZ celebrity gossip website has a link to another website called Ghoulpool.us which as its name suggests allows you to put up money to bet on which celebrities will move on to that big V.I.P. room in the sky in the coming year. It was under a piece about Lindsey Lohan.
There is a complicated formula of rewards depending on the age of the celeb and the nature of their demise. To be fair though, they do stress that if you kill the person yourself, you forfeit the right to any prize money.
sunday times column week twelve
Gambling and Girls Gone Wild
This week I sat in on a conference call to find a location for some sketches we are hoping to shoot in Vegas. We were looking for a flash looking penthouse with a view overlooking the strip there.
Some of the options were the one used in the film Rainman which has a Jacuzzi with a commanding view of Vegas and is the size of Livingston.
Classier again is the Playboy casino which has a mammoth purple suite whose centerpiece is a tastefully lit stripper pole. Yeah, baby!
There is another which has been specially designed for high rolling players from the NBA, the National Basketball Association, it has an extra large, extra long bed, and that thing you always dreamed of having in your bedroom, a half size basketball court. If you can’t score here, you might as well hang up your giant Nikes.
Vegas is Babylon, a city of pure capitalism, a neon circus in the desert founded by Mafiosi as a haven for gamblers and built for money laundering. You land at the airport and there are slot machines in the arrivals lounge, for those who are in too much of a hurry to lose all their money to even wait until they get to the hotel.
It is so hot there that you can barely step into the street without your hair going on fire. There are no clocks, this is a place where they want you to lose all sense of time. I remember standing at the window of my room on the twentieth floor of my hotel looking down on people hanging out by the pool at five am.
Sin City is trying to re-brand itself as a family destination, like someone with b.o. trying to cover it up with cheap perfume. Their TV ad slogan is “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”
The truth is that what happens in Vegas, such as serious gambling debts or certain kinds of diseases, may well actually follow you home.
All this is a long way from the one arm bandits of Saltcoats of my youth or the greyhound track that used to run in Shawfield Stadium that my dad took me to. There were often rumours of races being fixed, dogs being given valium or a greasy meat pie before a race, it was sort of the Tour De France, for dogs, of its day.
As a topical comedy writer, human misery is my stock in trade and it’s been a pretty good week.
Lindsey Lohan has fallen off the wagon, chasing her assistant into Santa Monica police station, having left her sobriety monitoring device but not her cocaine, back in the bar.
When searched, she said ‘it’s not mine’ the defence which I used myself when I was first caught with cigarettes by my mum when I was fifteen, and about as effective as ‘the dog ate my homework’.
The three guys who were in the car with her claim they were so traumatized that they want damages. They say that when they got to the cop shop the quick thinking starlet pointed to one of her hapless passengers and told the cop “I wasn’t me driving, it was the black guy” When in doubt, blame the black guy.
The posh rehab in Malibu she went to is called “Promises”. They should perhaps consider changing its name to “Broken Promises” or “Promises, Promises”.
In the old days the studio would have covered all this up, there is a famous story about a junior executive in the nineteen fifties who actually went to jail for a couple of years to cover up for the real drunk driver who was a big movie star.
Meanwhile Nicole Richie who drove the wrong way on the freeway with a big bag of grass and enough Vicodin pain killers to knock out an elephant, was made an example of and given four days in the slammer.
Britney, another Promises graduate, is also in trouble as her marathon meltdown continues apace. A shrink told me the real reason she’d shaved her head was that she’d been warned that a hair sample can identify any narcotics taken in the last two years, so she did it to avoid a drug test, out of fear that K Fed would get the kids.
Seemingly the poor thing turned up at a magazine photoshoot and wiped greasy chicken wings on an expensive designer dress. Then after her tiny dog left a brown calling card she used another frock to mop that up. She was in such a distressed state that the photos and the interview had to be scrapped as being altogether unusable. Apparently she fretted continually about the ceiling being about to fall in on her. Unfortunately I think it already has.
This week I sat in on a conference call to find a location for some sketches we are hoping to shoot in Vegas. We were looking for a flash looking penthouse with a view overlooking the strip there.
Some of the options were the one used in the film Rainman which has a Jacuzzi with a commanding view of Vegas and is the size of Livingston.
Classier again is the Playboy casino which has a mammoth purple suite whose centerpiece is a tastefully lit stripper pole. Yeah, baby!
There is another which has been specially designed for high rolling players from the NBA, the National Basketball Association, it has an extra large, extra long bed, and that thing you always dreamed of having in your bedroom, a half size basketball court. If you can’t score here, you might as well hang up your giant Nikes.
Vegas is Babylon, a city of pure capitalism, a neon circus in the desert founded by Mafiosi as a haven for gamblers and built for money laundering. You land at the airport and there are slot machines in the arrivals lounge, for those who are in too much of a hurry to lose all their money to even wait until they get to the hotel.
It is so hot there that you can barely step into the street without your hair going on fire. There are no clocks, this is a place where they want you to lose all sense of time. I remember standing at the window of my room on the twentieth floor of my hotel looking down on people hanging out by the pool at five am.
Sin City is trying to re-brand itself as a family destination, like someone with b.o. trying to cover it up with cheap perfume. Their TV ad slogan is “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”
The truth is that what happens in Vegas, such as serious gambling debts or certain kinds of diseases, may well actually follow you home.
All this is a long way from the one arm bandits of Saltcoats of my youth or the greyhound track that used to run in Shawfield Stadium that my dad took me to. There were often rumours of races being fixed, dogs being given valium or a greasy meat pie before a race, it was sort of the Tour De France, for dogs, of its day.
As a topical comedy writer, human misery is my stock in trade and it’s been a pretty good week.
Lindsey Lohan has fallen off the wagon, chasing her assistant into Santa Monica police station, having left her sobriety monitoring device but not her cocaine, back in the bar.
When searched, she said ‘it’s not mine’ the defence which I used myself when I was first caught with cigarettes by my mum when I was fifteen, and about as effective as ‘the dog ate my homework’.
The three guys who were in the car with her claim they were so traumatized that they want damages. They say that when they got to the cop shop the quick thinking starlet pointed to one of her hapless passengers and told the cop “I wasn’t me driving, it was the black guy” When in doubt, blame the black guy.
The posh rehab in Malibu she went to is called “Promises”. They should perhaps consider changing its name to “Broken Promises” or “Promises, Promises”.
In the old days the studio would have covered all this up, there is a famous story about a junior executive in the nineteen fifties who actually went to jail for a couple of years to cover up for the real drunk driver who was a big movie star.
Meanwhile Nicole Richie who drove the wrong way on the freeway with a big bag of grass and enough Vicodin pain killers to knock out an elephant, was made an example of and given four days in the slammer.
Britney, another Promises graduate, is also in trouble as her marathon meltdown continues apace. A shrink told me the real reason she’d shaved her head was that she’d been warned that a hair sample can identify any narcotics taken in the last two years, so she did it to avoid a drug test, out of fear that K Fed would get the kids.
Seemingly the poor thing turned up at a magazine photoshoot and wiped greasy chicken wings on an expensive designer dress. Then after her tiny dog left a brown calling card she used another frock to mop that up. She was in such a distressed state that the photos and the interview had to be scrapped as being altogether unusable. Apparently she fretted continually about the ceiling being about to fall in on her. Unfortunately I think it already has.
sunday times column week eleven
Harry Potter and the Philosopher Sharon Stone.
My eleven year old daughter started sobbing last night and I have only myself to blame.
When I asked what was wrong she told me she was crying because the Harry Potter books were coming to an end. I told her that she could always re-read the books and that JK Rowling would write other books. She shot me an angry look and said that I didn’t understand, that she had grown up with these characters and that this would be the last one.
When the books originally came out I got her the tapes to listen to before she was even able to read them.
By book two or three I remember looking in to check she was asleep and seeing her seven year old face wide eyed in terror at whatever awful thing was threatening to destroy the boy wizard. As a parent I’d wanted her to share my love of reading but on the other hand I did worry she was going to turn grey overnight.
I ordered the book on Amazon to be delivered to my office but we are away on holiday an hour and half north of LA and I’m now hiding newspapers and changing the TV channels so she doesn’t stumble across a spoiler before she has the chance to crack open the book.
I have seen all of the movies and found them hard going so it was with trepidation that on Saturday I got three tickets to see fifth movie at Mann’s Chinese theater on Hollywood Boulevard, where every inch of pavement has the handprint of a movie star from Charlie Chaplin’s little feet to Lassie’s pawprints.
To pick up our tickets, we had to fight our way past Johnny Depp, or actually three Johnny Depps, all look-alikes, one Edward Scissorhands, one Willie Wonka and one from Pirates.
I actually enjoyed this one and the story engaged me so much that I was almost unaware of the buff Daniel Radcliffe and his blinky performance. For me the real stars of the movie were Imelda Staunton her smirking cruelty a reincarnation of Blessed Margaret Thatcher and Alan Rickman whose pained ennui at having to be a teacher was something I could identify with.
On Monday night I was one of the few here who watched the Posh Beckham reality show, Coming To America. If that was the best of the six hours they had hoped to air, I hope that the editor was given an extra muffin basket for having sat through all of it.
At one point to throw the paparazzi off the scent, so that she could surprise David with a new watch, she put a wig on a blow up doll to act as a decoy. As the seconds inched by I wondered if they had somehow got the two mixed up on the show and if I was still watching the doll.
At one point she goes to a Hollywood café to confront Perez Hilton, a startled little munchkin who runs a Hollywood gossip website called TMZ, named for the thirty mile zone around the centre of Hollywood. Watching her reminded me of Vinnie Jones’ interview on our show when he said that David was only coming here so he could help carry her bags.
This weekend Tom Cruise is flying back from filming in Germany to throw a welcome party for Posh & Becks at LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a massive art deco museum literally across the road from where I live. He’s invited six hundred of his closest friends and I’m only sorry I’m out of town this weekend.
The LA times this week has photos of Tom in the role of the German officer who was behind the failed attempt to blow up Hitler in the last days of the Third Reich. He is in Wehrmacht uniform complete eye patch and trying his damnest to look all Prussian and tough, but somehow he just reminds me of a camp Peter Sellers character.
There has been controversy in Germany where they are not fans of Scientology and they refused the film makers permission to use certain key locations if they insisted that Tom play him. I can only assume that they are anxious to protect the good name of the Nazis.
The TMZ website has just announced that Craig Ferguson is now dating Sharon Stone. They often get it wrong, like the time a Scottish tabloid announced that Craig was engaged to Laurel Canyon, which was in fact the area in Hollywood where he was living, rather like reporting that he is dating Newton Mearns.
From a link at the end of the story I came across an internet chat strand about Craig and Sharon Stone, the comments made me laugh out loud. They ranged from “dude, I thought he was gay!” to “I can believe it because I heard she likes funny, clever types and even considered moving to Ireland, to meet people like Dylan Thomas.”
None of them seemed to worry that Dylan is first of all Welsh and perhaps more importantly has been dead for over fifty years. Dude, whatever !
My eleven year old daughter started sobbing last night and I have only myself to blame.
When I asked what was wrong she told me she was crying because the Harry Potter books were coming to an end. I told her that she could always re-read the books and that JK Rowling would write other books. She shot me an angry look and said that I didn’t understand, that she had grown up with these characters and that this would be the last one.
When the books originally came out I got her the tapes to listen to before she was even able to read them.
By book two or three I remember looking in to check she was asleep and seeing her seven year old face wide eyed in terror at whatever awful thing was threatening to destroy the boy wizard. As a parent I’d wanted her to share my love of reading but on the other hand I did worry she was going to turn grey overnight.
I ordered the book on Amazon to be delivered to my office but we are away on holiday an hour and half north of LA and I’m now hiding newspapers and changing the TV channels so she doesn’t stumble across a spoiler before she has the chance to crack open the book.
I have seen all of the movies and found them hard going so it was with trepidation that on Saturday I got three tickets to see fifth movie at Mann’s Chinese theater on Hollywood Boulevard, where every inch of pavement has the handprint of a movie star from Charlie Chaplin’s little feet to Lassie’s pawprints.
To pick up our tickets, we had to fight our way past Johnny Depp, or actually three Johnny Depps, all look-alikes, one Edward Scissorhands, one Willie Wonka and one from Pirates.
I actually enjoyed this one and the story engaged me so much that I was almost unaware of the buff Daniel Radcliffe and his blinky performance. For me the real stars of the movie were Imelda Staunton her smirking cruelty a reincarnation of Blessed Margaret Thatcher and Alan Rickman whose pained ennui at having to be a teacher was something I could identify with.
On Monday night I was one of the few here who watched the Posh Beckham reality show, Coming To America. If that was the best of the six hours they had hoped to air, I hope that the editor was given an extra muffin basket for having sat through all of it.
At one point to throw the paparazzi off the scent, so that she could surprise David with a new watch, she put a wig on a blow up doll to act as a decoy. As the seconds inched by I wondered if they had somehow got the two mixed up on the show and if I was still watching the doll.
At one point she goes to a Hollywood café to confront Perez Hilton, a startled little munchkin who runs a Hollywood gossip website called TMZ, named for the thirty mile zone around the centre of Hollywood. Watching her reminded me of Vinnie Jones’ interview on our show when he said that David was only coming here so he could help carry her bags.
This weekend Tom Cruise is flying back from filming in Germany to throw a welcome party for Posh & Becks at LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a massive art deco museum literally across the road from where I live. He’s invited six hundred of his closest friends and I’m only sorry I’m out of town this weekend.
The LA times this week has photos of Tom in the role of the German officer who was behind the failed attempt to blow up Hitler in the last days of the Third Reich. He is in Wehrmacht uniform complete eye patch and trying his damnest to look all Prussian and tough, but somehow he just reminds me of a camp Peter Sellers character.
There has been controversy in Germany where they are not fans of Scientology and they refused the film makers permission to use certain key locations if they insisted that Tom play him. I can only assume that they are anxious to protect the good name of the Nazis.
The TMZ website has just announced that Craig Ferguson is now dating Sharon Stone. They often get it wrong, like the time a Scottish tabloid announced that Craig was engaged to Laurel Canyon, which was in fact the area in Hollywood where he was living, rather like reporting that he is dating Newton Mearns.
From a link at the end of the story I came across an internet chat strand about Craig and Sharon Stone, the comments made me laugh out loud. They ranged from “dude, I thought he was gay!” to “I can believe it because I heard she likes funny, clever types and even considered moving to Ireland, to meet people like Dylan Thomas.”
None of them seemed to worry that Dylan is first of all Welsh and perhaps more importantly has been dead for over fifty years. Dude, whatever !
sunday times column week ten
Potter Versus Posh
This week Harry Potter and David Beckham both hit Los Angeles. They could hardly be more different, one is a squeaky voiced over-hyped kid with a massive PR machine behind him, the other is Harry Potter.
This week Harry, Ron and Hermione got their stars on the Hollywood walk of fame, hands and feet in the wet cement. We had Ron on the show, a shy, weirdly normal kid, who said that he’d just bought himself an ice cream van, just for the hell of it.
They were photographed on Hollywood Boulevard outside Mann’s Chinese Theater. It’s a famous tourist trap where on a weekend up to a hundred street performers , look-alikes and superheroes, work the strip for the tourists who want to get their pictures taken with Chewbacca, Spiderman, Marilyn Monroe.
Seemingly one of the problems is that some of the less scrupulous street performers will just leap in to the shot and then demand money from the tourist. At least once a month the cops are called in to restore order among the movie icons, imperial stormtroopers, and befuddled tourists.
There is something oddly pleasing about the TV footage of an angry six foot five dude in a Chewbacca outfit, minus the headpiece, being huckled away by the LAPD for nutting a tourguide. “Look at me, ma, I’m on national TV!”
Another time Batman and Spidey got into a stand off with some striking construction workers who didn’t want them to use their portaloo and before you could say Holy Shit the black and whites were on their way again.
The latest fracas involved a Chewie making a lewd and libidinous gesture towards a Marilyn Monroe while she was being photographed then running off before the cops could find him. Only here on the walk of fame could a six foot five alien dive into a crowd and disappear.
All this is a long way from the Posh and Becks machine, but it seems to me that it’s not a foregone conclusion that they will crack America and earn the money their publicists claim .
For a start if there is one thing that we are not short of here in Los Angeles, it’s malnourished women with implants who have an inflated sense of their own importance. Posh’s reality show ‘Coming to America’ has gone from a six part series on the struggling network NBC to a one off special, forty minutes of her house hunting, fretting over her driver’s license photos and showing off her cupboards and her much touted dry sense of humour.
I read on a British tabloid website that Rebecca Loos is trying to take credit for strengthening their marriage by having affair with him, which is a bit like Hitler taking credit for the founding of the state of Israel.
Soccer as they call it is big here like La Crosse is big in Europe. It is popular with Latinos but beyond the age of twelve kids play baseball, basketball or American football. A live sporting event with plenty of ad breaks for TV, t-shirts fired into the crowd with a canon, celebrities on giant jumbotron screens, cheerleaders and instant replays. It is a sport branded so aggressively it would make Posh and Becks blush at the modesty of their ambitions.
Beckham is now at an age when footballers used to start looking around for a good pub to invest in and he joins a team who are underperforming in a league that looks to me like an above average pub team, the mismatch has the feel of a movie.
Beckham’s gig here is clearly a sideshow to the main event which is the attempt to launch the Beckham Brand here in America. Seemingly they are massive in Japan where people love the fact that they are both so clean looking, like a Barbie couple. My guess is he’ll be seeing a vocal coach to deepen his voice so that he can start acting.
Meanwhile I have been doing my own modest bit for the Ford Motor Brand doing more sketches to plug their new SUV on the show. Yesterday we did two sketches on the coast in Malibu, one involving rock climbing and the other surfing. Even though most of the hard stuff was done by body doubles, the few hours of rock climbing, sucking in my gut on the beach and being hit in the nuts repeatedly by my own surfboard have left me feeling like I have played ninety minutes against Vinny Jones.
Watching Joe the professional climber stick on a ginger wig and a kilt, climb a sheer cliff face like he was a monkey, fall two stories onto a crash pad then leap up and do it all again was a laugh.
The real highlight of the day for me came after I staggered out of the water having failed to even get up on the surfboard in the rough seas to watch my pro surfer double as he weaved and bobbed casually through the waves in a kilt.
There was something about that image of a guy skimming those waves in a soaking wet kilt, Braveheart meets the Beachboys, that made me smile at the wonder and the silliness of it all.
This week Harry Potter and David Beckham both hit Los Angeles. They could hardly be more different, one is a squeaky voiced over-hyped kid with a massive PR machine behind him, the other is Harry Potter.
This week Harry, Ron and Hermione got their stars on the Hollywood walk of fame, hands and feet in the wet cement. We had Ron on the show, a shy, weirdly normal kid, who said that he’d just bought himself an ice cream van, just for the hell of it.
They were photographed on Hollywood Boulevard outside Mann’s Chinese Theater. It’s a famous tourist trap where on a weekend up to a hundred street performers , look-alikes and superheroes, work the strip for the tourists who want to get their pictures taken with Chewbacca, Spiderman, Marilyn Monroe.
Seemingly one of the problems is that some of the less scrupulous street performers will just leap in to the shot and then demand money from the tourist. At least once a month the cops are called in to restore order among the movie icons, imperial stormtroopers, and befuddled tourists.
There is something oddly pleasing about the TV footage of an angry six foot five dude in a Chewbacca outfit, minus the headpiece, being huckled away by the LAPD for nutting a tourguide. “Look at me, ma, I’m on national TV!”
Another time Batman and Spidey got into a stand off with some striking construction workers who didn’t want them to use their portaloo and before you could say Holy Shit the black and whites were on their way again.
The latest fracas involved a Chewie making a lewd and libidinous gesture towards a Marilyn Monroe while she was being photographed then running off before the cops could find him. Only here on the walk of fame could a six foot five alien dive into a crowd and disappear.
All this is a long way from the Posh and Becks machine, but it seems to me that it’s not a foregone conclusion that they will crack America and earn the money their publicists claim .
For a start if there is one thing that we are not short of here in Los Angeles, it’s malnourished women with implants who have an inflated sense of their own importance. Posh’s reality show ‘Coming to America’ has gone from a six part series on the struggling network NBC to a one off special, forty minutes of her house hunting, fretting over her driver’s license photos and showing off her cupboards and her much touted dry sense of humour.
I read on a British tabloid website that Rebecca Loos is trying to take credit for strengthening their marriage by having affair with him, which is a bit like Hitler taking credit for the founding of the state of Israel.
Soccer as they call it is big here like La Crosse is big in Europe. It is popular with Latinos but beyond the age of twelve kids play baseball, basketball or American football. A live sporting event with plenty of ad breaks for TV, t-shirts fired into the crowd with a canon, celebrities on giant jumbotron screens, cheerleaders and instant replays. It is a sport branded so aggressively it would make Posh and Becks blush at the modesty of their ambitions.
Beckham is now at an age when footballers used to start looking around for a good pub to invest in and he joins a team who are underperforming in a league that looks to me like an above average pub team, the mismatch has the feel of a movie.
Beckham’s gig here is clearly a sideshow to the main event which is the attempt to launch the Beckham Brand here in America. Seemingly they are massive in Japan where people love the fact that they are both so clean looking, like a Barbie couple. My guess is he’ll be seeing a vocal coach to deepen his voice so that he can start acting.
Meanwhile I have been doing my own modest bit for the Ford Motor Brand doing more sketches to plug their new SUV on the show. Yesterday we did two sketches on the coast in Malibu, one involving rock climbing and the other surfing. Even though most of the hard stuff was done by body doubles, the few hours of rock climbing, sucking in my gut on the beach and being hit in the nuts repeatedly by my own surfboard have left me feeling like I have played ninety minutes against Vinny Jones.
Watching Joe the professional climber stick on a ginger wig and a kilt, climb a sheer cliff face like he was a monkey, fall two stories onto a crash pad then leap up and do it all again was a laugh.
The real highlight of the day for me came after I staggered out of the water having failed to even get up on the surfboard in the rough seas to watch my pro surfer double as he weaved and bobbed casually through the waves in a kilt.
There was something about that image of a guy skimming those waves in a soaking wet kilt, Braveheart meets the Beachboys, that made me smile at the wonder and the silliness of it all.
sunday times column week nine
Dead Famous
On Sunday we drove half an hour down to the boardwalk at Venice Beach. A cross between the Barras and a low rent seaside circus, it is the scummy tidemark on the bath that was the Sixties.
There is a guy who looks like Osama Bin Laden on roller skates with a little amp and an electric guitar who plays Hendrix songs as he speeds backwards along the beachfront.
You can get a massage, a healing, some sage or have your name carved on a grain of rice. Semi naked jugglers, toothless tarot readers, acid casualties hawking sandals, tie die t-shirts, posters of Al Pacino all vie for your money.
Hare Krishnas, fire eating Latvians, and bored looking Scientologists all compete for the Sunday crowd. There is a sand sculpture of a dragon, a woman shouting about circumcision, and a guy doing a robot dance to fund his planned trip to Mars.
My own personal favourite is the guy who emerges from an actual trash can holding a sign, Spare Some Cash For Poor White Trash, but the cops move him on, as he doesn’t have a licence.
At the end of the Boardwalk is Muscle beach - a former haunt of our Governor, an open air gym where bulked up, steroid stuffed musclemen preen and pose, their oiled up muscles glistening in the late evening sun.
Venice reminds me a bit of the Barras in Glasgow: the guys hawking plates, selling dud batteries, and those same Scarface posters, that weird conjunction of enterprise and desperation.
Though for surreal madness you couldn’t beat Paddy’s market, a street market in the Gallowgate in Glasgow’s East End where you’d see a guy selling a broken shoe lace, a comb with even fewer teeth than he had and a broken light bulb with all the solemnity of an auctioneer at Sotheby’s. Paddy’s Market is most likely all gentrified now and has been turned into a Charles Rennie Mackintosh themed delicatessen.
Los Angeles is a dangerous place. There are mudslides, flashfloods, race riots, earthquakes, drive by shootings, coyotes, rattlesnakes and wild fires.
It was the 4th of July the other week, it is sort of Guy Fawkes’ night meets Ne’erday, lots of parties and people dressed up in clothes made from the Stars and Stripes.
Fireworks are illegal here due to the fire risk, we are in the midst of the longest drought on record. It’s mostly official firework displays but people sneak them in from the neighbouring state of Nevada where seemingly almost nothing is illegal.
One guy made the news after he got into trouble though he’d tried to make sure he wouldn’t be seen by having his private firework display somewhere discreet, in his house.
On July fourth there are always a few injuries caused by ignorance of the basic principles of Newtonian physics. In some of the less affluent parts of town they shoot guns into the air, forgetting that what goes up must come down. So there are always people who land up in the ER because some gangsta shot a bullet that landed on them. They even have ads on the back of buses asking people not to do this.
With all this danger you have to think ahead. There is a huge cemetery here called Hollywood Forever. It was run down and in a mess when two young guys took it over a few years ago and turned it around, making it the in place to be buried.
Its most famous resident is Valentino, who died at 31. It was said that each year on the anniversary of his death a mysterious grief stricken lady in black would turn up at his grave. It turned out when someone did some digging that she was an actress in the pay of the studio. The great director Cecil B De Mille is buried there in a grave facing his beloved Paramount Studios across the road. For the more obscure residents they even have a website, findagrave.com.
Since the new and enterprising owners took over they’ve started showing movies there once a fortnight in the Summer, for ten bucks you can watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest projected onto a white wall in the cemetery. There was even talk of the Zombie movie, “Dawn of the Dead” being in the programme but the graveyard owners stepped in and nixed it.
They do funerals from around eighteen hundred bucks or nine hundred quid, and they’ll even do you a sort of highlight reel of your life. For friends who care but don’t want the hassle of actually having to show up at your funeral they offer a service where mourners can watch your funeral on line, cybergrief.
There is even a guy out here who runs something called Dearly Departed Tours, for the more morbid tourist. Scott Michaels will drive you to the site of The Manson killings, passing the house of the Menendez brothers who murdered their parents. He’ll recount the story of the Welsh actress who met her death by jumping off the Hollywood sign, before they fenced it off. For a bit of light relief en route you can see where Hugh Grant was busted with Divine Brown and take a pee in the public lavatory where George Michael fell foul of an off duty cop. Classy, and the whole thing only takes half a day.
On Sunday we drove half an hour down to the boardwalk at Venice Beach. A cross between the Barras and a low rent seaside circus, it is the scummy tidemark on the bath that was the Sixties.
There is a guy who looks like Osama Bin Laden on roller skates with a little amp and an electric guitar who plays Hendrix songs as he speeds backwards along the beachfront.
You can get a massage, a healing, some sage or have your name carved on a grain of rice. Semi naked jugglers, toothless tarot readers, acid casualties hawking sandals, tie die t-shirts, posters of Al Pacino all vie for your money.
Hare Krishnas, fire eating Latvians, and bored looking Scientologists all compete for the Sunday crowd. There is a sand sculpture of a dragon, a woman shouting about circumcision, and a guy doing a robot dance to fund his planned trip to Mars.
My own personal favourite is the guy who emerges from an actual trash can holding a sign, Spare Some Cash For Poor White Trash, but the cops move him on, as he doesn’t have a licence.
At the end of the Boardwalk is Muscle beach - a former haunt of our Governor, an open air gym where bulked up, steroid stuffed musclemen preen and pose, their oiled up muscles glistening in the late evening sun.
Venice reminds me a bit of the Barras in Glasgow: the guys hawking plates, selling dud batteries, and those same Scarface posters, that weird conjunction of enterprise and desperation.
Though for surreal madness you couldn’t beat Paddy’s market, a street market in the Gallowgate in Glasgow’s East End where you’d see a guy selling a broken shoe lace, a comb with even fewer teeth than he had and a broken light bulb with all the solemnity of an auctioneer at Sotheby’s. Paddy’s Market is most likely all gentrified now and has been turned into a Charles Rennie Mackintosh themed delicatessen.
Los Angeles is a dangerous place. There are mudslides, flashfloods, race riots, earthquakes, drive by shootings, coyotes, rattlesnakes and wild fires.
It was the 4th of July the other week, it is sort of Guy Fawkes’ night meets Ne’erday, lots of parties and people dressed up in clothes made from the Stars and Stripes.
Fireworks are illegal here due to the fire risk, we are in the midst of the longest drought on record. It’s mostly official firework displays but people sneak them in from the neighbouring state of Nevada where seemingly almost nothing is illegal.
One guy made the news after he got into trouble though he’d tried to make sure he wouldn’t be seen by having his private firework display somewhere discreet, in his house.
On July fourth there are always a few injuries caused by ignorance of the basic principles of Newtonian physics. In some of the less affluent parts of town they shoot guns into the air, forgetting that what goes up must come down. So there are always people who land up in the ER because some gangsta shot a bullet that landed on them. They even have ads on the back of buses asking people not to do this.
With all this danger you have to think ahead. There is a huge cemetery here called Hollywood Forever. It was run down and in a mess when two young guys took it over a few years ago and turned it around, making it the in place to be buried.
Its most famous resident is Valentino, who died at 31. It was said that each year on the anniversary of his death a mysterious grief stricken lady in black would turn up at his grave. It turned out when someone did some digging that she was an actress in the pay of the studio. The great director Cecil B De Mille is buried there in a grave facing his beloved Paramount Studios across the road. For the more obscure residents they even have a website, findagrave.com.
Since the new and enterprising owners took over they’ve started showing movies there once a fortnight in the Summer, for ten bucks you can watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest projected onto a white wall in the cemetery. There was even talk of the Zombie movie, “Dawn of the Dead” being in the programme but the graveyard owners stepped in and nixed it.
They do funerals from around eighteen hundred bucks or nine hundred quid, and they’ll even do you a sort of highlight reel of your life. For friends who care but don’t want the hassle of actually having to show up at your funeral they offer a service where mourners can watch your funeral on line, cybergrief.
There is even a guy out here who runs something called Dearly Departed Tours, for the more morbid tourist. Scott Michaels will drive you to the site of The Manson killings, passing the house of the Menendez brothers who murdered their parents. He’ll recount the story of the Welsh actress who met her death by jumping off the Hollywood sign, before they fenced it off. For a bit of light relief en route you can see where Hugh Grant was busted with Divine Brown and take a pee in the public lavatory where George Michael fell foul of an off duty cop. Classy, and the whole thing only takes half a day.
sunday times column week eight
Sts wk 8 column version 2.
On Monday my eleven year old daughter went off to Camp Hollywoodland, an all girls sleepover camp. She said she was nervous about the spiders and the other kids, though I suspect that this might have been partly a ruse to get us to buy her more new stuff, torches, sleeping bag, suitcases, all pink of course.She is only actually gone until Saturday morning but she insisted on a ‘care package’ or goody bag which we sent off on Tuesday with more pink stuff. Meanwhile her six year old brother, possibly in an act of protest at this preferential treatment, has decided to cut his own fringe so that we had to take him to the barbers early the next day to try to fix it.
Until I was eight or nine my Uncle Paddy used to cut our hair, he lived downstairs from us in the same tenement and had us sit backwards on a chair while he attacked our hair with some kind of implement designed for shearing sheep. I remember being delighted when I finally went to a proper barbers and found out that getting a haircut didn’t necessarily have to be physically painful. God, I sound like Molly bloody Weir.
Ben Kingsley was a guest on the show, I call him Ben although he is Sir Ben because we are now friends. He was on plugging his latest film” Kill Me” in which he plays a hit man who goes to AA to stop drinking and become a better hitman.
He agreed to be in a recurring sketch called ESPN UK where Craig plays a sort of mad George Best character and I am the posh straight man, Sir Cecil Wellsley Hogg, glued on moustache and tweed suit, I look like my Geography teacher from the seventies. We cast Sir Ben as the new coach for LA Galaxy who was a former hard man who has renounced all violence In real life he seems so gentle and optimistic but when he turned nasty in the sketch and smashed a bottle over Craig’s head, it brought back memories of bar fights in Rutherglen. I really felt quite scared.
A relative of mine owned and ran a pub in Barrowland called the Clyde Vaults, it was what was know as a “wine shop”. I once heard a guy in Glasgow tell his pal, “see you, you’re that drunk, you’d get a knock back from the Clyde Vaults.” It was described by the Sunday Mail pub spy review in the following glowing terms:” this has to be the dirtiest pub in Scotland, possibly the world.” It had the nick name of Lourdes, because so many of its clientele would go in on crutches but later emerge singing and dancing, miraculously healed by the curative powers of “the wine”.
The big news here is of course Paris getting back out of the slammer again. She is on Larry King live on CNN today. Larry King is an old ham from radio who has a reputation for being easy on his subjects and astonishingly under prepared. He interviewed Paul Ringo Yoko and Olivia Harrison yesterday and kept on calling Ringo George.
The more reputable media covering Paris’ release are there supposedly to analyze the media circus surrounding her release, as if somehow their lights and cameras and crew are not really a part of it.
This is a kid who was drunk driving and then driving while banned but after three weeks in prison there seems to be this weird rush to canonize her, or maybe it’s just that Lindsey Lohan is still in rehab and it takes everyone’s mind off the war in Iraq.
We did more bits for the show shamelessly plugging the Ford Escape, where I play the host’s mad bekilted Scottish cousin. After tearing a seam on the thirty six inch waist kilt they hired for me, George in wardrobe took me aside and with all the discretion of a senior oncologist asked me in a whisper, ?” like this was a question that might wound me to the core. “Has someone put on a couple of L.Bs ?”
On Friday we’ll shoot a scene where we go horse riding which might be awkward for me as the closest I’ve ever been to a horse was a donkey ride on the beach at Saltcoats in the late sixties. Americans don’t call it horse riding but horse back riding, as if to distinguish it from sitting on the horse’s head, I suppose.
I took my kids to see Evan Almighty, the sequel to Jim Carrey’s Bruce Almighty this time with Steve Carrell as an anchorman turned congressman who is told by God to build an ark. It is reportedly the most expensive comedy ever made because the director tried to use real animals over special effects as far as possible. Having seen it I felt that they should have used a few more computer generated monkeys and spent the money saved on a couple of re-writes.
On Monday my eleven year old daughter went off to Camp Hollywoodland, an all girls sleepover camp. She said she was nervous about the spiders and the other kids, though I suspect that this might have been partly a ruse to get us to buy her more new stuff, torches, sleeping bag, suitcases, all pink of course.She is only actually gone until Saturday morning but she insisted on a ‘care package’ or goody bag which we sent off on Tuesday with more pink stuff. Meanwhile her six year old brother, possibly in an act of protest at this preferential treatment, has decided to cut his own fringe so that we had to take him to the barbers early the next day to try to fix it.
Until I was eight or nine my Uncle Paddy used to cut our hair, he lived downstairs from us in the same tenement and had us sit backwards on a chair while he attacked our hair with some kind of implement designed for shearing sheep. I remember being delighted when I finally went to a proper barbers and found out that getting a haircut didn’t necessarily have to be physically painful. God, I sound like Molly bloody Weir.
Ben Kingsley was a guest on the show, I call him Ben although he is Sir Ben because we are now friends. He was on plugging his latest film” Kill Me” in which he plays a hit man who goes to AA to stop drinking and become a better hitman.
He agreed to be in a recurring sketch called ESPN UK where Craig plays a sort of mad George Best character and I am the posh straight man, Sir Cecil Wellsley Hogg, glued on moustache and tweed suit, I look like my Geography teacher from the seventies. We cast Sir Ben as the new coach for LA Galaxy who was a former hard man who has renounced all violence In real life he seems so gentle and optimistic but when he turned nasty in the sketch and smashed a bottle over Craig’s head, it brought back memories of bar fights in Rutherglen. I really felt quite scared.
A relative of mine owned and ran a pub in Barrowland called the Clyde Vaults, it was what was know as a “wine shop”. I once heard a guy in Glasgow tell his pal, “see you, you’re that drunk, you’d get a knock back from the Clyde Vaults.” It was described by the Sunday Mail pub spy review in the following glowing terms:” this has to be the dirtiest pub in Scotland, possibly the world.” It had the nick name of Lourdes, because so many of its clientele would go in on crutches but later emerge singing and dancing, miraculously healed by the curative powers of “the wine”.
The big news here is of course Paris getting back out of the slammer again. She is on Larry King live on CNN today. Larry King is an old ham from radio who has a reputation for being easy on his subjects and astonishingly under prepared. He interviewed Paul Ringo Yoko and Olivia Harrison yesterday and kept on calling Ringo George.
The more reputable media covering Paris’ release are there supposedly to analyze the media circus surrounding her release, as if somehow their lights and cameras and crew are not really a part of it.
This is a kid who was drunk driving and then driving while banned but after three weeks in prison there seems to be this weird rush to canonize her, or maybe it’s just that Lindsey Lohan is still in rehab and it takes everyone’s mind off the war in Iraq.
We did more bits for the show shamelessly plugging the Ford Escape, where I play the host’s mad bekilted Scottish cousin. After tearing a seam on the thirty six inch waist kilt they hired for me, George in wardrobe took me aside and with all the discretion of a senior oncologist asked me in a whisper, ?” like this was a question that might wound me to the core. “Has someone put on a couple of L.Bs ?”
On Friday we’ll shoot a scene where we go horse riding which might be awkward for me as the closest I’ve ever been to a horse was a donkey ride on the beach at Saltcoats in the late sixties. Americans don’t call it horse riding but horse back riding, as if to distinguish it from sitting on the horse’s head, I suppose.
I took my kids to see Evan Almighty, the sequel to Jim Carrey’s Bruce Almighty this time with Steve Carrell as an anchorman turned congressman who is told by God to build an ark. It is reportedly the most expensive comedy ever made because the director tried to use real animals over special effects as far as possible. Having seen it I felt that they should have used a few more computer generated monkeys and spent the money saved on a couple of re-writes.
sunday times column week seven
Gabriel had his kindergarden graduation this week, his second graduation ceremony in under a year, they seem to be very big on this out here. These five year old kids wearing pale blue mortar board hats and marching on the spot while saluting and singing “You’re a grand old flag, you’re a high flying flag…’ Is it cute or is it brainwashing or some weird combination of all of these.
I spoke to a guy this week who used to work with Bill Cosby who came from the projects here in LA and after a hugely successful career in television he now has his own building in New York with leather covered floors and a sidewalk with underfloor, heating to avoid being sued by people who might fall on the ice there in the Winter.
Here in Los Angeles The norms of showbusiness have percolated down into very stratum of society, estate agents, or realtors as they call them here are everywhere, and no just the name of the company but their headshots, smiling at you from bus shelters and benches,
A lot of them look like actors or models, as if their photos are saying I’m only doing this for a bit until I land that juicy part. Some of them are on the phone, as if too say, I’m selling so many houses I don’t even have time to put the phone down for a photograph. As if I care what the guy who finds me a house looks like, now a photograph of the house, that might be helpful.
There’s a great indy radio station out here which has a show hosted by Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols. The most intriguing thing about his show is the way that it makes absolutely no concession to an American audience, it’s basically Steve Jones chatting away to himself about nothing in particular Steve Jones plays duets on his guitar on the show with people like Cliff Richard and talks about his health in excruciating detail, “I’m feeling a bit phlegmy today” and “I tried that Viagra once but all it did was give me a headache and made everything look blue.” Steve is now a kind of cockney Tommy Cooper . The first time I tuned in he had Johhny Rotten on with him as a guest. It was surreal to hear those broad London Accents away out here. Johnny was saying “I remember I was out in Rwanda, doing a benefit and singing God Save the Gorillas” Steve says“Yeah, that Rwanda is a right dangerous gaff!”
At the weekend Sarah and I have taken to going for a walk or as the yanks term it, a hike up Runyon Canyon, a half hour walk which ends in a panoramic view down over the whole Los Angeles. The canyon is always busy with people walking their dogs, excercising compulsively, kvetching about the business or more often than not, all three at the same time. As you pass people you catch these odd little snippets of conversation “My personal trainer says that for now I should just concentrate on my pecs.” and “Oh my God, I couldn’t believe it, girlfriend brought his latte, but it wasn’t even non fat!’ and “He’s been kind of depressed ever since I had him neutered” but then as Brendan Behan used to say, every cripple has his own way of walking.
This guy is walking across the Sahara desert, as you do, and his foot hits a bottle by and a genie pops out of it. The genie says to him “I am the genie of the bottle and I’ve been locked up in there for a thousand years, your wish is my command.” The guy looks at the genie and says to him,” Look, I just kind of freed you by accident and there is nothing I really want, I’m pretty happy with my life the way it is.
The genie is very surprised by this and says “ You know, I’ve been a genie for a very long time and in this game you meet all kinds of people but you’re the first person I’ve ever come across who is completely happy with his lot in life, good for you.
The guy says, thanks. I’d love to stand here and chat to you but I’d better be getting on my way before that midday sun really kicks in and he walks off. The Genie thinks about this for a minute and then goes after him and says , “Look, I’ve been thinking about this and though I admire your contentment, if word gets round the genie community that someone freed me after a thousand years, then my name will be mud. There has to be something I can do for you.
The guy thinks about this for a bit and looks at the Genie’s sad face and pulls a piece of paper from his pocket. “You see this, he says, “this is a map of the Middle East and people have been fighting over this little patch of desert for as far back as anyone can remember, longer even. Is there any way you could bring peace to this troubled corner of the globe?” The Genie bites his lip and looks pained. “Listen, . weight in gold, sure, forty virgins, not a problem, bigger you know what, dead easy and while that’s a very noble and unselfish wish but I’m afraid one of the genie rules is that we are not allowed to interfere in human history on that kind of scale,what you are asking for is just too big.”
So the guy thinks about this and says, “Look, not to worry, I won’t tell anyone about this so you don’t have to worry about the other genies.”
The genie still feels bad and says to the guy, “Is there nothing else you’ve always secretly wanted to do or to have, play guitar, meet someone from history, date a supermodel” and the guy says, “Actually on the subject of dating, I’ve always harboured a secret desire to understand the opposite sex, to really get what they’re about and how they think and why their take on things is so different from our own, is that something you think you could do for me?”
The genie looks at him with an even sadder face and shrugs and says, “ I’ll tell you what, let’s have another look at that map of the middle East.”
I spoke to a guy this week who used to work with Bill Cosby who came from the projects here in LA and after a hugely successful career in television he now has his own building in New York with leather covered floors and a sidewalk with underfloor, heating to avoid being sued by people who might fall on the ice there in the Winter.
Here in Los Angeles The norms of showbusiness have percolated down into very stratum of society, estate agents, or realtors as they call them here are everywhere, and no just the name of the company but their headshots, smiling at you from bus shelters and benches,
A lot of them look like actors or models, as if their photos are saying I’m only doing this for a bit until I land that juicy part. Some of them are on the phone, as if too say, I’m selling so many houses I don’t even have time to put the phone down for a photograph. As if I care what the guy who finds me a house looks like, now a photograph of the house, that might be helpful.
There’s a great indy radio station out here which has a show hosted by Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols. The most intriguing thing about his show is the way that it makes absolutely no concession to an American audience, it’s basically Steve Jones chatting away to himself about nothing in particular Steve Jones plays duets on his guitar on the show with people like Cliff Richard and talks about his health in excruciating detail, “I’m feeling a bit phlegmy today” and “I tried that Viagra once but all it did was give me a headache and made everything look blue.” Steve is now a kind of cockney Tommy Cooper . The first time I tuned in he had Johhny Rotten on with him as a guest. It was surreal to hear those broad London Accents away out here. Johnny was saying “I remember I was out in Rwanda, doing a benefit and singing God Save the Gorillas” Steve says“Yeah, that Rwanda is a right dangerous gaff!”
At the weekend Sarah and I have taken to going for a walk or as the yanks term it, a hike up Runyon Canyon, a half hour walk which ends in a panoramic view down over the whole Los Angeles. The canyon is always busy with people walking their dogs, excercising compulsively, kvetching about the business or more often than not, all three at the same time. As you pass people you catch these odd little snippets of conversation “My personal trainer says that for now I should just concentrate on my pecs.” and “Oh my God, I couldn’t believe it, girlfriend brought his latte, but it wasn’t even non fat!’ and “He’s been kind of depressed ever since I had him neutered” but then as Brendan Behan used to say, every cripple has his own way of walking.
This guy is walking across the Sahara desert, as you do, and his foot hits a bottle by and a genie pops out of it. The genie says to him “I am the genie of the bottle and I’ve been locked up in there for a thousand years, your wish is my command.” The guy looks at the genie and says to him,” Look, I just kind of freed you by accident and there is nothing I really want, I’m pretty happy with my life the way it is.
The genie is very surprised by this and says “ You know, I’ve been a genie for a very long time and in this game you meet all kinds of people but you’re the first person I’ve ever come across who is completely happy with his lot in life, good for you.
The guy says, thanks. I’d love to stand here and chat to you but I’d better be getting on my way before that midday sun really kicks in and he walks off. The Genie thinks about this for a minute and then goes after him and says , “Look, I’ve been thinking about this and though I admire your contentment, if word gets round the genie community that someone freed me after a thousand years, then my name will be mud. There has to be something I can do for you.
The guy thinks about this for a bit and looks at the Genie’s sad face and pulls a piece of paper from his pocket. “You see this, he says, “this is a map of the Middle East and people have been fighting over this little patch of desert for as far back as anyone can remember, longer even. Is there any way you could bring peace to this troubled corner of the globe?” The Genie bites his lip and looks pained. “Listen, . weight in gold, sure, forty virgins, not a problem, bigger you know what, dead easy and while that’s a very noble and unselfish wish but I’m afraid one of the genie rules is that we are not allowed to interfere in human history on that kind of scale,what you are asking for is just too big.”
So the guy thinks about this and says, “Look, not to worry, I won’t tell anyone about this so you don’t have to worry about the other genies.”
The genie still feels bad and says to the guy, “Is there nothing else you’ve always secretly wanted to do or to have, play guitar, meet someone from history, date a supermodel” and the guy says, “Actually on the subject of dating, I’ve always harboured a secret desire to understand the opposite sex, to really get what they’re about and how they think and why their take on things is so different from our own, is that something you think you could do for me?”
The genie looks at him with an even sadder face and shrugs and says, “ I’ll tell you what, let’s have another look at that map of the middle East.”
sunday times column week six
Americans suddenly liberate Paris, again.
Michael Jackson and OJ both got off, but not Paris, she did the crime and faced some time. Paris Hilton is released from prison after 3 days, rumours were that she had stopped eating. Poor old Paris is a hate figure here, epitomizing the famous for being famous set and oddly enough when she went into county prison it seemed that some people were warming to her, since in America there are private prisons where rich criminals can do their time in peace and avoid poor criminals, as they call them, Club Fed. Now that her lawyers have managed to get her out of the forty five days in the pokey I think that she is doing herself no favours and besides it strikes me that she has garnered so much publicity for herself as a brand out of this that she should be paying them.
Meanwhile Lindsey Lohan is back in rehab, Promise in Malibu, it has a reputation for being a little too lenient, but still planning a big bash for her 21st which in California is the legal age for drinking, Brittany is dating her drug counselor and Nicole Richie who is hoping not to get a prison sentence for driving down the freeway on the wrong side of the road stoned out of her empty head may or may not be pregnant.
I am flying to Seattle to shoot the first of a series of sketches on the show sponsored by a car company, it is sponsored product placement to get around the fact that so many people record shows and then watch them later, fast forwarding through the ads. I play Craig’s mad Scottish cousin, who has come to America to meet celebrities and Craig is anxious to avoid. I ask George, our wardrobe guy and the campest man in Hollywood, to find me a kilt for the part as I’ve left mine in London. Apparently they are not easy to get hold of but they do have some, mostly for productions of that masterpiece of Scottish social realism Brigadoon. The one he finds is old, missing its sporran and a little frayed around the edges, having got up at 4 am today I’m feeling very similar.
There is some talk of a bungee jumping sequence and I’m torn between my thrill seeking side and my abject terror of heights. George discretely suggests a pair of flesh coloured dance briefs to go under the kilt. I explain that nothing is worn under the kilt (it’s all in perfect working order) and he goes into an explanation of why if you are being catapulted at a great speed from a high bridge in a kilt, it might be better to have a bit of support for your personal equipment. I decide to pack them just in case, thinking that they may double as a sort of nappy.
I got a day’s work on a movie, The Kreutzer Sonata, it was shot on digital video with a tiny cast, so not exactly big budget, but hey, two hundred bucks is two hundred bucks. I play the Master of Ceremonies at a charity event and since most of it was improvised I had to come up with some jokes. My friend Lenny Levy told me this as his favourite Jewish Joke and I used it in the speech.
Once upon a time there was a very rich, old lady who had only one grandson, a boy of four whom she doted on. She asked the boy what he wanted for his fifth birthday and he said that he wanted to go to the seaside. So she dressed him up in his little sailor suit and his little sailor’s hat and despite the forecast of stormy weather off they went to the seaside.
So they’re standing there staring at the sea when a freak tidal wave sweeps in and plucks the little boy from where he is standing and the sea swallows him up, leaving the grandmother standing there alone.
The grandmother looks up and says to God,” Now look here, God, if you give me back my grandson I will become a much better person, I’ll give to the poor, I’ll pray every day, and I’ll never never ask you for anything else again as long as I live.”
Just then a second freak tidal wave comes along just like the first one and miraculously replaces the little boy on the very spot where he had stood a minute before. So the Grandmother looks down at the little boy and sees that he is soaking wet but completely unharmed, apart from the fact that he is missing his hat.
She looks up at God and says, “Now look here God, he had a hat!”
Michael Jackson and OJ both got off, but not Paris, she did the crime and faced some time. Paris Hilton is released from prison after 3 days, rumours were that she had stopped eating. Poor old Paris is a hate figure here, epitomizing the famous for being famous set and oddly enough when she went into county prison it seemed that some people were warming to her, since in America there are private prisons where rich criminals can do their time in peace and avoid poor criminals, as they call them, Club Fed. Now that her lawyers have managed to get her out of the forty five days in the pokey I think that she is doing herself no favours and besides it strikes me that she has garnered so much publicity for herself as a brand out of this that she should be paying them.
Meanwhile Lindsey Lohan is back in rehab, Promise in Malibu, it has a reputation for being a little too lenient, but still planning a big bash for her 21st which in California is the legal age for drinking, Brittany is dating her drug counselor and Nicole Richie who is hoping not to get a prison sentence for driving down the freeway on the wrong side of the road stoned out of her empty head may or may not be pregnant.
I am flying to Seattle to shoot the first of a series of sketches on the show sponsored by a car company, it is sponsored product placement to get around the fact that so many people record shows and then watch them later, fast forwarding through the ads. I play Craig’s mad Scottish cousin, who has come to America to meet celebrities and Craig is anxious to avoid. I ask George, our wardrobe guy and the campest man in Hollywood, to find me a kilt for the part as I’ve left mine in London. Apparently they are not easy to get hold of but they do have some, mostly for productions of that masterpiece of Scottish social realism Brigadoon. The one he finds is old, missing its sporran and a little frayed around the edges, having got up at 4 am today I’m feeling very similar.
There is some talk of a bungee jumping sequence and I’m torn between my thrill seeking side and my abject terror of heights. George discretely suggests a pair of flesh coloured dance briefs to go under the kilt. I explain that nothing is worn under the kilt (it’s all in perfect working order) and he goes into an explanation of why if you are being catapulted at a great speed from a high bridge in a kilt, it might be better to have a bit of support for your personal equipment. I decide to pack them just in case, thinking that they may double as a sort of nappy.
I got a day’s work on a movie, The Kreutzer Sonata, it was shot on digital video with a tiny cast, so not exactly big budget, but hey, two hundred bucks is two hundred bucks. I play the Master of Ceremonies at a charity event and since most of it was improvised I had to come up with some jokes. My friend Lenny Levy told me this as his favourite Jewish Joke and I used it in the speech.
Once upon a time there was a very rich, old lady who had only one grandson, a boy of four whom she doted on. She asked the boy what he wanted for his fifth birthday and he said that he wanted to go to the seaside. So she dressed him up in his little sailor suit and his little sailor’s hat and despite the forecast of stormy weather off they went to the seaside.
So they’re standing there staring at the sea when a freak tidal wave sweeps in and plucks the little boy from where he is standing and the sea swallows him up, leaving the grandmother standing there alone.
The grandmother looks up and says to God,” Now look here, God, if you give me back my grandson I will become a much better person, I’ll give to the poor, I’ll pray every day, and I’ll never never ask you for anything else again as long as I live.”
Just then a second freak tidal wave comes along just like the first one and miraculously replaces the little boy on the very spot where he had stood a minute before. So the Grandmother looks down at the little boy and sees that he is soaking wet but completely unharmed, apart from the fact that he is missing his hat.
She looks up at God and says, “Now look here God, he had a hat!”
sunday times column week five
Americans suddenly liberate Paris, again.
Michael Jackson and OJ both got off, but not Paris, she did the crime and faced some time. Paris Hilton is released from prison after 3 days, rumours were that she had stopped eating. Poor old Paris is a hate figure here, epitomizing the famous for being famous set and oddly enough when she went into county prison it seemed that some people were warming to her, since in America there are private prisons where rich criminals can do their time in peace and avoid poor criminals, as they call them, Club Fed. Now that her lawyers have managed to get her out of the forty five days in the pokey I think that she is doing herself no favours and besides it strikes me that she has garnered so much publicity for herself as a brand out of this that she should be paying them.
Meanwhile Lindsey Lohan is back in rehab, Promise in Malibu, it has a reputation for being a little too lenient, but still planning a big bash for her 21st which in California is the legal age for drinking, Brittany is dating her drug counselor and Nicole Richie who is hoping not to get a prison sentence for driving down the freeway on the wrong side of the road stoned out of her empty head may or may not be pregnant.
I am flying to Seattle to shoot the first of a series of sketches on the show sponsored by a car company, it is sponsored product placement to get around the fact that so many people record shows and then watch them later, fast forwarding through the ads. I play Craig’s mad Scottish cousin, who has come to America to meet celebrities and Craig is anxious to avoid. I ask George, our wardrobe guy and the campest man in Hollywood, to find me a kilt for the part as I’ve left mine in London. Apparently they are not easy to get hold of but they do have some, mostly for productions of that masterpiece of Scottish social realism Brigadoon. The one he finds is old, missing its sporran and a little frayed around the edges, having got up at 4 am today I’m feeling very similar.
There is some talk of a bungee jumping sequence and I’m torn between my thrill seeking side and my abject terror of heights. George discretely suggests a pair of flesh coloured dance briefs to go under the kilt. I explain that nothing is worn under the kilt (it’s all in perfect working order) and he goes into an explanation of why if you are being catapulted at a great speed from a high bridge in a kilt, it might be better to have a bit of support for your personal equipment. I decide to pack them just in case, thinking that they may double as a sort of nappy.
I got a day’s work on a movie, The Kreutzer Sonata, it was shot on digital video with a tiny cast, so not exactly big budget, but hey, two hundred bucks is two hundred bucks. I play the Master of Ceremonies at a charity event and since most of it was improvised I had to come up with some jokes. My friend Lenny Levy told me this as his favourite Jewish Joke and I used it in the speech.
Once upon a time there was a very rich, old lady who had only one grandson, a boy of four whom she doted on. She asked the boy what he wanted for his fifth birthday and he said that he wanted to go to the seaside. So she dressed him up in his little sailor suit and his little sailor’s hat and despite the forecast of stormy weather off they went to the seaside.
So they’re standing there staring at the sea when a freak tidal wave sweeps in and plucks the little boy from where he is standing and the sea swallows him up, leaving the grandmother standing there alone.
The grandmother looks up and says to God,” Now look here, God, if you give me back my grandson I will become a much better person, I’ll give to the poor, I’ll pray every day, and I’ll never never ask you for anything else again as long as I live.”
Just then a second freak tidal wave comes along just like the first one and miraculously replaces the little boy on the very spot where he had stood a minute before. So the Grandmother looks down at the little boy and sees that he is soaking wet but completely unharmed, apart from the fact that he is missing his hat.
She looks up at God and says, “Now look here God, he had a hat!”
The Jewish jokes, How was your holiday? It was disappointing. How about the food? It was terrible, and such small portions
Ladies is anything alright?
This guy is walking across the Sahara desert, as you do, and his foot hits a bottle by and a genie pops out of it. The genie says to him “I am the genie of the bottle and I’ve been locked up in there for a thousand years, your wish is my command.” The guy looks at the genie and says to him,” Look, I just kind of freed you by accident and there is nothing I really want, I’m pretty happy with my life the way it is.
The genie is very surprised by this and says “ You know, I’ve been a genie for a very long time and in this game you meet all kinds of people but you’re the first person I’ve ever come across who is completely happy with his lot in life, good for you.
The guy says, thanks. I’d love to stand here and chat to you but I’d better be getting on my way before that midday sun really kicks in and he walks off. The Genie thinks about this for a minute and then goes after him and says , “Look, I’ve been thinking about this and though I admire your contentment, if word gets round the genie community that someone freed me after a thousand years, then my name will be mud. There has to be something I can do for you.
The guy thinks about this for a bit and looks at the Genie’s sad face and pulls a piece of paper from his pocket. “You see this, he says, “this is a map of the Middle East and people have been fighting over this little patch of desert for as far back as anyone can remember, longer even. Is there any way you could bring peace to this troubled corner of the globe?” The Genie bites his lip and looks pained. “Listen, . weight in gold, sure, forty virgins, not a problem, bigger you know what, dead easy and while that’s a very noble and unselfish wish but I’m afraid one of the genie rules is that we are not allowed to interfere in human history on that kind of scale,what you are asking for is just too big.”
So the guy thinks about this and says, “Look, not to worry, I won’t tell anyone about this so you don’t have to worry about the other genies.”
The genie still feels bad and says to the guy, “Is there nothing else you’ve always secretly wanted to do or to have, play guitar, meet someone from history, date a supermodel” and the guy says, “Actually on the subject of dating, I’ve always harboured a secret desire to understand the opposite sex, to really get what they’re about and how they think and why their take on things is so different from our own, is that something you think you could do for me?”
The genie looks at him with an even sadder face and shrugs and says, “ I’ll tell you what, let’s have another look at that map of the middle East.”
Elephant shit sweeper up guy story, what you mean quit showbusiness altogether?
Cosby who came from the projects in LA and his building with the leather covered floors and the heated sidewalk to avoid frivolous lawsuits from people who fall on the ice there in the Winter.
Realtors in LA and their headshots.
Johnny Rotten and Steve Jones on the radio, Jonesy’s Jukebox on Indy Radio, surreal to hear those broad London Accents away out here. “I remember I was out in Rwanda doing a benefit and singing God Save the Gorillas” “Yeah, that Rwanda is a right dangerous gaff” Steve Jones who is a sort of cockney Tommy Cooper, plays duets on his guitar on the show with people like Cliff Richard and talks about his health in excruciating detail, “I’m feeling a bit phlegmy today” and I tried that Viagra once but all it did was give me a headache and made everything look blue.
Brendan Behan, “What can’t be cured must be endured” and “Every cripple has his own way of walking.”
The canyon and the walks, the dogs, the anorexics, the gays and the snippets of conversations you hear as you go past. “I would totally look for a new manager” Work on my pecs. I had him spayed and neutered.Oh my God, it wasn’t even non fat!’
Is that goat fell? No, but it doesn’t look too steady on its feet.
Michael Jackson and OJ both got off, but not Paris, she did the crime and faced some time. Paris Hilton is released from prison after 3 days, rumours were that she had stopped eating. Poor old Paris is a hate figure here, epitomizing the famous for being famous set and oddly enough when she went into county prison it seemed that some people were warming to her, since in America there are private prisons where rich criminals can do their time in peace and avoid poor criminals, as they call them, Club Fed. Now that her lawyers have managed to get her out of the forty five days in the pokey I think that she is doing herself no favours and besides it strikes me that she has garnered so much publicity for herself as a brand out of this that she should be paying them.
Meanwhile Lindsey Lohan is back in rehab, Promise in Malibu, it has a reputation for being a little too lenient, but still planning a big bash for her 21st which in California is the legal age for drinking, Brittany is dating her drug counselor and Nicole Richie who is hoping not to get a prison sentence for driving down the freeway on the wrong side of the road stoned out of her empty head may or may not be pregnant.
I am flying to Seattle to shoot the first of a series of sketches on the show sponsored by a car company, it is sponsored product placement to get around the fact that so many people record shows and then watch them later, fast forwarding through the ads. I play Craig’s mad Scottish cousin, who has come to America to meet celebrities and Craig is anxious to avoid. I ask George, our wardrobe guy and the campest man in Hollywood, to find me a kilt for the part as I’ve left mine in London. Apparently they are not easy to get hold of but they do have some, mostly for productions of that masterpiece of Scottish social realism Brigadoon. The one he finds is old, missing its sporran and a little frayed around the edges, having got up at 4 am today I’m feeling very similar.
There is some talk of a bungee jumping sequence and I’m torn between my thrill seeking side and my abject terror of heights. George discretely suggests a pair of flesh coloured dance briefs to go under the kilt. I explain that nothing is worn under the kilt (it’s all in perfect working order) and he goes into an explanation of why if you are being catapulted at a great speed from a high bridge in a kilt, it might be better to have a bit of support for your personal equipment. I decide to pack them just in case, thinking that they may double as a sort of nappy.
I got a day’s work on a movie, The Kreutzer Sonata, it was shot on digital video with a tiny cast, so not exactly big budget, but hey, two hundred bucks is two hundred bucks. I play the Master of Ceremonies at a charity event and since most of it was improvised I had to come up with some jokes. My friend Lenny Levy told me this as his favourite Jewish Joke and I used it in the speech.
Once upon a time there was a very rich, old lady who had only one grandson, a boy of four whom she doted on. She asked the boy what he wanted for his fifth birthday and he said that he wanted to go to the seaside. So she dressed him up in his little sailor suit and his little sailor’s hat and despite the forecast of stormy weather off they went to the seaside.
So they’re standing there staring at the sea when a freak tidal wave sweeps in and plucks the little boy from where he is standing and the sea swallows him up, leaving the grandmother standing there alone.
The grandmother looks up and says to God,” Now look here, God, if you give me back my grandson I will become a much better person, I’ll give to the poor, I’ll pray every day, and I’ll never never ask you for anything else again as long as I live.”
Just then a second freak tidal wave comes along just like the first one and miraculously replaces the little boy on the very spot where he had stood a minute before. So the Grandmother looks down at the little boy and sees that he is soaking wet but completely unharmed, apart from the fact that he is missing his hat.
She looks up at God and says, “Now look here God, he had a hat!”
The Jewish jokes, How was your holiday? It was disappointing. How about the food? It was terrible, and such small portions
Ladies is anything alright?
This guy is walking across the Sahara desert, as you do, and his foot hits a bottle by and a genie pops out of it. The genie says to him “I am the genie of the bottle and I’ve been locked up in there for a thousand years, your wish is my command.” The guy looks at the genie and says to him,” Look, I just kind of freed you by accident and there is nothing I really want, I’m pretty happy with my life the way it is.
The genie is very surprised by this and says “ You know, I’ve been a genie for a very long time and in this game you meet all kinds of people but you’re the first person I’ve ever come across who is completely happy with his lot in life, good for you.
The guy says, thanks. I’d love to stand here and chat to you but I’d better be getting on my way before that midday sun really kicks in and he walks off. The Genie thinks about this for a minute and then goes after him and says , “Look, I’ve been thinking about this and though I admire your contentment, if word gets round the genie community that someone freed me after a thousand years, then my name will be mud. There has to be something I can do for you.
The guy thinks about this for a bit and looks at the Genie’s sad face and pulls a piece of paper from his pocket. “You see this, he says, “this is a map of the Middle East and people have been fighting over this little patch of desert for as far back as anyone can remember, longer even. Is there any way you could bring peace to this troubled corner of the globe?” The Genie bites his lip and looks pained. “Listen, . weight in gold, sure, forty virgins, not a problem, bigger you know what, dead easy and while that’s a very noble and unselfish wish but I’m afraid one of the genie rules is that we are not allowed to interfere in human history on that kind of scale,what you are asking for is just too big.”
So the guy thinks about this and says, “Look, not to worry, I won’t tell anyone about this so you don’t have to worry about the other genies.”
The genie still feels bad and says to the guy, “Is there nothing else you’ve always secretly wanted to do or to have, play guitar, meet someone from history, date a supermodel” and the guy says, “Actually on the subject of dating, I’ve always harboured a secret desire to understand the opposite sex, to really get what they’re about and how they think and why their take on things is so different from our own, is that something you think you could do for me?”
The genie looks at him with an even sadder face and shrugs and says, “ I’ll tell you what, let’s have another look at that map of the middle East.”
Elephant shit sweeper up guy story, what you mean quit showbusiness altogether?
Cosby who came from the projects in LA and his building with the leather covered floors and the heated sidewalk to avoid frivolous lawsuits from people who fall on the ice there in the Winter.
Realtors in LA and their headshots.
Johnny Rotten and Steve Jones on the radio, Jonesy’s Jukebox on Indy Radio, surreal to hear those broad London Accents away out here. “I remember I was out in Rwanda doing a benefit and singing God Save the Gorillas” “Yeah, that Rwanda is a right dangerous gaff” Steve Jones who is a sort of cockney Tommy Cooper, plays duets on his guitar on the show with people like Cliff Richard and talks about his health in excruciating detail, “I’m feeling a bit phlegmy today” and I tried that Viagra once but all it did was give me a headache and made everything look blue.
Brendan Behan, “What can’t be cured must be endured” and “Every cripple has his own way of walking.”
The canyon and the walks, the dogs, the anorexics, the gays and the snippets of conversations you hear as you go past. “I would totally look for a new manager” Work on my pecs. I had him spayed and neutered.Oh my God, it wasn’t even non fat!’
Is that goat fell? No, but it doesn’t look too steady on its feet.
sunday times column week four
Pirates, Paris and Two Bunch Palms
Thursday I took my kids to see Pirates 3 Dead Man’s Chest. Afterwards my 12 year old daughter came out of the bathroom with a look of barely contained excitement on her face. “Oh my God, dad!” I thought she had just found some money but it turned out that she had just seen Paris Hilton washing her hands in the cludgie next to her.
It might be no bad thing that Paris gets used to crowded toilet facilities and sharing with other girls as on Tuesday she begins a prison sentence for driving on a license after it was suspended for drunk driving.
At the weekend we managed to arrange some child care and spent the weekend at a spa in the desolate town of Desert Hot Springs about two and half hours drive into the desert from West Hollywood.
The spa is called Two Bunch Palms and is on a sacred Indian site. It is famous for its natural hot springs and mud baths, it features as the movie executive’s retreat in the Robert Altman movie The Player. It was once a clandestine hideaway for Al Capone who built a stone fortress there as his hideout from the Feds. They have his bullet proof car on display there.
I went for a run in the desert and saw a coyote, it looks like a skinny dog whose head is too big, not unlike the one in the cartoon.
I thought back to the family holidays we went on as kids. We either went to Ireland or to the West coast of Scotland in our green Morris Oxford, a car with a fold down leather arm rest in the back seat and bright orange pop up indicators.
It was mostly Girvan, for the Glasgow fair fortnight, I have a photo of us sitting in deck chairs, the only family on that beach next to what looks to be an active sewage pipe, on a day when an Eskimo would not venture outdoors for fear of frostbite.
My father sits smiling at us across the years, the only one whose teeth are not chittering, although mind you those teeth are not his, as he lost his in his youth in Ireland playing Hurling, which is somewhere between a contact sport and a martial art.
When he thought that it was time for us to get into the sea, he’d would tell us “Put on your costume” to the occasional surprise of any nearby listeners who might expect some kind of theatrical performance.
Our swimming costumes, maroon coloured and tweedy, were of dubious provenance, possibly hand knitted by some sadistic aunt. They were made of some kind of synthesis of a man made fabric and steel wool.
One of their unique features was that whenever they came into contact with any type of moisture they immediately doubled in weight and size. When I came out of the sea in them I looked like I was wearing a blood red overfull nappy which hung around my knees. Swimming in them was like swimming in leg irons.
If they weren’t hand knitted then they were no doubt purchased at Mrs Murphy’s, a second hand shop next to Paddy’s market in the Gallowgate in the east end of Glasgow. We kids were issued with strict instructions not to tell anyone that our clothes were bought in a second hand store and if the Rutherglen bus passed as my mother was on her way in there, she would dive up a close to avoid being spotted going in there.
At my father’s funeral, Mrs Murphy stood outside the chapel to pay her last respects to my dad. As I carried the coffin to the hearse I passed right by her, “Lovely man that Mr McGrade,” she said sadly,” size ten in a shoe” I couldn’t tell whether she was mourning the loss of a friend or his custom.
Another memorable Scottish holiday was the year we somehow managed to end up renting the lower half of a scruffy council house in Girvan. It rained so long and hard that if we had stayed there any longer we would have had to start building an ark.
It was torture for us as there was no TV downstairs but we could hear the one that was on upstairs, for four kids it was the equivalent of starving to death while living above a bakery.
I have a vivid memory of the one high point of the holiday which was watching the cross eyed boy who lived next door slowly dissect a golf ball with a fork. The first layer under the skin a bunch of elastics, then inside that a gooey substance that looked like what you find inside a chocolate éclair. You won’t see that in your Scottish Tourist Board Ads at the cinema.
Thursday I took my kids to see Pirates 3 Dead Man’s Chest. Afterwards my 12 year old daughter came out of the bathroom with a look of barely contained excitement on her face. “Oh my God, dad!” I thought she had just found some money but it turned out that she had just seen Paris Hilton washing her hands in the cludgie next to her.
It might be no bad thing that Paris gets used to crowded toilet facilities and sharing with other girls as on Tuesday she begins a prison sentence for driving on a license after it was suspended for drunk driving.
At the weekend we managed to arrange some child care and spent the weekend at a spa in the desolate town of Desert Hot Springs about two and half hours drive into the desert from West Hollywood.
The spa is called Two Bunch Palms and is on a sacred Indian site. It is famous for its natural hot springs and mud baths, it features as the movie executive’s retreat in the Robert Altman movie The Player. It was once a clandestine hideaway for Al Capone who built a stone fortress there as his hideout from the Feds. They have his bullet proof car on display there.
I went for a run in the desert and saw a coyote, it looks like a skinny dog whose head is too big, not unlike the one in the cartoon.
I thought back to the family holidays we went on as kids. We either went to Ireland or to the West coast of Scotland in our green Morris Oxford, a car with a fold down leather arm rest in the back seat and bright orange pop up indicators.
It was mostly Girvan, for the Glasgow fair fortnight, I have a photo of us sitting in deck chairs, the only family on that beach next to what looks to be an active sewage pipe, on a day when an Eskimo would not venture outdoors for fear of frostbite.
My father sits smiling at us across the years, the only one whose teeth are not chittering, although mind you those teeth are not his, as he lost his in his youth in Ireland playing Hurling, which is somewhere between a contact sport and a martial art.
When he thought that it was time for us to get into the sea, he’d would tell us “Put on your costume” to the occasional surprise of any nearby listeners who might expect some kind of theatrical performance.
Our swimming costumes, maroon coloured and tweedy, were of dubious provenance, possibly hand knitted by some sadistic aunt. They were made of some kind of synthesis of a man made fabric and steel wool.
One of their unique features was that whenever they came into contact with any type of moisture they immediately doubled in weight and size. When I came out of the sea in them I looked like I was wearing a blood red overfull nappy which hung around my knees. Swimming in them was like swimming in leg irons.
If they weren’t hand knitted then they were no doubt purchased at Mrs Murphy’s, a second hand shop next to Paddy’s market in the Gallowgate in the east end of Glasgow. We kids were issued with strict instructions not to tell anyone that our clothes were bought in a second hand store and if the Rutherglen bus passed as my mother was on her way in there, she would dive up a close to avoid being spotted going in there.
At my father’s funeral, Mrs Murphy stood outside the chapel to pay her last respects to my dad. As I carried the coffin to the hearse I passed right by her, “Lovely man that Mr McGrade,” she said sadly,” size ten in a shoe” I couldn’t tell whether she was mourning the loss of a friend or his custom.
Another memorable Scottish holiday was the year we somehow managed to end up renting the lower half of a scruffy council house in Girvan. It rained so long and hard that if we had stayed there any longer we would have had to start building an ark.
It was torture for us as there was no TV downstairs but we could hear the one that was on upstairs, for four kids it was the equivalent of starving to death while living above a bakery.
I have a vivid memory of the one high point of the holiday which was watching the cross eyed boy who lived next door slowly dissect a golf ball with a fork. The first layer under the skin a bunch of elastics, then inside that a gooey substance that looked like what you find inside a chocolate éclair. You won’t see that in your Scottish Tourist Board Ads at the cinema.
sunday times column week three
Trollywood, Hollywood and Carmyle Loyal
On Wednesday of this week I went to see Rangers play LA Galaxy, Beckham’s team, though he hasn’t joined them yet, in a friendly, an odd mixture of the eerily familiar and the new. They had a piper play Flower of Scotland, the Proclaimers on the P.A. system at half time, some tranny looking lounge singer sang the Stars and Stripes, and then fireworks went off. Rangers won one nil, next to the Galaxy team their players pale faced like coal miners blinking in the evening sunlight. You could order food from your seat like the do at American baseball games, it was all terribly civilized.
It was all a stark contrast to my childhood sorties to Parkhead, being lifted over the turnstile, the wry comic abuse that was shouted, and old men incontinent with drink, those slate grey mince pies that were so full grease that if you bit into one at the deep end and the grease landed on you, you’d end up in Canniesburn for a skin graft. It sounds mad but I slightly pine for the days when football wasn’t quite so corporate.
The day of Us superbowl in Miami last year I read a piece in the New York Times about the pressure on players to take steroids to bulk up for the game and how the money they earned was a tiny fraction of what the National Football League brought in. Then if you get injured and can’t play, they didn’t want to know. There guys are the modern day equivalent of the gladiators of ancient rome, corporate slaves.
A friend invited me to a charity event at the Beverly Hills Hotel to raise money for the homeless in Los Angeles. There was something surreal about these wealthy people and that setting and the contrast with the images up on the screen which showed the lives of the homeless Angelenos. I felt like an imposter among all these high rollers. A lot of diamonds and big hair, and then there were the women.
Dick Van Dyke got up to speak, (it reminded me of that old joke : his real name is actually Penis Van Lesbian) no but seriously, he bounded up to the stage like a twenty two year old yoga instructor. A shock of white hair, and that voice is so familiar from all those movies I saw as a kid, but no animated penguins this time.
He talked about the horrors of the homeless villages, the shanty towns in downtown LA and how private hospitals have taken to driving uninsured patients down there and throwing them out on their arses with IVs still in their arms. In 21st century tinsel town all men may be created equal, but not for long.
The favoured mode of transport for the homeless here is the shopping trolley. There seem to be so many, hundreds of plastic bags and odd bits and pieces mounted on them so that they look like some touring Modern Art Installation. Title : Hooray for Trolleywood.
Some are alcoholics, drug addicts, mentally ill, fell on hard times or all of the above, a grim reminder that here there is no safety net so just be sure not to fall.
A columnist from the LA times spoke about a schizophrenic man he had befriended who was a very gifted classical musician before he fell. The man was too afraid to use the homeless shelter they were fund raising for but he said he liked knowing it was there and ate and showered there. The difficulty with a problem on this scale is that it can seem overwhelming. The distance between the Hollywood Hills and downtown is a few miles in one way and so much more in another.
I noticed on the list of trustees the widow of the late film maker John Frankenheimer and remembered the advice he gave a friend of mine, a first time film maker.
First of all, he told my friend, don’t give the studio any leeway to re-cut your film so try just shoot what you need. His second piece of advice was to never shoot in Britain, because they have the worst extras in the world. Frankenheimer. This hard earned observation came after he made a film called Grand Prix in Kent in 1966.
He wanted some shots of the crowd looking excited but the good people of Kent just couldn’t give him what he wanted, he noticed that the only thing they seemed to care about was the tea break. So what he did was tell the cameramen to keep rolling and he had the crew pull the tea trolley out in front of the crowd and as soon as they did this he got the excited and overjoyed reaction shot that he needed.
The other big reaction that he needed was the crowd’s horrified response when the star’s car crashes. Again they just seemed to look surly. So once again he pulled the stunt with the tea trolley, it was pulled out in front of them, they looked pleased and then at a given signal, the tea trolley was blown up, he got his reaction.
Another favourite moment was when I followed the hard boiled head of a studio and a cockney locations scout around an old English castle which we were looking at to use in a film I’d written.They were looking at the medieval oak door of the house. Studio Head: “This place might do the trick but I’m not sure about that door, we might have to change it.” The locations guy, sounding like Michael Caine, looked dubious about this and told him “That door, guvnor, is older than America.”
The story goes that when they were filming Ghandi on location in India, a cast of thousands of extras stood for hours in the midday sun while Dickie Attenborough lecture them through a loudspeaker system on the importance of Ghandi as a historical figure and the siginificance of this particular moment, Ghandi’s funeral, to the overall arc of the film that he had envisioned. Dickie is in tears and the native supporting artists are beginning to drop in the heat. The moment he finishes, the assistant director, grabs the mike and shouts, “ Right. Ghandi’s dead and you’re all sad. Turn over!”
On Wednesday of this week I went to see Rangers play LA Galaxy, Beckham’s team, though he hasn’t joined them yet, in a friendly, an odd mixture of the eerily familiar and the new. They had a piper play Flower of Scotland, the Proclaimers on the P.A. system at half time, some tranny looking lounge singer sang the Stars and Stripes, and then fireworks went off. Rangers won one nil, next to the Galaxy team their players pale faced like coal miners blinking in the evening sunlight. You could order food from your seat like the do at American baseball games, it was all terribly civilized.
It was all a stark contrast to my childhood sorties to Parkhead, being lifted over the turnstile, the wry comic abuse that was shouted, and old men incontinent with drink, those slate grey mince pies that were so full grease that if you bit into one at the deep end and the grease landed on you, you’d end up in Canniesburn for a skin graft. It sounds mad but I slightly pine for the days when football wasn’t quite so corporate.
The day of Us superbowl in Miami last year I read a piece in the New York Times about the pressure on players to take steroids to bulk up for the game and how the money they earned was a tiny fraction of what the National Football League brought in. Then if you get injured and can’t play, they didn’t want to know. There guys are the modern day equivalent of the gladiators of ancient rome, corporate slaves.
A friend invited me to a charity event at the Beverly Hills Hotel to raise money for the homeless in Los Angeles. There was something surreal about these wealthy people and that setting and the contrast with the images up on the screen which showed the lives of the homeless Angelenos. I felt like an imposter among all these high rollers. A lot of diamonds and big hair, and then there were the women.
Dick Van Dyke got up to speak, (it reminded me of that old joke : his real name is actually Penis Van Lesbian) no but seriously, he bounded up to the stage like a twenty two year old yoga instructor. A shock of white hair, and that voice is so familiar from all those movies I saw as a kid, but no animated penguins this time.
He talked about the horrors of the homeless villages, the shanty towns in downtown LA and how private hospitals have taken to driving uninsured patients down there and throwing them out on their arses with IVs still in their arms. In 21st century tinsel town all men may be created equal, but not for long.
The favoured mode of transport for the homeless here is the shopping trolley. There seem to be so many, hundreds of plastic bags and odd bits and pieces mounted on them so that they look like some touring Modern Art Installation. Title : Hooray for Trolleywood.
Some are alcoholics, drug addicts, mentally ill, fell on hard times or all of the above, a grim reminder that here there is no safety net so just be sure not to fall.
A columnist from the LA times spoke about a schizophrenic man he had befriended who was a very gifted classical musician before he fell. The man was too afraid to use the homeless shelter they were fund raising for but he said he liked knowing it was there and ate and showered there. The difficulty with a problem on this scale is that it can seem overwhelming. The distance between the Hollywood Hills and downtown is a few miles in one way and so much more in another.
I noticed on the list of trustees the widow of the late film maker John Frankenheimer and remembered the advice he gave a friend of mine, a first time film maker.
First of all, he told my friend, don’t give the studio any leeway to re-cut your film so try just shoot what you need. His second piece of advice was to never shoot in Britain, because they have the worst extras in the world. Frankenheimer. This hard earned observation came after he made a film called Grand Prix in Kent in 1966.
He wanted some shots of the crowd looking excited but the good people of Kent just couldn’t give him what he wanted, he noticed that the only thing they seemed to care about was the tea break. So what he did was tell the cameramen to keep rolling and he had the crew pull the tea trolley out in front of the crowd and as soon as they did this he got the excited and overjoyed reaction shot that he needed.
The other big reaction that he needed was the crowd’s horrified response when the star’s car crashes. Again they just seemed to look surly. So once again he pulled the stunt with the tea trolley, it was pulled out in front of them, they looked pleased and then at a given signal, the tea trolley was blown up, he got his reaction.
Another favourite moment was when I followed the hard boiled head of a studio and a cockney locations scout around an old English castle which we were looking at to use in a film I’d written.They were looking at the medieval oak door of the house. Studio Head: “This place might do the trick but I’m not sure about that door, we might have to change it.” The locations guy, sounding like Michael Caine, looked dubious about this and told him “That door, guvnor, is older than America.”
The story goes that when they were filming Ghandi on location in India, a cast of thousands of extras stood for hours in the midday sun while Dickie Attenborough lecture them through a loudspeaker system on the importance of Ghandi as a historical figure and the siginificance of this particular moment, Ghandi’s funeral, to the overall arc of the film that he had envisioned. Dickie is in tears and the native supporting artists are beginning to drop in the heat. The moment he finishes, the assistant director, grabs the mike and shouts, “ Right. Ghandi’s dead and you’re all sad. Turn over!”
sunday times column week two
All in the best possible taste
In the Steve Martin movie LA Story, there is a moment when he enthuses as only he can about one particular corner of Los Angeles, telling his friend, “Some of the buildings round here are over TEN years old! “ It is a good joke but in a city that a hundred years ago was farmland, there is some reason to think of ten years as historic.
Los Angeles became the place to make movies for three reasons, the land was cheap, the long sunny days meant that you could film all day without expensive lights and most importantly it was as far as you could get from New York and the people who owned the patents for film cameras, it was off the radar.
At the end of my street is a castle, huge blocks of granite, turrets, a flying buttress, it wouldn’t look out of place in Scotland, except that it is a three bedroom detached house, the scale is wrong, like Stonehenge in miniature. Next to it is a Surrey style house with Chinese characters in wrought iron on the windows, then a Hansel and Gretel gingerbread style cottage, the overall effect suggests the backdrops used in old movies. All the same there is an exuberance about it that on a good day makes me smile, it’s a bad taste party for houses.
In the nearby historic Hancock Park district, (built in the 1920’s), a Music Producer bought a corner house and decided that what it needed was some kind of make over. He has a gold Rolls Royce and a gold Hummer parked outside, tasteful and understated in the American way. After he moved in he was obviously looking for ways to classy up the property and to the horror of his neighbours and the Hancock Park Conservation Society, he bought a six foot replica of Michelangelo’s David and stuck it on a five foot column outside his house. The neighbours and the locals complained vociferously that he was bringing down the whole tone of the area. In an effort to keep the peace with his new neighbours, he decided to put up a few more Davids to keep the first one company, twenty three to be exact. At Xmas he puts little red Santa hats on each of them. I think of the place as Camp David.
A year ago this week I was invited to a friend’s birthday party at the home of Carrie Fisher, daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, a sprawling Aladin’s cave of a gaff, with a bungalow for guests, trippy sculptures and illuminated signs in the massive garden. The first thing you see as you enter the house is a photo of Carrie as Princess Leia from Star Wars alongside Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill. Next to it is an old screen magazine with her and her movie star mom on the cover.
The house is full of odd hidden little rooms. There is a stained glass window of a bishop and a choirboy in an useemly embrace, the kitchen floor tiles sport a prozac pill design.
The house is some kind of three dimensional model of her psyche.
Her parties are as well known as she is. She gives me the tour pointing out the spare bedroom where Liz Taylor would crash between divorces but making no mention of the party two years before when she woke up to find one of her house guests, a gay Republican, dead from an overdose in her bed.
My landlady is an Israeli woman in her seventies who tells me that since 9/11 Americans are too scared. “They are like chickens. In Israel, if you are invited to a birthday party or a wedding, you go. You bring a gun, but you go, because as we say… you cannot die every day!”
On Sunday we went to Malibu to the seaside and at lunch we spot supermodel Heidi Klum, her musician husband Seal and the two baby seals in a Malibu mall being swamped by six paparazzi all taking the same shot.
On the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu we pass Moonshadows the bar where Mel Gibson had his drinks before being pulled over, blaming Jewish people for all the wars and claiming he owned Malibu. There is a sign that says Welcome to Malibu but someone has changed it so that it now reads, Welcome to Melibu.
I am told that after the success of the film Braveheart it was decided to commission a statue of William Wallace, but that since there were no photographs or other likenesses of the man, what was in fact erected was a statue of Mel Gibson, pocket sized conspiracy theorist and billionaire drunk driver.
That nigt I went to see Shrek the Third with the two eldest of my ginger brood. Mike Meyers does a good generic Scottish accent, I have decided that he sounds like he comes from one of the posher parts of Bathgate. Interesting what they use the accent for in movies. In Happy Feet the fun hating penguins are Scots, and the half man half octopus bad guy in Pirates of the Carribean sounds like a kirk Elder who has had a stroke. Why are we thought of as such killjoys ? What happened to the good old days of Z Cars when every drunk they lifted was played by a Glaswegian, mostly Phil McCall ?
Some Angelenos are a little unclear about where exactly it is that I come from. I have had ‘Scotland, that sounds like a romantic place to me, I’d like to drive there some time!’ and from an actress in the green room, ‘Scotland, is that in Scotland yard?’
My sister mailed me a copy of the Ecosse supplement with me on the cover and I notice that there is a small photo of my cousin Denise Mina just above it. She is from the shorter side of the family and e mails me to say that only people who know us both would realize that the two photos are actually to scale.
As I am reading her article my six year old son Gabriel comes into the living room, sees my picture and shouts, “Hey dad, look, you’re on the front page of a magazine, you’re famous, you’re famous, look!” I suggest he should go and find his mother and tell her the great news.
In the Steve Martin movie LA Story, there is a moment when he enthuses as only he can about one particular corner of Los Angeles, telling his friend, “Some of the buildings round here are over TEN years old! “ It is a good joke but in a city that a hundred years ago was farmland, there is some reason to think of ten years as historic.
Los Angeles became the place to make movies for three reasons, the land was cheap, the long sunny days meant that you could film all day without expensive lights and most importantly it was as far as you could get from New York and the people who owned the patents for film cameras, it was off the radar.
At the end of my street is a castle, huge blocks of granite, turrets, a flying buttress, it wouldn’t look out of place in Scotland, except that it is a three bedroom detached house, the scale is wrong, like Stonehenge in miniature. Next to it is a Surrey style house with Chinese characters in wrought iron on the windows, then a Hansel and Gretel gingerbread style cottage, the overall effect suggests the backdrops used in old movies. All the same there is an exuberance about it that on a good day makes me smile, it’s a bad taste party for houses.
In the nearby historic Hancock Park district, (built in the 1920’s), a Music Producer bought a corner house and decided that what it needed was some kind of make over. He has a gold Rolls Royce and a gold Hummer parked outside, tasteful and understated in the American way. After he moved in he was obviously looking for ways to classy up the property and to the horror of his neighbours and the Hancock Park Conservation Society, he bought a six foot replica of Michelangelo’s David and stuck it on a five foot column outside his house. The neighbours and the locals complained vociferously that he was bringing down the whole tone of the area. In an effort to keep the peace with his new neighbours, he decided to put up a few more Davids to keep the first one company, twenty three to be exact. At Xmas he puts little red Santa hats on each of them. I think of the place as Camp David.
A year ago this week I was invited to a friend’s birthday party at the home of Carrie Fisher, daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, a sprawling Aladin’s cave of a gaff, with a bungalow for guests, trippy sculptures and illuminated signs in the massive garden. The first thing you see as you enter the house is a photo of Carrie as Princess Leia from Star Wars alongside Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill. Next to it is an old screen magazine with her and her movie star mom on the cover.
The house is full of odd hidden little rooms. There is a stained glass window of a bishop and a choirboy in an useemly embrace, the kitchen floor tiles sport a prozac pill design.
The house is some kind of three dimensional model of her psyche.
Her parties are as well known as she is. She gives me the tour pointing out the spare bedroom where Liz Taylor would crash between divorces but making no mention of the party two years before when she woke up to find one of her house guests, a gay Republican, dead from an overdose in her bed.
My landlady is an Israeli woman in her seventies who tells me that since 9/11 Americans are too scared. “They are like chickens. In Israel, if you are invited to a birthday party or a wedding, you go. You bring a gun, but you go, because as we say… you cannot die every day!”
On Sunday we went to Malibu to the seaside and at lunch we spot supermodel Heidi Klum, her musician husband Seal and the two baby seals in a Malibu mall being swamped by six paparazzi all taking the same shot.
On the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu we pass Moonshadows the bar where Mel Gibson had his drinks before being pulled over, blaming Jewish people for all the wars and claiming he owned Malibu. There is a sign that says Welcome to Malibu but someone has changed it so that it now reads, Welcome to Melibu.
I am told that after the success of the film Braveheart it was decided to commission a statue of William Wallace, but that since there were no photographs or other likenesses of the man, what was in fact erected was a statue of Mel Gibson, pocket sized conspiracy theorist and billionaire drunk driver.
That nigt I went to see Shrek the Third with the two eldest of my ginger brood. Mike Meyers does a good generic Scottish accent, I have decided that he sounds like he comes from one of the posher parts of Bathgate. Interesting what they use the accent for in movies. In Happy Feet the fun hating penguins are Scots, and the half man half octopus bad guy in Pirates of the Carribean sounds like a kirk Elder who has had a stroke. Why are we thought of as such killjoys ? What happened to the good old days of Z Cars when every drunk they lifted was played by a Glaswegian, mostly Phil McCall ?
Some Angelenos are a little unclear about where exactly it is that I come from. I have had ‘Scotland, that sounds like a romantic place to me, I’d like to drive there some time!’ and from an actress in the green room, ‘Scotland, is that in Scotland yard?’
My sister mailed me a copy of the Ecosse supplement with me on the cover and I notice that there is a small photo of my cousin Denise Mina just above it. She is from the shorter side of the family and e mails me to say that only people who know us both would realize that the two photos are actually to scale.
As I am reading her article my six year old son Gabriel comes into the living room, sees my picture and shouts, “Hey dad, look, you’re on the front page of a magazine, you’re famous, you’re famous, look!” I suggest he should go and find his mother and tell her the great news.
sunday times column week one
Where I live now in West Hollywood, just above Little Ethiopia, there is a Starbucks every two blocks it seems. They have reached such a saturation point that they will soon have to start opening Starbucks inside the toilets of the bigger Starbucks.
The other oddly ubiquitous business here is the psychic. “Walk ins welcome, Chakras Cleansed, Karma changed, fortunes told, career advice, loved ones returned.” There seem to be more psychics per square inch than anywhere else I have ever lived. I suppose it’s a reflection of the uncertainty of the business and the flakiness of the people.
My mother grew up in Rutherglen and they had a neighbour who would come in and read the tea leaves for them. You drank your tea then swirled around the dregs into some kind of shape that she could read.
I’m not sure how accurate she was but seemingly she always started off the reading the same way no matter who it was. She would look down into the cup and then into the face of the person and with all the solemenity of an Aztec priest would state , “Sometimes you’re happy and sometimes you’re no !” This would have whoever was getting the reading nodding furiously at her uncanny accuracy.
Like so many her job fell victim to new technology when the tea bag came along and did away with the tea leaves at the bottom of the cup. At first she hoped it was just a fad. Who saw that coming?
It reminds me of the story of the tabloid editor who called up the Mystic Meg on his newspaper, and told her, as you will no doubt have foreseen, your services are no longer required.
The Scots are hard to avoid in America, there is Carnegie, who came here with nothing, made a fortune in steel then gave most of it away, endowing, among other things Rutherglen library. Eleven presidents were of Scots ancestry, there are eight Edinburghs here but only seven Glasgows.
The other oddly ubiquitous business here is the psychic. “Walk ins welcome, Chakras Cleansed, Karma changed, fortunes told, career advice, loved ones returned.” There seem to be more psychics per square inch than anywhere else I have ever lived. I suppose it’s a reflection of the uncertainty of the business and the flakiness of the people.
My mother grew up in Rutherglen and they had a neighbour who would come in and read the tea leaves for them. You drank your tea then swirled around the dregs into some kind of shape that she could read.
I’m not sure how accurate she was but seemingly she always started off the reading the same way no matter who it was. She would look down into the cup and then into the face of the person and with all the solemenity of an Aztec priest would state , “Sometimes you’re happy and sometimes you’re no !” This would have whoever was getting the reading nodding furiously at her uncanny accuracy.
Like so many her job fell victim to new technology when the tea bag came along and did away with the tea leaves at the bottom of the cup. At first she hoped it was just a fad. Who saw that coming?
It reminds me of the story of the tabloid editor who called up the Mystic Meg on his newspaper, and told her, as you will no doubt have foreseen, your services are no longer required.
The Scots are hard to avoid in America, there is Carnegie, who came here with nothing, made a fortune in steel then gave most of it away, endowing, among other things Rutherglen library. Eleven presidents were of Scots ancestry, there are eight Edinburghs here but only seven Glasgows.
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