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.