I don’t know if people remember it, but over a decade ago Cadbury’s released an advert in which a gorilla appeared to play the drums for Phil Collins’ ‘In The Air’ tonight. I found this parody of it on the scifi band channel on YouTube, with Chewbacca doing the honours instead of the gorilla. There are a number of other parodies like it, but this is the one I prefer. I’m sticking it up here as I thought some of the great readers of this blog might also enjoy it. I supposed I should have really put it up on Star Wars day, May 4th, but it’s a bit late for that now.
No, not a tale about a funny performing animal who can speak. Gef the Talking Mongoose was a poltergeist that haunted a Manx family in their remote farmhouse in the 1930s. As well as making knocks and scratches it also spoke, claiming to be a spirit from India that had come to Europe. Although it made many other claims and hints about its identity as well. When manifesting, it took the form of a small, furry creature. There are photographs of the spook, but they are less than entirely convincing. Its appearance in once photo has been compared to a woman’s fur stole of the type worn in the period. There is a cast supposedly of the ghost’s footprints, and they are unlike those of a mongoose or anything else, for that matter. The front paws are much larger than the rear. The case was investigated by the Hungarian lawyer and parapsychologist Dr Nandor Fodor and the British ghost hunter Harry Price.
Apparently they are making a film of the case to be released later this year. The film is produced and directed by Adam Sigal, and stars Christopher Lloyd as Nandor Fodor, Minnie Driver as Anne, Simon Pegg as Harry Price, and Neil Gaiman as the voice of Gef himself. Lloyd was the mad scientist in the Back to the Future films, though he also appeared as a Klingon commander in Star Trek III: the Search for Spock. Some of us can still remember him as Mad Jim in the 1970s/ early 80s comedy, Taxi. Pegg has appeared in a series of comedies, like Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and World’s End, as well as the rebooted Star Trek films and Paul, about a Grey alien who really has been living on Earth for all these years. Neil Gaiman is a comics and Fantasy writer, who created the cult Goth comic back in the 90s, The Sandman, co-wrote Good Omens with the late, much missed Terry Pratchett, the BBC fantasy series Neverwhere, and a string of Fantasy novels like American Gods, which I think may have been adapted into a TV series. I’ve a very strong interest in the paranormal and Gef the Talking Mongoose is a fascinating case. I believe there was a radio play about it on Radio 4 a year or so ago. According to the imdb page the film is expected to be released on the 16th September this year.
This is a video from Lawrence Fox’s Reclaim the Media channel on YouTube, which is part of his Reclaim party. I’m very much aware that by reblogging it I’m tempting the ire of the Labour party for publishing the ideas and content of a rival party. But I think here Lozza and his crew have a point. Looking at it, he doesn’t object to drag as a late night entertainment for adults. What he objects to is very sexualised drag performances being staged in front of children as a vehicle for indoctrinating them with Queer Theory and the gender ideology.
I state again that I am definitely opposed to anyone being stigmatised or persecuted because of their sexuality or gender identity. I’m putting this video up because I do think that there is an attempt to use drag as a vehicle for indoctrinating children, and that the theories about human sexuality and sexual identity are fundamentally wrong and dangerous.
The video traces the history of drag from the days of ancient Greece, the middle ages and the early modern period, when male actors took female roles because of the social taboos against women appearing on stage. He claims that drag as a distinct form of entertainment appeared in the 19th century. The word itself may be a contraction of ‘Dressed As A Girl’. By the late 19th century drag was subversive and political, critiquing social norms about gender. It was originally late night fun for adults, but now there are attempts to put into the classroom. Drag Queen Story Hour is in the vanguard of this campaign.
Queer Theory, which is part of this new movement, has its origins in the postmodernist philosophical movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It begins with Michel Foucault’s 1976 History of Sexuality. Lozza says that Foucault definitely wasn’t a paedophile. This is almost certainly irony, as Foucault used to travel to north Africa for sex with young, pre-teen boys. He also explicitly argued that children can give sexual consent. His book claimed that sexuality was a social construct shaped by culture and history. This was then extended further by Gail Rubin, a lesbian anthropologist in her Thinking Sex. This also argued that sex and gender were the product of cultural norms, which were themselves oppressive and had no basis in nature. She defended every sexual taboo, including ‘boy lovers’.
Rubin was followed by Judith Butler and her book, Gender Trouble, which introduced into the debate the theory of performativity. Gender was not innate, but something people perform. She also challenged the gender binary of male and female. Drag Queen Story Hour differs from other forms of drag in that it is an exercise in gender performativity. This is unlike pantomime dames, who are comic figures exaggerating some female mannerisms while preserving their male gait. Drag queens themselves evolved from gay nightclubs and cabaret to challenge gender norms, but they were adult entertainment.
Drag Queen Story Hour itself began in 2015 in San Francisco, launched by author and activist Michelle Tea. She started it as a way of spreading knowledge of gay culture. Tea was already involved with transgressive culture, touring with a sex workers’ artistic collective and with a Queer feminist poetry collective, Sisterspit, whose anthology included pieces by and about drug addicts and other marginalised, underground groups. Drag Queen Story Hour was launched with Tea’s own group, Radar Productions, and was first staged in San Francisco public library. It was intended to introduce children to gay culture and diversity, equity and inclusion. It was an immediate success, and spread to other cities and across the Atlantic to Britain.
Lozza states that the claim by its defenders that Drag Queen Story Hour is just about teaching children to read in a fun way is dishonest. Here he mentions the recent scandal of the drag king, who performed in schools in the Isle of Man. This individual sparked controversy and a review of the programme by teaching children that there were 72 genders. Amongst themselves, the advocates of Drag Queen Story Hour are quite clear about their intentions to indoctrinate children. He talks here about the paper ‘Queer Pedagogy’, co-authored by the drag queen Little Miss Hot Mess, which appeared in an American journal of education. This stated the goal was to attack racist, capitalist modes of reproduction and the nuclear family.
From this he moves to the matter of expense and how much these events cost. Much of it is funded by the Arts Council. In 2019 the British Library hosted a Drag Queen Story Hour as part of their ‘Live, Love, Liberty’ exhibition. Last year, 2022, New York public library spent $200,000 on such events. The organisers insisted that these performances were safe, with background checks made on the performers and the performances themselves not sexual and suitable for children. This was belied by clips of some of these events showing very sexualised performances. Seven of the drag queens who performed in the Story Hours have been charged with child sex offences. Sharon Le Grand, another drag queen, also said in 2022 ‘We need to teach our children to open their hearts. We need to teach our children to open their minds. We need to teach our children to open their legs.’ Drag kings, a recent addition to the show, have also exposed their chests during the performances to show their mastectomy scars, blurring the line between drag and strip shows. He also talks about the problem of the adult nature of the drag acts away from children. Many of them have web pages with very adult jokes and content, which children can easily find. As an example, he gives a rather coarse joke from Ruby Violet’s description of herself, who performed in front of children aged 3-11 in an event staged by Hertfordshire council.
He concludes by discussing the way opposition to Drag Queen Story Hour has been misrepresented and the attempts to outlaw protests against it. The Beeb declared that opponents of drag queens were motivated by conspiracy theories and were members of the far right. In Canada a law has been passed banning protests within a certain limit of drag queen performances, punishable by a fine of $25,000. The video concludes with him mentioning that there are a number of organisations fighting the gender ideology and Drag Queen Story Hour, whose details he’ll put in the blurb about the video, and a plug for another YouTube series from Reclaim, Bad Education.
While I feel that the video is broadly accurate, obviously that doesn’t mean that each and every drag queen involved in story hour is ideologically motivated or a danger to children. Clive Simpson and Dennis Kavanagh have said in their YouTube videos, The Queens’ Speech, that many drag queens are just gay men trying to make a buck, and so don’t want a blanket ban on such shows. The EDIjester has also drawn a distinction between British and American drag. In his view, British drag, unlike its American counterpart, came out of the music hall tradition and wasn’t sexual. Again, I remember when British TV comedy frequently included drag. One of the major stars of 70s week day TV was Danny La Rue, while comedians and comic actors like the Two Ronnies, Dick Emery and Les Dawson also performed in drag. Also back in the 70s and 80s were Hinge and Bracket, which mixed musical comedy with drag. Again, this was mainstream entertainment on TV and radio and considered entirely innocuous. There have also been Paul O’Grady’s Lily Savage and Barry Humphries with Dame Edna Everege.
And yes, some of the opponents of Drag Queen Story Hour are far right conspiracy theorists. You can see that with Correct, Not Political, who hold weird conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum, staged counter-protests against left wing demonstrations and openly admire Mosley. Their opposition to Drag Queen Story Hour comes from a deeper hostility to homosexuality and its promotion.
But I think critics of Drag Queen Story Hour and Queer Theory, like James Lindsay, are absolutely correct about the attempts to use drag as a vehicle for explicit political indoctrination and very harmful ideas about gender. It’s this aspect of it that needs to fought and combated.
Okay, here’s something a bit different for this Easter Day. I was looking through the genre film site, Teleport City, yesterday when I came across a review of the 1968 Indian movie Wahan Ke Log. As well as covering western films, Teleport City also has excellent reviews of Asian genre cinema. Much of this is about the various Hong Kong martial arts epics, but it also deals with other countries like India. I’ve no idea what the title means, but the review was fascinating in what it said about the influence of James Bond on Asian cinema at the time and also how the UFO phenomena had reached Asia and influence popular culture over there, at least in the form of this movie. Apparently the success of the Bond films led to the release of a number of similar flicks in Asia, as countries like India sent their suave, elegantly dressed superspies after nefarious villains intent on world conquest. In this case, it was a UFO invasion from Mars. Among the suspects was an Indian scientist, who has invented a laser gun, which his criminal son has gotten hold of and is using for his evil purposes. And yes, there are song and dance numbers as the hero goes into nightclubs to see the female lead sing while knocking back cocktails. In the end it is revealed that the Martian invasion is a hoax, perpetrated by one of India’s Asian rivals, though the review wouldn’t tell you whether this was Pakistan or China. The only hint they gave as to who was responsible was that it wasn’t Burma.
It’s a long review, and I admit, I did no more than skim it. What interested me is what the film says about the global nature of the UFO phenomenon. It first arose in America in the 1950s and so can appear very much as a western phenomenon even though there have been sightings all over the world. The sceptical UFO magazine, Magonia, used to complain that UFO researchers had a simplistic view of non-western cultures when it came to interpreting UFO encounters. They assumed that witnesses from regions like Africa could not be faking their experiences or mixing it up with material from the global UFO culture because, living in such distant parts of the world they were somehow untouched by western popular culture. That this was not so was shown in one UFO documentary where an African UFO witness wore a Michael Jackson T-shirt.
I’d also assumed that there was little in the way of Science Fiction in India. One of the anthologies of SF stories I read in the ’90s included one Indian short story, but stated that there wasn’t much of it. I read elsewhere that when it came to fantastic cinema, the main genre was the ‘Theologicals’ about the Hindu gods. These satisfy the need for the fantastic and cosmic that in the west is catered to by Science Fiction and Fantasy movies. It certainly seems that the majority of science fiction cinema and television from Asia comes from Japan, although China might be starting to catch up with its television adaptation of the Three Body Problem.. I also found it interesting for what it also showed about the nationalistic tensions in Asian cinema as well. Some of the 1950s SF movies have been seen as metaphors for the Communist threat, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or otherwise informed by Cold War paranoia. One of the clearest examples of this is the B-movie The Angry Red Planet, in which the voice of God appears on people’s radios from Mars denouncing Communism. I think. Wahan Ke Log shows that the theme of invasion from outer space could also express the same national and political fears in Indian cinema of covert foreign plots to take over the country.
Not all Indian SF cinema may be so grim, however. A couple of decades ago our local multiplex had posters up for the Bollywood epics it was also showing as well as the latest Hollywood releases. One of them appeared to be about an alien family with large, high craniums landing and living in India. One of the pictures was of the family on a bike trip, their cycle helmets suitably shaped to cover their peculiar noggins. It was only when thinking about it a little later that it occurred to me that this could be India’s answer to the Coneheads. There’s a whole world of SF and space related cinema out there, which takes themes and tropes from the west and adds its own unique experience and views, as countries around the world industrialise and start to explore the High Frontier for themselves.
I got an invitation the other day from the Labour party to buy tickets so that I could meet Peter Mandelson at a special dinner in Swindon. It was a repeat of a similar dinner a little while ago, in which they Labour faithful were asked to buy tickets to a similar event to meet certain members of the party’s front bench. I didn’t want to go then. Not just because I couldn’t afford it, and am too sick to travel to Swindon anyway, but also because I objected to it in principle. The Labour party was set up by the trade unions and socialist parties to fight for working people. It should be funded from their subscriptions, not from corporate donations and dinners set up in emulation of the Tories.
And principle says I don’t want to meet Mandelson anyway. He was very clever as the party’s spin doctor and electoral strategist, but he and Blair prolonged Thatcherism well past its proper lifetime. It was Blair’s government that cut of benefits for asylum seekers and pushed them into detention centres, pushed NHS privatisation into high gear, and went about cheerfully outsourcing more state business, introduced the work capability tests, carried on with benefit sanctions, and was very enthusiastic about private management of prisons. Blair also took money from pro-Israel Jewish businessmen, thus ensuring his silence over that country’s flagrant human rights abuses. And then there was a little matter like the illegal war in Iraq. It was under Blair that the party turned away from its working class roots to appeal to middle class swing voters. They condescendingly expected Labour voters to go with it, as they had nowhere else to go. Hence the shock and outrage when Jeremy Corbyn started packing them out at halls, parks and sports grounds up and down Britain. Hence also the rise of UKIP, as White working class voters who felt they’d been abandoned by the both parties turned to Farage’s xenophobia and populism.
If I want to go and see someone from the Labour party, it’d be Richard Burgon, Jeremy Corbyn or that other dissident, ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone. I’d go and see Rosina Allin-Khan, a woman of mixed Polish and Asian heritage, who’s a doctor working in the NHS and concerned, as so many are, about the state the Conservatives have reduced it to. I’d want to hear Black Activists Rising Against Cuts. I dare say they have takes on racism and White privilege that might annoy me, but austerity is hitting the Black community hardest, as is clear from a paper in the collection The Violence of Austerity. I’d go to see the head of Young Labour as she defies the leadership on issues like socialism and Israel.
I want proper, working people back leading the Labour party. I want to see a working mother tell her story about struggling to keep her family fed and their home heated on her and her partner’s wages. I want to hear former students tell how, despite their degree, their now mired in £40,000 worth of debt and are flipping burgers at McDonald’s for a living. I want to hear the people who volunteer at food banks about the starvation and privation they see. I want to see someone from Disabled People Against Cuts talk about how austerity, low wages and welfare cuts is affecting ordinary disabled folk. I want to see Jews like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Tony Greenstein and Jackie Walker talk about Israeli atrocities and the sectarian anti-Semitic persecution to which they’ve been subjected. I want to see Alexei Sayle, shouty, foul-mouthed Sayle, make jokes about Communism and the Conservatives, celebrating and supporting real anti-racist activists like Marc Wadsworth.
I want to hear the voices of ordinary men and women stuck in dead-end jobs and zero hours contracts talking about their lives and how they can be improved. People on supermarket checkouts, cleaners, white-collar office workers, now being depressed into the rest of the proletariat. As for business, I only want to hear from the small business people, the Arkwrights, who run local stores and corner shops, who are being driven into the ground as the Tories and corporatist New Labour support big business and the supermarkets.
I want to hear from the elderly as they worry about pensions and issues like mobility, as well as the problems they experience as everything goes on line. Many of them don’t have a computer and don’t understand them. They have to rely on their children to sort some of this out for them. What if they haven’t had any, and don’t have younger friends and neighbours to help them?
I want the victims of the benefit agencies humiliations and sanctions regime to tear into that and the cruelty and self-interest of the clerks administering it.
These are the people, I’d pay to see. Not someone like Mandelson, Blair or Starmer, who seem to have only a nodding acquaintance with working people, and see them through the prism of voting and demographic documents with the cool, detached eye of the ad man. Not someone who patronises them with management-speak, who expects Labour grassroots activists and supporters to act as drones reading from specially prepared scripts.
I want that to end. I want it to have ended long ago, when Brown lost the election.
I want to see local MPs for local people, not right-wingers parachuted in against the wishes of ordinary voters.
Those are the real Labour party. Not Mandelson, Blair and Starmer. I want to see proper Labour activists at protests, picket lines and church halls. I don’t want to see corporate closet Tories across a dinner table.
After her great and highly controversial Rwanda plan, Suella Braverman yesterday announced another grand scheme, this time to tackle the grooming gangs. She announced that she was going to set up a special police task force to deal with them. This is another area fraught with racial politics. Cruella declared that there was something in Pakistani culture that caused them. When challenged about this, she said she was just referring to the gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford. The news about this latest policy from the Tories included various experts. One of these cited a report commissioned by the Tories two years ago that found there was no link between the grooming gangs and ethnicity, and that the majority of men in these gangs were white. Which is what you’d expect, as this is a White majority country. Other issues include concerns about racial stereotyping and putting the focus on the perpetrators rather than victims. The concern was that the girls who were preyed on by the gangs were left without police and authority protection because of their high-risk life styles. Aside from this, Braverman has not made any statement about what funding and resources will be allocated to this new crime unit, how it will be organised and operate, and so on. So I wonder how serious she is. Not very, is how it all seems.
Firstly, the Tories have had years to set up a dedicated squad to deal with the gangs, ever since the scale of the abuse and the inactions and cover-ups by the police and local authorities became a scandal. They haven’t done so. Instead, this announcement has been made right at the time when the Tories are nearing the final years of their term, are low in the polls and, it seems, desperately looking for a policy that will resonate with the public. And I don’t believe it was an accident either that Cruella specifically mentioned Muslim/Pakistani gangs. Because of the size of the scandal, the impression was given that the grooming gangs generally came from this ethnicity. She was appealing to the Islamophobic right.
There are real issues regarding Islamic culture and attitudes to women. Traditional Islamic culture requires women to dress in the black, all-covering chadors and cover their hair with the hijab. Women were not supposed to go out in public except in the company of their husbands or close male relatives. And female sexual promiscuity is strictly forbidden. Thus there is an attitude in some parts of the Muslim and general Asian community that White girls are whores or sexually easy. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote about this in one of her columns in the Independent years ago. One of the lines in a spoof of ‘Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover’ on Goodness, Gracious Me, altered so that it was instead, ‘Fifty Ways to Leave Your Mother’, was ‘Your mother says, ‘that White girls just a whore”. Anthropologists have also documented similar attitudes in the wider Muslim community. Norway has lessons for immigrants to teach them not to molest or rape western women. A few years ago the Finns released an English-language video with same intention. This featured three women singing, ‘Hey! Don’t touch me there! That’s my no-no space’. But I don’t see any attempt to tackle similar attitudes among Muslim migrants to Britain.
It looks to me instead that Braverman is deliberately appealing to the Islamophobic right and that section of the population that may be considering voting for Reform or whatever it is rump UKIP is calling itself. This is empty, culture war electioneering, and I see no intention of tackling grooming gangs, whether they’re Asian, White or whatever.
This is just about the Conservatives wanting to con people into re-electing them. And if they are, they’ll forget it, just as they’ve broken every other policy which hasn’t been about boosting the bloated incomes of the rich at the expense of the rest of us, Black, White and Asian.
Kernow Damo posted another video on YouTube yesterday, showing precisely how totalitarian Starmer is prepared to be in his struggle to stop Labour members supporting Jeremy Corbyn. A group of Welsh Labourites wanted to go off to see a film defending the former Labour leader, which was presented by that known Fascist, Alexei Sayle. (For those too young to remember him, Alexei Sayle was one of the new, politically-correct comedians of the 1980s. His parents were Communist Romanian Jews, and he was one who was very hot on being anti-racist and anti-sexist). Unfortunately, their constituency party was told that they couldn’t. Labour party members may not see it by order of the NEC.
What! Who elected Stalin to the Board of British Film Censors? This is a free country, not a Communist dictatorship, and Stalin has no business telling anyone what they may or may not see, provided it is all legal. I think if I were in the Welsh Labour members’ shoes, I’d organise an informal trip for interested people, but completely outside and unknown to the Labour bureaucracy.
This is a disgusting decision, especially as Corbyn was still a Labour member. In my view, this makes Starmer totally unfit for government. There is too much censorship in this country. The Tories would like to take away our right to protest. The woke want to scream down anyone anyone who criticises the postmodern Critical Social Justice Policies, and drive those academics who are critical of them out of the education system. And the Tories have also shown how they suppress reports criticising them, or demanding they take further action. Starmer’s banning of Labour members from using their own judgement about a film about Jeremy Corbyn shows that there is a real danger of him doing exactly the same once he gets into power and the media investigate the failings or abuses in his administration.
I want a Labour government, but Starmer should not be its head.
As I’m sure you all have seen, the big news today is that comedian, actor and broadcaster Paul O’Grady has passed on. The obituaries for him have, naturally, talked about his career and its highlights, starting with his most notorious creation, Lily Savage. Savage, complete with her massive bouffant blonde hairdo, long eyelashes, high heels and razor-sharp tongue, hit our screens in the 1990s. She was a character O’Grady had developed in the gay clubs. I also got the impression that she was based on women he’d known in childhood. But O’Grady didn’t stop there. He also hosted chat shows and one series, in which he went through south-east Asia on a quest to find a particularly glamorous Chinese starlet of the 1930s. Among the series more notable incidents was one in which O’Grady appeared in matching black turban and sarong in Thailand or one of the neighbouring countries. But he also visited the cemetery to the British and imperial soldiers worked to death by the Japanese on the Burma railway. O’Grady naturally became upset, looking at the terribly young age of some of these fine men inscribed on their tombstones. He also got annoyed with the official recommendation not to say to much about the Japanese, ‘Why not? They started it!’ Quite. It was a deeply moving piece of television that showed O’Grady at his best. And from there he went on to present a long-running series on ITV about Battersea Dogs’ Home, For the Love of Dogs. O’Grady was a massive dog-lover, and as they’ve been saying on the TV tributes to him, he had a natural rapport with his canine friends, several of whom he took home. During one episode, repeated today, he met the Queen Consort, Camilla. He’d had problems with his heart, and underwent an operation on it some time ago. I think the news has said that he passed away in his sleep, which is a blessing. He was also appearing in a play. The eulogies have also said that he was a staunch supporter of gay rights.
Savage was a little bit racy, but looking back on it, she seems to me to be very much in the traditional spirit of British drag: outrageous, but driven by character and family friendly, and there was real wit involved. The modern drag shows seems to be more in the style of American drag and much more sexualised.
It’s a sad day for British TV entertainment. As well as being a versatile entertainer, O’Grady came across as a genuinely nice bloke. Commiserations to his friends and family. He will be missed on our screens.
Simon Maginn is, I believe, a Jewish Labour member of the type Starmer, the Blairites and the Israel lobby despise. He’s put up a series of videos critically refuting the anti-Semitism smears in the Labour party, each one dealing with a separate part of it. In this video he attacks a story retailed by former comedian David Baddiel in his book, Jews Come Last, that going around one Labour conference was a pamphlet about the Holocaust that mentioned all the other groups target by the Nazis except the Jews. The central theme of his book is that crimes and offences against Jews are taken less seriously than those against other books. Baddiel was also one of the media figures telling the world and anyone who would listen that Jeremy Corbyn was terribly anti-Semitic and so was the Labour party. I don’t know whether the man Julie Burchill once described as looking like his fellow comedian’s, Rob Newman’s, afterbirth, is just naive and gullible, and has simply swallowed everything the British media said about Corbyn and the Labour party, or whether he is actively malign.
As Simon shows, there is zero substance to this story, making it impossible to check. The leaflet has never been produced, and there are no accompanying details about it. Baddiel doesn’t mention what conference it was at, or where, who produced it. There was a pamphlet produced by the Socialist Workers in 2008 in Leicester that didn’t mention the Jews. This seems to have been a genuine oversight and the result of bad editing by the writers, rather than actual anti-Semitism. But it was not by the Labour party and was long before Jeremy Corbyn became its head. Simon therefore considers this allegation refuted.
As for crimes against other groups given priority over Jews, one of the allegations at the beginning of this century made against the French authorities was that they treated Islamophobic crimes more seriously than anti-Semitic offences. But this was because there was greater prejudice against Muslims than Jews. If I remember correctly, only 5 per cent of the French population considered that Jews weren’t real Frenchmen compared to 30 per cent plus for Muslims. Jews were given less priority not because of anti-Semitism, but because of its absence. If something like this is happening in Britain, my guess is that it’s for the same reasons. Tony Greenstein has cited statistics several times which show, contra the allegations of the Community Service Trust and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, that the majority of severely normal Brits either have positive views of Jews, or consider them no better or worse than anyone else. And even without the smear campaign, my own impression is that people take allegations of anti-Semitism and Nazism extremely seriously.
Okay, here’s a couple more sketches of notable entertainers, Max Wall and Lemmy from the Heavy Metal band Motorhead. Motorhead’s greatest hit is probably ‘Ace of Spades’. In an interview years ago, Lemmy dispelled the notions that it was about Satanism or anything deeper, explaining that it was just about gambling. It was inspired by the Watford Gap service station and playing the fruit machines their on the way to and from gigs.
Decades ago the News Quiz, when it was still worth listening to, published an apology to Mr. Kilminster, for running a story about his sexual antics that got the details wrong and so made it sound less debauched than it really was. They had reported that he had a hung a woman upside down in his cupboard for a few hours. Not so. He had tied her to the bed, and this had gone on for three days. Lemmy complained, and the paper duly issued a correction and apology. Rock and roll!
He also makes a cameo appearance as the pilot of a water taxi in the 1980s British SF movie, Hardware, about a sculptor, who restores a killer war robot her boyfriend has bought from a scavenger in a radiation desert. The machine upgrades itself and goes on the rampage. The film was directed by Richard Stanley, who also directed the recent film version of Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space starring Nicholas Cage. Hardware’s story is extremely close to the 2000 AD ‘Future Shock’ story, ‘Shocc!’ and Stanley was successfully sued by the comic and the strip’s creators. This hasn’t prevented the film from being considered by many as one of the best British science fiction films.
Lemmy wasn’t racist, but I can’t say I’m comfortable with the cod-Confederate uniforms he used to wear. I dare say it was done just to signal he was a rebel and possibly the southern American origins of much rock, but considering what the Confederacy stood for, it is tasteless.
Max Wall was the performer best known for his silly walk, bent over, bum projecting and knees bent, rather like Groucho Marx. I was reminded of him while thinking about the Asimo robot. This was unveiled by the Japanese in the 90s and was one of the first humanoid walking robots. It looked a little like an astronaut with a huge pack on its back and a head that resembled a space helmet. It also walked with its legs bent, which inspired me to draw this sketch of the robot channelling Wall.
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