I was a big fan of Wallander on BBC4. I watched every episode. Every episode he investigated a murder nobody else could solve. Wallander was estranged, but on good terms with his wife and daughter. Whisper it. He was an alcoholic. His greatest addiction wasn’t booze, it was work.
Harry Hole is a better looking Wallander. After all the titular role goes to Michael Fassbender. He works for the Norwegian Police Service. He’s got an estranged wife, Rakel (Charlotte Gainsbourg) (whisper it living with a… I picked that up quite early). But Harry is given a lot of leeway at work, living on past glories.
Katrine (Rebecca Ferguson) reminds him of this by saying they studies his old cases at Wallander school in Oslo. I wasn’t sure how she assigned herself to the case and Harry’s office while being suspended. Norway has always been a more lenient culture. All the latest technology but no phones? She’s a hottie, but Wallander only has eyes for unusual homicides, his-ex-wife and his stepson, Oleg. Wallander had a faithful dog, that would have ranked higher than Katrine, but she’s got her own agenda. No surprises there.
There’s a crooked politician. And a serial killer who leaves behind snow men. His snow men are pretty good. Luckily for him, everyone speaks perfect English. Fassbender makes a terrible drunk, because he looks just the same as he does sober. He’s like Steve in Coronation Street, but with better hair. He’s only got two expressions. But I can’t remember what one of them was. I guess they’ll need to employ three script writers to explain it to me.
Katrine makes the startling deduction that The Snowman only kills when it snows. Harry was well impressed. He offered one of his two expressions to viewers as a reward.
The serial killer also seems to know exactly what Harry is doing, while finding time to murder women who have one child and are of a certain age. In the same way that duckling follow whatever they see first, it might be a pair of Wellington boots in the snow. His mother drowning in a car and a father that was a cop and disowned him and bullied them is imprinted on her son’s mind. The grown-up Snowman will make the world pay.
Phew. That was rather a long description. Wallander would have sorted this in half the time. But his looks at more Wallace and Gromit. That would never be Fassbender enough. Watchable?
My partner said I’d like this. We don’t have the same tastes. She watches fuckin Emmerdale and Coronation Street. But she knows I’m a sucker for anything Scottish, with actors playing working-class characters. I’ve not read Andrew O’Hagan’s book, yet. So I’m doing it in the wrong order. Two-part series first. Book to follow.
I have read O’Hagan’s book, The Illuminations. It is set in parts of Saltcoats on the Ayrshire coast. I put the last part in for English readers. Most folk in Glasgow and the surrounding area of a certain age, know where Saltcoats is. It’s the kind of place where your mum took you to paddle in the sea and feed your wee brother to the seagulls.
Here we have Tully (Tony Curran) and Jimmy (Martin Compston) playing the natives that got away thirty years ago, returning to their seaside roots. Tully is an ex-English teacher. Jimmy is a writer. Not just any old writer, but a writer like Andrew O’Hagan that makes a more than decent living from his writing. He lives in London with his playwright partner, Angela (Natali McCleary). The focus fall more on Tully’s partner, Anna (Ashley Jensen). The reason becomes apparent after the opening exchanges.
You cannae just check out, you’ve got responsibilities.
Who to?
Anna.
I’m doing this my way.
Tully’s got terminal cancer. He doesn’t want treatment. He wants to go to Switzerland and end it. Voluntary euthanasia. He’s for it. Anna isn’t against it, in general, but only when it concerns the love of her life, Tully. She wants more time. More time with him.
Tully also wants to get together with the guys they used to hang about with. That used to be in a band that worshipped at the feet of Manchester bands that played The Hacienda in 1984. New Order and The Fall feature in backstory when the lads from Saltcoats made a trip of a lifetime and thought growing old was not an option. Thatcherism was never an option. And the ability to rhyme off Robert De Niro’s three greatest movies was a given.
Youth goes north to go south and live forever.
Big themes, well worth a watch. I’m with Tully on that one. Cancer gets one in two of us. But it’s dementia, I fear. Aging population. One million of us have it. Projections for 2050, one-and-a-half million. My mum had dementia. My da had cancer. I said to my partner, if I get dementia, just shoot me. She said I wouldn’t know I’ve got dementia, because I’ve already got it. I think that was a joke.
I don’t know any writers with cash to spare for a trip to Euthanasia-land. But I could maybe make Saltcoats. I don’t want to make death proud. I just don’t want to be alive when my brain is spaghetti oops. What’s your take on this? Or can’t you remember?
On the cover is a picture of Lenny McLean, with a banner, The No.1 Bestseller and a quote (from Lenny) ‘I look what I am, a hard bastard’. The book has been ghost-written by Peter Gerrard who has worked with Reggie Kray and Ronnie Knight. The back cover shows a picture of a glowering Lenny with a sweep-over bald patch, wearing a white t-short, hands clenched as fists. The background shot is the sign for The Blind Beggar pub where Ronnie Kray walked in and shot George Cornell in 1966. Nobody agreed to come forward as a witness. A barmaid that knew Ronnie Kray was made to say she didn’t. I’ve been watching the programme on STV (and ITV) about The Rise and Fall of the Krays. A voyeuristic element, but also educational and entertaining. Lenny McLean died of brain and lung cancer on 28th July 1998.
I can get away with saying that the writing reaches mediocrity. But that’s not Lenny’s fault. In Get Carter, Michael Caine plays a gangster on the rampage in the North East of England. He comes up against a character much the same height, but carrying a few more pounds (Bryan Mosley who was Alf Roberts from Coronation Street) and Carter tells him, ‘Don’t even think about it. This is what I do for a living. Hurt people.’
Lenny McLean, six-foot-two and twenty stone is proud of that. Claimed to be ‘the hardest man in Britain’. Had 2000 to 3000 fights. And never lost, but does admit a draw with fellow Eastender, and fellow hardman Roy Shaw, who also said he’d never been beaten, and makes claim to also be the hardest man in Britain. I’m sure Ronnie and Reggie Kray would claim to be the hardest men in Britain. It’s about respect and I wouldn’t argue with any of them.
In the third, deciding, bareknuckle bout, Lenny said he smashed Roy Shaw. It’s there in the warm-up bout, before the main story. Joe Pyle described as a promoter and businessman tells the reader:
I used to manage and promote the original Guv’nor, Roy Shaw. At that time, Roy was unbeaten, and unbeatable. He was taking on challenges, and the first thing I would ask was: ‘Can you sell at least £6000 worth of tickets?’ If they couldn’t they didn’t get the fight. Roy was riding a crest, then along came a young fellow from Hoxton. His name was Lenny McLean. I’d never heard of him. Roy had never heard of him. We took up Lenny McLean’s challenge. After two fights and a win each, a return was arranged and Roy walked straight into a right-hander. Lenny became the Guv’nor.’
The king is dead. Long live the king. Lenny’s proud of his uncle from the East End of London. You’d need to come ten-handed to take him down. Even then, you’d be short-handed, but not short-changed. Lenny is old school. He’s like that. There’s a lot of hate and uncontrolled aggression.
Take a step back and play amateur psychologist. Both Lenny and Ron lost their dad at a very early age and idolised them. Lenny’s stepdad was a brute. He beat all of his family and broke Lenny’s arm and leg before he was ten. Injustice grows arms and legs. Lenny learned how to hate at a very early age. His idea of justice was giving someone a slap. By that he means something short of a full-scale beating and his opponent needing several nights in a hospital bed. You don’t need to like Lenny, but you need to fear him. Respect him.
‘Faces’ are somebody of note. Villains. But in the world in which they lived a bit of sprauncing, lying and fibbing, a bit of graft was the way to get on. The busies were the enemy. And a grass lost all respect and had went over to the enemy. Disputes were settled like men by fists, bottles, knives or guns.
The straight world that most of us live in was where sheep gathered. They were there to fleece us, but they meant us no harm. Lenny was up for most work as long as it brought in a bit of money. The closest he came to insight was when he stood beside a businessman crook that had a won a council contract and was ripping of the workers who did the decorating they hadn’t been paid for. Underpaying them and telling them to take it or leave it. With Lenny beside him, they took it. But Lenny reassures the reader it’s a moral world he lives in, because he gave the dodgy business a slap, when he started working for himself and had to distemper a ceiling, and his boss told him he’d missed a bit.
Lenny McLean wasn’t going to be told what to do. Not by him. Not by anybody. When he was in prison he would have given the guy that had ghost-written a book for him a slap for suggesting his dear old mum had a drink problem. When he went to America and met with Mafia bosses—who offered him a role in Sylvester Stallone’s next picture—he was going to give them a slap. He’d raised £200 000 and needed their money to make a film about his life. They weren’t coming across. He gave a slap to someone the other bouncers had said was giving them a bit of agg in the Hippodrome. Lenny had to take care of it, because he was head bouncer. His word was law. And if you didn’t like it you got slapped.
‘Me and Robert get down to the dance floor sharpish, and there was this geezer stark bollock, naked, pissing and wanking in front of all the young girls. Dirty slag. We went to get a hold of him and he did a little dance and ran up the stairs. That’s all I needed, I was tired.’
The little ‘backhander’ turned into a murder charge when the dirty slag died.
‘I’ve belted hundreds of blokes over the years, and I mean really belted, and as far as I know, none of them died.’
The Old Bill pulled him in. Lenny got charged with the murder of Gary Humphries. That meant he was looking at life. Forty-years old he’d be drawing his pension when he came out. But the screws did a number on him. They had his nuts on a grinder, threating to pull in another bouncer that had small children to look after. Lenny did the right thing. He took the fall.
I can write this stuff all night. But you know how it goes. Good triumphs over evil. The naked guy was straight out of the nut house. If he’d been normal, he’d have dressed like the Krays in a sharp suit and behaved himself with extortion, torture and blackmail as a sideline. That way he wouldn’t have been a psychotic psychopath that murders folk instead of being murdered by the busies, while trying to frame a law-abiding hardman. Lenny took a rest from his violent life and died peaceably in his sleep. Lots of faces, old and new, attended his funeral to pay their respect.
This is my guilty secret, takes me right back to my childhood. I’m a BBC 4 kinda guy. The kinda guy that sneers at people that watch soap operas like River City, Coronation Street, Emmerdale or Question Time. Yet, here it is, factual stories based on a recipe borrowed from Hammer House of Horror. Remember the rule. Vampires. Scary Christopher Lee. Wrap the blankets around your neck and hope they bite your wee brother in the bed next to your own. Sit in the sunlight. Or if it’s a shark, do that Billy Connelly thing and hold up two fingers with your feet planted firmly on the ground.
Terror in the Woods. Do not get lost in woods with a capital W and camp beside the most haunted cathedral in the world which has access to a long forgotten plague pit and the gate to hell. Two teenagers that like to mess about in front of the camera and play at being dead gay with each other, but not in that way, spend a night in a wood. There’s a mock-up of what happened. Scratching on the tent. The portable DVD doesn’t work. Your torch doesn’t turn on. And you keech your pants as the ghost of a wee lassie with no eyes floats through the tent. Who need the Blackpool rollercoaster?
Then you go home – with a big scary ghost in your haversack. Aye, the ghost knows where you live now. Ghost sat-nav. So you call in the Scooby Doo bunch of ghost busters. What do they do? Whistle it down. Hi, silver bullets. Crosses. Exorcisms and priests. Nah, tell the ghost to go and shaft itself, but it doesnae.
And you get the two wee guys, now a bit older saying we kidded on about ghosts until we met a real one. See telly, that’s educational, doesn’t need to be BBC 4 or a version of Ghost on Benefits. Smoking.
Ghost in the Wall. So you’ve got this woman with dyed red hair telling you, aye, I’d seven kids and eh, my man’s dad died in that chair. We could smell his cigarette smoke and he was doing a bit of haunting. He dragged my baby daughter through the walls and held her like a rat in the spaces. When I dragged her out her eyes were black. You know what they say, don’t go into the cellar. Move house. Nah, hang about. He was only kidding on. He’s settled down to baby sitting and making knocking noises. Families, eh, they fuck you up.
Hellfire Farm is right next to Terror in the Woods, but without the trees. It’s deepest darkest Wales, boyo. Look out for a massive electricity bill hitting you right in the eye. Ghosts are murder on the electricity. Shining pupils in the corner of the room. Farmyard animals that mysteriously hang themselves and a pig that does laps of the farm and runs itself to death. The focal point seems to be the dad. He seems cursed, but quite likes it. He’s like a pig on speed, drawing all these pictures that look vaguely like something you don’t want to look at, but can’t look away. Option A, go to the local cinema and watch The Shining, or jump in the car and fuck off. No. This couple and their children carried right on. It nearly cost them. They brought in an exorcist. He burned the Harry Potter books and the Satanic Bible and all of da’s painting and the outstanding electricity bill no one on earth could pay. You know what happened next, don’t you? It followed him home. I want a legless leyless lined map where these places with capital letters are so I can avoid them. No floaters. Can’t wait until next week.
This is the first episode of a four-part drama. I won’t be watching the other three episodes. I know the formula – a thrill at every advert break. So like Coronation Street or Emmerdale or whatever soap you watch something big is going to leave you wanting more than your cuppa and something small is left hanging during advert breaks to bring you back with a Kit Kat. Labelling theory contends that what people say you are, you end up ingesting that message and being. If teenager Sam (Jack Rowan), a model school kid who thwarts bullies bullying another kid on the school bus and spends his time in the hospital reading to old codgers in the geriatric wing and telling them jokes, he’s obviously up to no good because he’s born to kill. Nature or nurture? Well, his mum who is also a nurse on a geriatric ward, Jenny, (Romola Garia) thinks he’s a good kid. Most mums do. Some scenes hint at a kind of incestuous relationship, but that may be how Sam is reading it, because he’s a psychopath. He’s born to kill. Empathy is not something psychopaths do, but they can learn to mimic being human, in the same way that the moron’s moron, Donald Trump can mimic being a President by blowing up the world. Born to kill. Jenny has the dim, dark secret beloved of thrillers and it’s not very secret, her ex-partner is also a psychopath, but he’s liable to come calling…advert time. Then there’s Chrissy (Lara Peake), the new girl at the school. She is grungy, not born to kill, but is an arsonist. She sets fire to the science lab, probably because she was bored and making a statement about moving house, going to a new school and teenage angst. . That’s the kind of friends psychopaths hang about with. Like attracts like. Jenny ends up getting detention for trying to burn the school down. As does Sam, who’s mum thinks he’s really a good kid, because he tries to take the rap for Jenny’s misdemeanours. Jenny’s dad, Bill (Daniel Mays) is a cop, a detective sergeant, so he knows if her arson attack had killed a classroom of kids, she was liable to get detention and lines, having to copy on the blackboard a million times ‘I must not kill my classmates or I’m a psychopathic killer like Sam, but it’s not my fault. I’m stroppy and misunderstood. An amateur. He’s the psycho’. Phew. I’m even tired after that. A bit of times tables tells us one psycho multiplied by another psycho, for example, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Fred and Rosemary West, means a whole lot of trouble and more detention time.
You know how it goes, Born to Kill is a modern psychological drama starred a new and upcoming actor…must see…not for me.
odonnellgrunting 