PARADISE LUST. HAPPY TO BE ON AN ISLAND IN THE SUN. RICHARD BRANSON'S RETREAT. BUTLINS FOR STUPID PEOPLE

The telly is profiling the super rich at the moment;  there is a great, angry show on one of the outlets, The SuperRich and Us,  there has been the exposure of the unspeakable and vile TatlerFolk, who should all be summarily executed and PBC 2's carefully restricted view of Richard Branson's Caribbean island, Nekker, Billionaire's Paradise, despite all the inevitable fawning, 

reveals him to be a cheap and not very bright narcissist and a bit of a snorting bully.  

Oh, mr ishmael, he can't be stupid, look at all the money he's made, plus Tubular Bells.  Right, that's me told. Robert Maxwell, Alan Sugar, Rupert Murdoch, you are my sunshine, all of you.

When I was in business, myself, retailing furniture into prosperous houses, I would always pay attention to anything the customer chose to say to me, I was always curious. Some were self-made businessfolk, engineers from the Back Country, fishmongers from the Cotswolds. Many were senior health professionals grown  wealthy in private practice.  I sold a beautiful, extravagant five-mirrored dressing chest,

It was like this but much more grand  and florid.

one time, to a regular customer, an anaesthetist, and in the shop she said to her brat of a 12 year old daughter, for whom she had made the purchase - £1250 - Now, darling, mr ishmael has gone to some trouble to find us this and it just so matches your other bedroom furniture,  you will take good care of it because it's quite a lot of money........Oh, mother, it's only what you make in a morning.  Well, not every morning, darling. 

Another time, a brain surgeon at the Queen Elizabeth, wanting to buy a big fuck off compactum wardrobe went into one of those spiv spiels, Oh, come,we are all men of the world, surely you can lose the VAT. For cash.  We're talking cash here. Pound notes. There weren't any pound notes, then, but never mind, I assumed he knew his neural pathways better than he knew his currency-argot.

 I happened to have a couple of grand in my back pocket. Cash, I said, showing it to him, I have enough cash for today, thank you, and anyway, cash sales have to go through the books, too, whaddayathink I am, a fucking crook, like you, and where do you suppose your NHS salary comes from, if it's not from VAT, eh? I fired a round of fucks into him and off he went, a sadder and a wiser man; he came back though, muted, and bought the wardrobe, 'sany number of brain surgeons around, but this wardrobe - it had been a bishop's - was the only one in the world.

Another time, I bought  another compactum wardrobe - I restored and sold  loads of them - at auction, one night, bought it for a song, don't know why, nobody wanted it; it was what the trade calls Edwardian, that fabulous inlaid mahogany, unshowy, with a flat pediment, simple but high quality brassware, masculine, with beautiful grains and colours. 

Anyway, I had this, one like this,  in the shop for ages, at £450 and I couldn't sell it but I liked it so much that I took it home. And for about a year, I used to wake up and look at this thing, in awe. I had sold hundreds of flashy Victorian wardrobes but these turn-of-the-century pieces were and still are, in terms of materials, design and cabinet-makers skills, a special case;  the Italians used to love this stuff, shipping it out by the tonne.   Time came, anyway,  that I was moving house, myself;  I'll just drop this back in the shop, I thought, until we're settled-in at the new place.  The piece still had it's £450 price ticket on and when I put it in the shop I just thought, maybe it's too cheap and so I squeezeed a 1 in front of the 450 and fuck me, it sold within ten minutes. Woman walked into the shop and said, can you deliver that?  Sure can. Right, she said, taking out her cheque book, how much is it?

When we delivered it, to a Victorian millionaire's  mansion in Farquahar Road, Edgbaston, I realised that these people had better things to do than involve me in a tax fiddle, money wasn't their thing, they already had money; fine things, rare, unusual, preferably unique, that was their thing. And sitting in their then two million pounds house, this would have been cheap at twice the price. The barrowboy surgeon, however, he was still on the make, probably always will be, although he will always, also,  think twice about saying Can we lose the tax; by we, he meant me, he meant me going to prison, cheeky cunt.

The are not all like him, forever holding their hands out, scowling;  I dealt with scores of them and some were just like you and I but there were enough of them, like him, to give his game a bad name.

My business life persuaded me that for most of us, despite the efforts of our masters to persuade us otherwise, money isn't actually everything.  

The Branson show, however, the existence and celebrity of a prat like Richard Branson, provides a counterpoint;  depressing, vulgar and trashy the super rich, whilst depriving so many of what they need have nothing that I want.

In addition to running late and overcrowded trains, Beardy also makes a packet from hiring his island home to stupid arseholes who would disgrace Butlins and this show took a look at them and their costly experence in Paradise. Branson always walks and talks flash insouciance, doesn't he? Nobody loves the rich, apart, maybe, from themselves and Beardy's chums seem to be arseholes, like himself, chancers, like Tony and Imelda, who knighted him after a free holiday in his island shithole.  

This is all free, Richard, right?  
I mean everything?
Knighthoods don't come cheap, y'know.
I may be a pretty, straightguy 
but I still have to turn a profit.

And, look, I simply say,
Imelda, she doesn't come cheap.

Beardy has, in pride of place in his beach hut, a letter from Diana Spencer-Battenberg, a knob-sucking-promissory-note, a  paean to his generosity, in letting her, her brats and her team - servants paid for by us - crash-out there, she hadn't met the al Fayeds at that point.  Beardy simpers, in his wet voice, that it was just perfect for Diana, 

took the pressure off, and for the kids, too, took the pressure off princes Gormless and Hooligan, because they were people like him, people like Beardy, in the public eye, what they need and deserve is a ShitIsle in the sun, away from the rest of us, who make their lives a misery. And that's what he's got, palm trees, lizards and a poxy wee beach, which employs a handful of slaves-with-JCBs from a neighbouring island, desperately trying to stop the sands slipping into the sea. 

This portrait of  the mad aviator on his Caribbean home did him  no favours, even relaxed, fending-off no questions about VirginSpace or his shitty train service  and half-pissed, even on his own turf he looks and sounds shifty and unwholesome. 

No, no (giggles wetly), 
it's just a metaphor for me pissing on you.

The white staff,  all youngish, all prettyish, all unfathomably stupid and starstruck, 

live-in on Party Island, within earshot of their  master's wet voice, the better to serve him, 'cos that's wot Richard needs, opined some pimply rentboy, cos he's so busy an' works so hard;  the black folks  are boated-in, daily to make the beds, haul the shit, chop the wood and dig the sand;  Richard allows them a wee party of their own, now and again, a glass of red wine and a jump in  Branson's ocean; they must think they've died and gone to Heaven, jumping in the sea, eh? Caribbeans?

Another Beardy Bimbo,
they all look like her, his Apartheid inner sanctum.

Looking uncomfortably like a pimp, Biggles  insisted that not only should his staff members drink with paying visitors but have what he called relationships with them, boasting, with a snort, that he had sacked, after two days, a manager who had suggested otherwise.  

Branson's accountant, above, relaxes by leting his customers nibble  sushi off her warm body, it's really career-expanding, she pouts, to have soy sauce licked out of my bellybutton. 
Honest, not invent.

Said visitors appeared to consist, on this occasion,  of older, rich women, drooling over the Watersports boy, just think, one of them drooled, today he was teaching me to water-ski, tonight he's pouring my drink, nudge-nudge.  Others would call for drinks to be delivered to them as they sprawled on the dwindling sands, and can he please take his shirt off before he comes. Splashing about in the sea, drinking too much booze, eating too much food and the ogling of young flesh, far from the prying eyes of others,  that seemed to be the Nekker Experience.  Twenty grand a week, or thereabouts


At the whites only staff barby, the boythings and girlthings prepare Richard's favourite for him -  chickens are broiled, stood vertical over the coals on a beer can which is opened and stuffed into their  aperture; the top removed, the beer is supposed to boil, flavouring the flesh.  It was an oddly obscene sight, a dead chicken, cooking  with a beer can thrust up it, and not just for vegetarians. And one can't help but suspect that, never mind his wet grins,  this ghastly fuck-up of a man would like to see us all with a redhot beercan up our arses.

Despite all the conditions he would have imposed, in this startling show  Branson could not help but expose himself, wanking away at the White Man's Burden.

My old friend Gauguin used to fume:   Life being what it is, one dreams of vengeance. A hurricane would do, sweep all this vermin into the sea,

ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND BIRMINGHAM, REVISITED. QUESTION TIME PBC1. SHOULD STANISLAV,A YOUNG POLISH PLUMBER, BE DEPORTED, AS UKIP DEMANDS?

 Good evening from Birmingham

 and let's start straight away with the question that has divided the nation;

 

 Should stanislav, a young, polish plumber, be deported?

It is simply outrageous, and morally indefensible, and ethically questionable and probably illegal and brings politics into further disrepute, not as though it occupied the moral high-ground to start with,

And let's face it, it's not as though you could sink much lower. 

 Speaking as a Muslim woman, I mean, if you deport stanislav, who's gonna fix my fucking shithouse? Cheap4Cash?

I mean, if you're stood at the bottom of the stairs and there's a flood of icy water coming down, with condoms and Tampaxes and turds and toilet paper and Allah, peace and blessing be upon his name, knows what the fuck else in it  then you don't need a fucking politician, you need a fucking plumber, innit, ToryBoyGoneBad? 

The whole stair carpet's ruined and the house reeking of piss and  menstrual blood and nappies and nuclear-strength curry-shit, eh?  And your wittering on like a cunt about quotas and skill sets and residency cri-fucking-teria? Good for fuck all, 'swhat you are;  need a quick rub-down with a fucking housebrick. UKIP? You'll have us all down on our knees in front of the khazi, up to our shoulders in our own shit.  Fucking useless bastards.

No-one in UKIP was suggesting that we round up foreigners and either put them in work camps or deport them. Much less exterminate them. 

Not yet, anyway.

Let's be absolutely clear about that, Yazza, lovely name by the way, Yazza, is it foreign,some of my best friends are foreigners, British foreigners but foreigners all the same; no, no, all that happened was that after an ubelieveably busy day, working, I might say, frightfully hard for the people of this country, as, might I say, do all of us in politics;  being quite incredibly tired, my colleague, Mark Dickless,  gave a slightly confused answer with regard to our policy on the Final solution, I mean UKIP's strategy for promoting harmonious integration...........Good God, look at that.......

 I say, Dimbleby, are there darkies allowed in the audience?

Look, there's another one, in the second row, a Paki.....

And there's another, on the end of the row, up there, 

you're not letting him ask a question are you.....??

 

 Calm down Douglas, old girl, don't get your knickers in a twist, you know what you're like.  No, it's quite simple, we wouldn't allow him to ask a question until he'd been here for three months. Or is it two years.......Play some really cool jazz, though, some of them,  blacker the better, tne blacker the dude, the cooler the tune,  as we jazz lovers say.....

.

 No,  Ken, no way, two years is far too long, we simply couldn't get 'em registered, not in two years......

 

    Registered, you mean eligible for NHS DeathCare,

 as happened on your watch, Andy, on your watch, in North Staffs.?

 No, Ken, registered to vote Labour...

The dreadful, the unspeakable PBC1 Question Time show came from Birmingham last night, a place, judging by the audience, wholly unmoved by Mr Fruitcake, his colour-it-in politics-for-morons  and his angry Poundlanders and contemptuous of turncoat MP,

 

Mr Douglas Gobswell, 

although not nearly as derisory as it was in response to the laughably shrill utterances of some pathetic little scrubber

 

belonging - and I use the word  keenly -  to whoever owns the so-called Taxpayers Alliance,

 

poor little fool, clearly a graduate of the Guido Fawkes School of Political Science,  had no idea of the scale of her self-ridicule, 

oughta be a law against that, people using the PBC to make of themselves irredeemable fools. 'Snot fair on them. Not fair on the viewers, either; even on my side of the screen,  I was tied in knots, Embarrassment's figures-of-eight contorting my limbs, Please-God-Make-It-Stop-ing for all I was worth. One of the most brazenly stupid people I have ever, ever, ever seen. And she thought she was clever, NowLet'sBeClear-ing her empty head off.

Anyway, a member of the audience, 

rather more grounded than the TaxMinx, completed her caustic assessment of the panel with the question, referring to  turncoat opportunist arsehole, Mr Mark Dickless 

- What, anyway, are we doing, 

even thinking about voting for a man who, 

when he gets tired, turns into  a racist?

If I was WysteriaDave I'd be on the 'phone to a tee-shirt printers, right now, ordering  thousands:

 UKIP

 

ONLY RACIST WHEN WE'RE KNACKERED.

It was a gem of sharp, Brummy realism, sparkling on an ocean floor of trash, effluent  and wreckage, the panel was  a grim school of bottom-feeding professional parasites, juicily barracked by its audience, pointlessly circling itself,  excreting clouds of rhetoric and bombast, I-Know-Besting;  the audience, however, just for once, was - apart from a feeble sprinkling of Kippers - united in hard-baked scorn and derision against MediaMinster. If you didn't see it, it is available on the Ouija-Pad; there is a hint, there, from Birmingham, a glimmering, that all may not yet be lost to Knavery, Farage's or the others'.

WOTSONTELLY, SYLVIE GUILLEM, DANCER.

CAN SOMEONE DIRECT ME TO THE ART, PLEASE?

So much of the PBC's arts programming has been hi-jacked recently, vehicularised,  by posturing, bullying arseholes talking down to us - Alan Yentob, interviewing, like a slavering groupy, his teenage pop idols,

His breath'll lift the varnish from that Strat,

if he's not careful;
you can smell it from here.
 
one almost expected, in a recent outing, that he would ask Mark Knopfler for a plastercast of his dick, just for his personal collection, y'understand.


Brothers in arms.

Yentob is one of the more gross, nauseating, overpaid luvvies whom, via our taxes, we keep in indolent, self-fellating luxury, sharing with us, betimes, his journey into this or that aspect of pop trivia; they're never just making a fucking programme, these Yentobs, they're all on a fucking mission of discovery, good of them, really, to babble at us, shouting urgent cultural instructions, from their luxury liners.


And, of course, I'm an artist myself, so I know how you suffer.
I suffer myself.
A portrait of the artist as a young potatoman.

Mark PotatoMan is another, nose-talking flat-out, racing against himself in the Most Well-Researched Interviewer Ever Steeplechase, one would be surprised to learn that he ever paused for a split-second to enjoy a work of art or entertainment, too busy deconstructing it, making notes, for a future tellyarts gabfest in which he sits, bloated, ashen, reeking of grease'n'garlic, and oozing his superior knowledge of everything, ever; repulsive fucking mutant, he should go for a run, the fucking gabshite. And he should wear a tie or a tee-shirt, one or the other. He clearly knows nothing of the art of dishevelment.
 
I would love to hear, just once before I die, one of these fuckers saying, for instance, Dickens, nah, never read a word of it. Shakespeare? Nah, not for me; read Hamlet, that's enough, innit? Japanese cinema? you must be outa your fucking mind. But no, the PBC is carpeted, wall-to-wall, with cultural polyglots, a Babel of effete narcissism, the sort of people whom mr jgm2 says should be charged double or treble for their arts degrees. I used to be among that arts degree crowd, myself, Gilgameshing, Chaucering and Joyceing my way to a wordy, arty future, so it hurts to find myself courtesy of the PBC, coming over all Hermann Goering - ven I hear ze vord kultur I reach vor mein pistol.
 
That the PBC is run for and by crooks, ponces, pimps, slags, degenerates and child molesters is now axiomatic; that we continue to shovel our money into the scabby, snarling mouths of the likes of Chris Patten - just because this failed Tory spiv says we should - is almost unbelieveable. In a decent society Patten, Dyke, Thompson, the whole shameless, shabby crew would be breaking rocks on Dartmoor. For ever. If a foreign, national institution was proven to be a hotbed of larceny, degeneracy and decades-long, institutionalised noncing the PBC would be wetting itself in indignation. Mrs woman on a raft describes herself as being moored just off the coast of reality. Until heads roll at the PBC, actually into the basket and not into wealthy retirement, we, the United Kingdom, will remain a sewer-island, off the coast of civilisation.
 
They're not all as bad as that, though, the culture jocks, not as bad as foul, as yentob. Some of them have a sense of humour and Waldemar Jabberwocky always has interesting things to say about paintings,


Jabberwock does Baroque.
 
and he even manages to make some of it seem spontaneous, although spontaneity and the managerialised, child-abusing PBC are antipathetic. It really isn't good enough that the public broadcaster's coverage of arts generally is in the unlaboured hands of a bunch of cunts. I know critics, at least paid ones, are a considerably lesser form of life than the rest of us but even so, Kirsty Wark and her slew of screeching, parasitic, late-night cocksuckeurs culturelle;


Paul Morley, Diane Wei Liang, Kirsty Wark,
Miranda Sawyer, Andrew Motion.
I'd throw them all out of the lifeboat,
in fact, I wouldn't even let them in.
 
Yentob and PotatoHead, Andy Graham-Dixon, Mark Kermode, Sue Perkins, Clemency Burton-Hill, Jesus, I could go on for a month. And most of this lot, as usual, are Oxbridge, some of them,


Look, I'm an artist, too.
I'm not just some PBC talking head tart.

like the gorgeous, pouting Burton-Hill are both Oxbridge and the pampered spawn of some superannuated BBC grandee del noncios.
 
But aside from daddies and dons, the main thing which this gang has in common is that each really makes a dreadful, self-absorbed fist of what we pay them to do, what the nation needs them to do, now, more than ever. There is a better way and that is to take ordinary people and say, OK, whaddayamake of this, then? But that's never going to happen. Only in places like here.

I used to take groups of official criminals - as opposed to bankers and politicians - to see Shakespeare or to an art gallery or a music festival, alongside, I hasten to add, directing them towards work, training and common-or-garden Decency. Never knew that was for me, most'd say, and clutched in the sharp, grimy paws of Kirsty Wark and the rest, it never will be. X-Factor, that's the thing for you, singing, 'swhat you understand.
 
In the grown-up world, writers review each others' books - and how many fucking books can there be, there's already millions upon millions of them, why don't people learn a different language instead of reading the latest, indispensable, Sebastian Faulks tripe? As bankers review each others' bungs, PBC execs review each others' larceny, cops review each others' crimes and doctors review each others' greedy malpractices so the critics, acting as our own cultural coppers, review for us the evidence relating to their brighter, more successful chums' efforts and tell us what we think. But actually, if you look at Tracey Emin's Great Bed of Shit, for instance, you will see that art is whatever you can get away with.
Even so, wading about in shit, the role of ordinary people is to be told, by the charmed crcle of clever people, what they think about art or music or politics. Or anything. You'll like the things we tell you to, or you won't like at all.

It was a rare pleasure, then, to see, last night, an arts show seemingly completely controlled by its subject and - barring an introductory simper from Clemency - completely devoid of the critical, faux-interrogative, flattering voice. Although he will be best remembered for selling dodgy insurance to the elderly, the tellymonster, Parkinson, wrote the book on pandering to the scum of showbiz and the arts. And do tell us, Mr Niven, some of the many other ways in which you are wonderful.

I don't do dancing. Maybe it's my early presbyterian upbringing, I dunno, I just don't and I rarely watch it - save for Ginger Rodgers and Fred Astaire and Michael Jackson, on a good day - I don't think I've ever looked at dancing. There was a guy used to be on Sunday Night at the London Palladium, when I was a young child. Antonio, I think his name was,



a Spanish flamenco dancer, hand-clapping, boot heel-stomping, shouting Ole, every once in a while, he was mesmerising. But that's about it with me and dancing so it was just a mild curiosity which drew me, last night, to PBC2's Sylvie Guillem - Force of Nature



Now a breathtakingly fit 48, Guillem trained initially as a gymnast and only a student exchange period with the Paris Opera Ballet saw her talent recognised by then Director, Rudolf Nureyev,



who, against all precedent, propelled her into the position of etoile, principal ballerina, whilst she was still virtually a child. Rudi's preferment cast the die for her future personal and artistic behaviour. She would only ever do what she wanted to do.
The film is short, about a half an hour and concentrates as much on Guillem's monologues on Life, Art and the Environment as it does on her dancing and although these are compelling a longer show would have enabled us to be the more amazed, I suspect, by her dancing. There are short clips of her in classical roles and lengthier segments of her modern works; all of them, for me, at any rate, clarified the difference between sheer, ferociously uncompromising artistry and the countless little daily performances which we all give, over and over again for the benefit of family, friends, workmates and strangers alike; all the world is a stage, of course, Guillem's stage, though, occupies a different space, rarified, fantastically dramatic and, perhaps most significantly, utterly wordless.

.

I was left breathless, open mouthed by the sheer physicality of her performances, her partners all marvel at the things she can force her body to do, even now, approaching fifty.

 
She can stretch and bend and fold and free from partner support she can spin two or three times in mid-air.
As I said, I know nothing of balletstrokedance, leaves me cold as a rule but with some of Guillem's modern pieces my ignorance, my unfamiliarity didn't seem to matter. None of them were large, ensemble, company pieces, just two dancers or in the final piece just Guillem, herself, sketching the stages of woman's life, the movements in space of this one body matched to a few notes, expressing achey truths denied to words. 



In her to-camera pieces she was equally compelling.

It's odd, isn't it, how, maybe because we listen a wee bit harder, the words of those to whom English is not native, seem so much more, well, so much more right, unhabituated, more seeking and feeling and testing than declamatory. She spoke of how, early on, she had realised that she had but one life and to allow others - seniors - to dictate it was the same as giving it to them freely, for their own use. And when she transferred from Paris to London's Royal Ballet she quickly became known as Mademoiselle Non for her frequent flat refusals to play suggested roles. London - and global - directors and audiences feel that her ungovernability is a price well worth paying for seeing her on their stages.

Contempating the end of her career, Guillem laughs that the inevitable decline in her powers will only propel her upwards, slingshotting her into something else, something which is manifesting itself in her antsy support for SeaShepherds,

a radical environmentalist group which sidesteps the customary Bono-bleatings of showbiz in favour of direct action, ramming illegal whaling ships, for instance.


I am sure she will be a loss to dance lovers but most of her stuff will be digitised for posterity and there may well be another Sylvie along in a minute or two, there usually is.
But if you get a chance to see her, in this film, dancing and talking - both of them forms of thinking out loud - then, as we usually say, it is well worth the time spent.







She's got everything she needs,
she's an artist, she don't look back.