GIVE IT UP FOR GILBERT

As the leaves fall from the trees and the nights draw in, succumb ye not to autumnal gloom. For come November, Gilbert O'Sullivan will be back from his gigs in Japan, ready to wow the faithful at venues like the Auditorium in Grimbsy and the Pavillion in Bournemouth. For myself, I rather fancy the Opera House in Manchester, with a Chinese meal afterwards.

In a perfect world, Gilbert would be across the table, toying with his shredded duck, explaining what "Ooh Wakka-Doo-Wakka-Day" is really about  and thanking me for years of loyal support. A birthday in 1973 was hugely enriched by younger sister's poem (and accompanying sketch of the singer-songwriter): "Gilbert O'Sullivan is here today to wish you a very happy birthday. He will sing you your favourite song, 'Get Down'. I am quite sure you will not frown". But there was, sadly, no copy of the record in question attached.

I fear Gilbert himself has done quite a bit of frowning down the years. Even the poster announcing his tour dates has him looking a little sullen and menacing. It's great that the hair is still there. It's just a pity he looks as if he has business to sort out at the undertakers rather than looking forward to a good sing-song. 

Whetting our appetite for the tour, BBC 4 recently gave another outing to one of those self-indulgent, largely affectionate 70s Pop retrospectives. Leo Sayer, Demis Roussos and David Soul all played ball, reminiscing fondly about their ups and downs. Barrie White, 'the Walrus of Love', was sadly no longer in the picture. Gilbert did not show, but allowed his daughter to chip in quite cheerfully. 

The ever admirable Paul Gambaccini was the pick of the pundits and waxed lyrical about Gilbert as a supremely talented tune-smith, mysteriously  "missing in action" since the early   1970s. Gambo knows about these things and a quick bit of Googling turned up a sympathetic interview he had done with Gilbert for Rolling Stone in the early 1970s when  the man born Raymond Allen  had topped the American charts for six weeks with Alone Again, Naturally and appeared to have the world at his feet. Did you get that? SIX WEEKS. It came second only to 'American Pie' in the top-sellers that year and went on to be covered by Nina Simone, Shirley Bassey, Neil Diamond and um...Donny Osmond. Gilbert has guarded the song's legacy carefully, refusing its use for adverts and karaoke  and winning a 'landmark' copyright victory against rapper Biz Markie when he 'stole' a chunk of it. Said Gilbert:  "the one thing I am very guarded about is protecting songs and in particular I'll go to my grave in defending the song to make sure it is never used in the comic scenario which is offensive to those people who bought it for the right reasons". 

You don't mess with Gilbert, as became abundantly clear in the excellent RTE-made documentary Out on his Own: Gilbert O'Sullivan, also screened by BBC4, bless 'em. Gilbert made it clear he didn't much like having the camera crew around, but allowed them to film him in concert in Tel Aviv, making sweet music in Nashville, poring over old lyrics, chatting to fans and going (sometimes painfully) down memory lane, particularly when we got onto legal battles with his former manager and snide reviews. He was an intriguing mixture:  wry, sardonic, regretful, self-deprecating, bombastic, modest, arrogant....Not much twinkle-eyed blarney there, but despite being lauded as Ireland's first UK chart-topper (is that true?),  the young Gilbert (sorry, Raymond) relocated to Swindon at an early age. 


The man doesn't fools gladly and woe betide anyone who asks him about comebacks and the gaping gaps in the discography. A wicked headline from one bruised paper: "A Moan Again, Naturally". Mean, but not far wrong. 

"I write pop songs, end of story", said Gilbert at one point. But how good are his pop songs? 

To my eternal shame, I never bought anything when the man was in his prime, investing an insulting 50p on a 'Best of"....on cassette from a charity shop in Kelso a  few years back.  I expected something at best endearingly naff, but repeat listenings to said compilation revealed Alone Again,  Naturally to be exquisite,  so too the Morrisey-covered Nothing Rhymed. Get Down and Clair  are silly, but rather  nice. Matrimony, Ooh Baby...? Well, if you must. But 50p seemed a pretty good bargain. 


It may, of course, be worth dipping into the more hidden recesses of the O'Sullivan archive, or maybe not. A Woman's Place is in the Home is not, I fear, meant ironically. I have always been intrigued by the Clair b-side, What could be nicer? (Mum, the kettle's boiling), Gilbert always having an eye for the domestic detail, not something you could say for David Bowie and other contemporaries. "Freak out in a moon-age day dream but let's have a nice cup of tea first". 


Gilbert does sometimes get out of the kitchen to go global, but with mixed results. Fans enthuse greatly about All They Wanted to Say, Gilbert's admirable take on 9'11. Lovely tune, but dip into lyrics: "I don't know what makes a man, or a woman think that terrorism isn't evil" and it starts sounding like the winner of a school competition for a song about peace. Will it sound better at the Grimsby Auditorium as the devoted hold their mobiles aloft? It's surely worth finding out.

WHAT A LE CARRE ON

Wearily predictable, but very necessary, the first thing I had to do after paying an extortionate West End £12.30 to see the much-feted film version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy  was to nip into a nearby HMV to buy……Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, a mere £7 if you’re interested. You know the one. The peerless Sir Alec as Smiley, shuffling along in overcoat and scarf; the Russian dolls; the choir boy at the end of every episode, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant“ etc; dear, departed Beryl Reid snivelling her way to a BAFTA. One of the BBC’s finest hours, we have forever been told, an adaptation that raised the bar for all others and did much to enhance John Le Carre’s reputation, not just the master of the spy thriller, but a superb chronicler of human foibles. Where is that Booker, or even the Nobel?

The author himself gave his blessing to Gary Oldman, Colin Firth et al and even graces the film with a small cameo (I missed it). But I wonder what he makes of the broadsheet frenzy over TTSS (as we Le Carre lovers have long learned to call it). The reviews I have seen have been pretty pro (bar a splendidly vituperative  kicking from Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail), but have also been accompanied by a slew of promotional material, extra supplements, Le Carre retrospectives, audio book discounts (anyone for The Honourable Schoolboy? it’s TERRIBLY good). For John (nee David), who normally hides out on the Cornish coast and recently gave a ‘last ever’ interview to the redoubtable Jon Snow, I would find some of the hype a little embarrassing. I think George Smiley, at least the Alec Guinness version, would have been less than enthused.

It is probably unfair and pointless to make too many comparisons. If memory serves me correctly, the BBC’s TTSS ran over seven weeks in  the autumn of 1979, less than six years after the book came out, before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the Pink Floyd released The Wall. Was it before or after Sir Anthony Blunt’s exposure as a one-time Soviet agent? Anyway, it was very much bound up with that era. Making a film on all this in 2011 is the equivalent of shooting something in 1979 based on 1947, the summer of Compton and Edrich, when the Cold War was just getting going. 

Much has been made of the film version’s seventies references. The Circus team and their connections inhabit a London that is relentlessly down-at-heel, with lousy furniture, everybody smoking and no hints of the Thatcherite yuppification to come. A nice in-joke has one agent reading a copy of Jackie (“Dear Cathy and Claire,  I think my best friend is a Soviet mole, what should I do?”), although it should probably have been a Mayfair.  The defunct Wimpy hamburger chain also features.  It’s altogether less genteel than what we huddled around the TV for in the last days of the 1970s. I even suspect that some of the chaps here didn’t go to public school. I certainly wouldn’t have messed with Oldman’s Smiley, a man you could imagine sitting happily through torture sessions. 

Oldman seems to have wowed the critics and will doubtless pick up some prizes a few months down  the road. If you grew up on Gary as Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears, or as (gulp) Sid Vicious, finding the middle-aged version turning the Circus inside out is a bit of a stretch. But he is pretty good. John Hurt makes a wonderful spy boss ‘Control’, Mark Strong a valiant, complex Prideaux, the book’s most tragic figure. The younger generation, Stephens, Cumberbatch, Hardy, were all fine as far as it went. Then again, you wouldn’t expect duff performances from the top-line thespians assembled for this outing. Were Colin Firth not already so ubiquitous and praised to the skies (although I have never forgiven What a Girl Wants) I would probably have found his foppish Bill Haydon less irritating. At least we were spared Stephen Fry and Liam Neeson.The end result is fine, as far as it goes. But if this turns out to be one of the films of 2011, as the posters keep telling us, it's been a pretty thin year.

But time to re-renter the Cold War comfort zone. Rewind gently to 1979 and it all comes back so quickly. Here we are in Lacon’s garden at dawn with daughter practising her violin. Here comes Hywel Bennett’s sleazy, but righteous Ricki Tarr going AWOL again. Beryl really goes for it, in her cups, fresh from playing Matron in Rosie Dixon Night Nurse, castigating her ‘dunderheads’ and wittering pointedly about treachery at the Circus.

Beryl is long gone. So too are most of the mole suspects, the potential ‘Geralds’: gone: Ian Richardson, the vain, languid Haydon; the always good Terence Rigby, who went from Z Cars to the Circus to become Roy Bland; Michael Aldridge, who featured implausibly alongside Madonna in Shanghai Surprise. Bernard Hepton, marvellously prissy, nervous and manipulative as Toby Esterhase, is still with us. Ian Bannen, my personal man of the match in a strong field as Prideaux, died in a car-crash in Scotland. Your starter for 10: in which film did he turn up as a Soviet intelligence chief?


The BBC version was treated with rather sickly reverence at the time, bar some gentle lampoons from Private Eye. You do need quite a lot of patience and a rewind button. What did that raised eyebrow signify? Was that really Karla?  A belting first episode, introducing Smiley as book-lover, spurned spy-master and stoical cuckold ("give my love to Anne"...) and showing Prideaux coming horribly unstuck in "Czecho" is a belter. Then it's off to Lisbon with Ricki and the games of bluff and double-bluff begin. The dialogue is consistently arch and elliptical (none of these chaps would describe  'Witchcraft', the fake material supposedly coming from Moscow as 'shit', as they do in the film), but darlings, it's all about the nuances. Scriptwriter Arthur Hopcraft, the football writer's writer, does a frankly beautiful job. For many of us, this was our first entree into Le Carre's world and we are in no hurry to leave. 


DVD extras are often a mixed bag, but here you get the author offering childhood reminiscences, memories of his own days in espionage and Cold War afterthoughts (withering on Kim Philby). It remains magnificent. Best consumed along with tea and chocolate cake on an autumnal Sunday afternoon, with the rain pounding against the windowpane. 

WHEN IN ROME, DON'T DO AS THE BORGIAS

Prior to each screening, Sky Atlantic kindly warns viewers that The Borgias may contain “violent and distressing scenes as well as scenes of a sexual nature”. Fair enough on the bonking and battering alert; an awful lot of throats are cut and hearts stabbed, while the average episode will net you at least four couplings, if no actual copulation. But ‘distressing’? Even the least discerning viewer will rapidly twig this is not a documentary about gender-based violence.

The real distress is for historians, still recovering from The Tudors and Rome, who will find much to quibble with, and for those who can’t believe Neil Jordan, producer and writer of this drivel has come to this. This is the same Neil Jordan who delivered Mona Lisa, flawed, but still magnificent, The Company of Wolves and Michael Collins. True, he also made the execrable In Dreams and High Spirits, but The Borgias ? It’s almost as shaming as something the other Jordan, our Katie Price,would put her name to. And he did it all in the name of art and history. From an interview with AssignmentX.com:


“Nobody can start a war without appealing to some god. Almost nobody. And I just think religion, and power, and politics, go hand in hand. One is a mask for the other. And it amazes me in a strange way how little the world has changed from the Borgia era to the present day. Tony Blair could not invade Iraq without an appeal to God, you know? And I think religion is the thing that will always be there, because people have this strange need for certainty, and nothing can destroy it for them”.


You don’t say, Neil.

If you have Sky (and I mainly don’t, honest…), The Borgias is worth visiting, but I would check out a youth hostel or honest B & B rather than spending your hard-earned ducats on a room at the papal palace. It’s all here: corruption, intrigue, incest, betrayal, beautiful opening sequences, delicious locations (Hungary, not Italy, but there you go), lots of nubile lovelies and…..Jeremy Irons, as the Pope, no less.


If you are going to turn up in this kind of twaddle, at least enjoy. Steven Berkoff has a high old time as Savonarola, but then again Berkoff has never agonized about the ‘crap factor’. He was in Rambo, for heaven’s sake. Jeremy actually looks pretty bored by proceedings, given dull lines about securing new territory for The Vatican and trying to supervise a difficult family unit. “We need the union more than we need riches... Perhaps it is time to strengthen our ties with our ancestral homeland”. We would all rather see him strengthening ties with the lubricious females on offer, particularly after his bedroom heroics in Damage with Juliette Binoche. Sadly, marriage to Mrs Borgia is not what it was. Joanne Whalley is predictably feisty as the Borgia mum and looks to be enjoying herself. Then again, if you’d been been married to Val Kilmer in real life and been shot dead in The Edge of Darkness, hanging out with the Borgias can’t be too demanding.

Of the newcomers, much has been made of Holliday Grainger, like Whalley, a Mancunian, but I find her pretty drippy, despite her fondness for a bit of rough. The young male Borgias all sound like posh young cockerels trying way too hard. Some of this feels like stumbling into a sixth form play, albeit with an 18 certificate. “I can neither read nor write”, says a humble spy, recruited by Cesare. This is difficult to believe, given that he sounds like he went to Harrow.


Emmies galore for all concerned, with American critics and gushing audiences apparently convinced they are watching another HBO gold-plated classic, helped on its way by spurious Jordan references to The Godfather. Rubbish to that too. Michael Corleone would have come down like a ton of bricks on a family that got on like this.


I speak with some bitterness, for I can remember all too fondly the original Borgias, not the 15th century bunch, but the hugely implausible, but always entertaining family that arrived in 1981, courtesy of an Anglo-Italian-Australian (?) co-production, announcing themselves with some clunky brass and a falcon, a title sequence that probably cost about fifty quid. There is, to my knowledge, no box set available, but you may get an occasional clip on YouTube, plucked from TV hell compilations. There is also royal biographer Sarah Bradfords's  book (you guessed it, The Borgias), probably well down her CV. This gives some idea of the treasures on screen, but is hard-going. Here is Lucrezia contemplating her destiny: "Now, at long last, the revulsion she felt at the scenes of that night had brought to the surface her subconscious desire to escape from the passionate thraldom in which she had lived". 


Back to the screen.  Most critics gave up on it after the first episode, some asking spiky questions about the BBC’s involvement in this toxic Euro-pudding when Granada on the other side was giving the nation luxurious dollops of Brideshead Revisited. Some concern too for John Prebble, distinguished historian and authority on Scottish clans who was script-writer in chief. Thankfully, Clive James popped in from time to sympathise with the cast and to try (hilariously) to make sense of papal pronouncements and bedroom shenanigans. I watched every episode and the repeats and was delighted when a friend presented me with a quartet of downloaded DVDs close to thirty years after Cesare and his clan marched into Rome.


Alexander VI was played by Adolfo Celi, a highly distinguished actor and director in his native Italy, but best known on these shores for being James Bond’s adversary Emilio Largo in Thunderball. Later he was best known for moaning “God forgive me” as he mounted a protesting Lucrezia, “father, what are you doing?” Lucrezia was Anne-Louise Lambert, a young Aussie actress, brilliant in Picnic at Hanging Rock, but all at sea in Rome, having a rotten time in the bridal chamber and equally miserable as a nun. At least she escaped Home and Away. She later retrained as a psychotherapist.


If cast members were routinely humiliated, what of historical figures? I doubt whether Leonardo da Vinci, played by Malcolm Hayes, would have reckoned much to his five-minute cameo. He swirls around, looking like an old hippie, while the fabulously nasty Cesare, played by Oliver Cotton, pours bitter scorn on his talk of aviation. Machiavelli gets a little longer, watching bemused as Cesare fires his crossbow, the bolts ripping into criminals and vagrants in the square. “I think you’ve made your point”, the author of The Prince hints as Cesare’s tally goes up to four. But the would-be Lord of the Romagna zaps another two for good measure.


This Cesare made a point of killing sister’s husbands and boyfriends, saw off brother Juan, rowed endlessly with his father and was master of ceremonies at a pre-wedding orgy, where whores ran around on all fours picking up chestnuts with their mouths. He rarely let you down, nor did his enemies. Quizzed on whether he had received “letters from Cesare Borgia”, a rival warlord proclaimed with pride: “I wiped my backside with them”.


Much more recently, Cotton turned up as Michael Heseltine in a drama about Thatcher. But he was disappointingly subdued. How one wanted him to turn to Sir Geoffrey Howe and snarl: “be loyal to me Geoffrey, or I shall slit your belly and spill your guts”.

PUT IRONS IN IRONS?

“I knew Sebastian by sight long before I met him.That was unavoidable for,from his first week, he was the most conspicuous man of his year by reason of his beauty, which was arresting, and his eccentricities of behaviour, which seemed to know no bounds. My first sight of him was in the door of Germer's,and on that occasion, I was struck less by his looks and more by the fact he was carrying a large teddy-bear".

Oh lovely, lovely, lovely. Bring me champagne, strawberries and the finest chocolates in the house and take me back 30 years to the early, post-riots autumn of 1981 when I, a still slender youth, set my heart on Oxford’s dreaming spires and Brideshead Revisited ruled on ITV. The prose came from Evelyn Waugh via John Mortimer. The pitch perfect voice-over, steeped in regret and nostalgia, came from dearly beloved Jeremy Irons, already 33, but immaculate as an Oxford undergraduate. There were those who hated it from the start, deeming it to be smug, vacuous, upper-class tosh, Downton Abbey with popery and teddy bears. But even a one-off episode, a charity shop pick-up from a newspaper giveaway, still works a little magic. The recent cinema version, despite stout performances from Emma Thompson and others, was already doomed for oblivion before the cameras rolled.

Oh, what became of that youthful duo, strutting through the quads and struggling to stay out of each other’s pants in Italy? Anthony Andrews, despite a fair-to-middling West End, rep and TV career, is still best known for dipso Sebastian, although in real life it was a nasty bout of water intoxication that could have done for him. And Jeremy…..Well he has just turned 63. Having been both charmed and repelled by Catholicism and its impact on the Brideshead mob as young Ryder, Jeremy is currently El Papa himself, the legendarily corrupt Alexander VI, main man in The Borgias. It is, if truth be told, a singularly lazy, if cheerfully cynical turn, but possibly what Jeremy wants (and deserves?) at this time of life.

Lynn Barber once admitted to wanting to boil Irons in oil in the face of interview bolshiness and rank bad manners. Others have found his dalliance with the Countryside Alliance at best off-putting, suggesting he has always been a tad tweedy and weedy. I recall the discomfort of fellow studio guests on Radio Four when Jeremy inexplicably announced he had always wanted to break wind on air.  More recently, there were hearty suggestions from the aging actor that patting a lady’s bottom was a friendly gesture to be treated with good humour (and gratitude?)  by the recipient?  

This may all leave Jeremy on at least the outer fringes of supreme pratdom. But what of the work?

In Hollywood, Irons is best remembered for his Oscar-winning turn as insulin man Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune, keeping a none-too-kindly eye on Glenn Close. Whisper it quietly, but this was mainly tinned ham. “Sunny had a sundae”, intoned von Bulow, a cartoon baddie of lugubrious charm and European wiles, although nothing like as sinister as Simon Gruber in Die Hard with a Vengeance. I have never got all the way through David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, where you get two Jeremies for the price of one, sparring gynaecologist twins, no less, but it is not for the faint-hearted.

 At the other end of the spectrum, our man was  righteously wet opposite de Niro in The Misssion, bringing the word of Christ to the forests of South America. Father Gabriel was mercifully dispatched by brutal colonial raiders. I had the pleasure of seeing him murdered in the flesh as Richard II at Stratford, but reserved the greatest exultation for his death bed departure in Bertolucci’s shamefully awful Stealing Beauty, having failed to cop off with Liv Tyler in Tuscany.  Heartless, but Jeremy in extremis tends to have that effect.

Jeremy mid-coitus is also not a pretty prospect. Who can forget the look of horror on is his face, or indeed his naked frame, in the David Hare on a very bad day Damage as son Rupert Graves goes over the banister, his last view on earth that of father pumping away at Juliette Binoche? No wonder Miranda Richardson gave him his marching orders.

But the Irons CV is impressive in its diversity: lecherous literatus Jerry, cuckolding Ben Kingsley in Pinter’s Betrayal; off in pursuit of Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman;  acting the rueful roué and aged musketeer in The Man with the Iron Mask; hitting the sword and sorcery trail in Eragon and (gulp) Dungeons and Dragons. Much of this (including  The Borgias ) is bill-paying hackwork (Jeremy has quite a few cars to maintain).   I certainly hope he got a decent cheque for the little-seen The Fourth Angel , Jeremy as an Economist journalist (no less), hunting down the Serbian terrorists who took out half his family, helped on his way by Timothy West, Forest Whitaker and Charlotte Rampling as MI6's most glamorous ex-agent.

But Mr Irons can still raise his game. He was  seriously good as Dudley Earl of Leicester opposite Helen Mirren in the excellent Queen Elizabeth I, which showed historical drama could be more than serial shagging, beheading and scenery mastication.

Oh to have seen him in his busking days, or as a posh Judas betraying David Essex in Godspell. But if you want to see the child inside the man, check out those YouTube Playaway clips from the 1970s. Who needs Lord Sebastian’s flights of fancy or the stately majesty of Castle Howard when you can act the fool with Brian Cant?

EVERYONE'S A WINNER

I am a bit disappointed not to get a last minute invitation to Sir Michael Winner’s  wedding. I was also dismayed that no public holiday was granted in celebration of the nuptials. It’s the first time up the aisle for the veteran film director and restaurateur, emerging pyjama clad from a string of high profile dalliances and having recovered from a very nasty medical experience.

One had always hoped Michael would pledge his troth to Jenny Seagrove. I once sighted them together at interval time, breathing the warm London air on Charing Cross Road, midway through Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing. I’m sure Jenny remains A Woman of Substance, but I will remember her best as the evil nanny, Camilla, in The Guardian (the film, not the newspaper), bent on infanticide in league with killing trees in William Friedkin’s worst ever cinematic offering.  The two parted, (not because of the evil  trees)  Jenny ending  up with theatre impresario and Everton overlord Bill Kenwright.  The new Mrs Winner is no blushing nymphette, but Geraldine Lynton-Edwards, a sprightly 71.

Winner’s adventures in restaurant land and advertising have been mildly diverting, but have latterly overshadowed his many onscreen triumphs, surely worthy of a BFI retrospective, ideally before he pops his clogs. Most Winnerphiles, while noting earlier classics like Some Like it Cool  (Winner does naturism – don’t go there), fall over themselves to pour praise on the Charles Bronson Death Wish franchise, awash with no excuses homicide, judicious revenge and the occasional gang-rape. Death Wish II comes with the added bonus of a killer Jimmy Page sound-track. Ground-breaking, fearless and ahead of the curve these mighty films all were, but latter Winner is equally rich and tasty, although the critics have never quite go it.  Parting Shots, featuring north-eastern rock star Chris Rea as terminally ill (but not really) muso going on killing spree, found little favour with Total Film: “This is film-making at its cheapest, at its nastiest, and its most self-indulgent. Ignore it – hopefully it’ll quickly go away”. Bullseye! brought Michael Caine together with Roger Moore in a jolly romp about conmen, aided and abetted by the always classy Patsy Kensit and a much maligned John Cleese, but was judged by one Winner-baiter (get Bronson on the case) as “an unsightly wart on the face of cinema”.

Pride of place for me will always go to Dirty Weekend, loosely adapted, or ‘Winnerised’ from Helen Zahavi’s cult novel. Set in Brighton, it features Lia Williams as Bella, a frumpy doormat given a mystic makeover by Ian Richardson and let loose on the seafront as a femme very fatale. She rapidly sees off neighbouring pervert Rufus Sewell (hammered to death), lecherous dentist David McCallum (run over with his own car after an oral sex session he probably regretted) and an extremely fat man called Norman (post-coital bag over the head). A gun come into play later as Lea finds the Sussex constabulary a bit off the pace in dealing with predators and psychos. Never mind the rest of Winner’s oeuvre; this was surely Sir Michael’s pass key to the pantheon.