Fagburn: Current Mood

The media fills me with inertia.

Peter Cook: Remembered

A lovely, long article by John Hind on the lovely, long Peter Cook who died twenty years ago today.

Jeremy Thorpe: 1929-2014

I'm stilll gone, but couldn't miss documenting this. x

Jeremy Thorpe tribute bingo; Eton, colourful, charismatic, gifted mimic, brown derby, former male model, great dane, hired a hitman to kill his ex-boyfriend, allegedly, Minehead, bunnys can and will go to France, bit the pillow, acquitted, judge, a verdict that surprised many, pink oboe, Peter Cook, retired from public life, Parkinson's, devoted wife, Nick Clegg comments...

PS Jeremy Thorpe scandal: Where are they now?

Fagburn: How Very Interesting

Hi!

Just letting you know there is nothing very interesting to write about today.

x

'Those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War...'

Fagburn: Where Are They Now?

I am Lawrence of Arabia in Dorset.
I am Lawrence from Felt in Belgravia.
I am Wittgenstein in Norway.
I am Gramsci in prison.
I am Oscar Wilde in Paris.
I am Peter Cook in Hampstead.
I am JD Salinger in New Hampshire.
I am Mark E Smith in Edinburgh.
I am Bobby Fischer in Pasadena, Budapest, the Philippines, Iceland. 
I am Thoreau at Walden.
I am Larry David in Hollywood.
I am Holden Caulfield in hospital.
I am Nietzsche in the nuthouse.
Ted Kaczynski in Montana.
Maybe even Morrissey in Rome.
Unhome alone.

I am nothing and
and I am okay being nothing just for now, thank you,
among all the other disappointed,
disillusioned,
disappeared.

Biding my time.

Coalition: Marriage Wrecker

This story - Cracks In The Coalition Marriage - made the front page of The Sunday Telegraph today.

The start of a party conference is when broadsheets try and do some serious yacht-rocking, often with a serialisation of some "tell-all memoirs" - as with Damian McBride's in the Mail before Labour's last week.*
Happily for Dave in Telegraphland this has been overshadowed by his mortgage stunt, "foreign beggars", and the ghost of Margaret Thatcher.
They still must consider gaymarriage the most damning extract from In It Together; Matthew d'Ancona's "insider's story about the coalition", which "reveals furious rows between ministers threatened to tear it apart – and David Cameron’s support for gay marriage provoked such a backlash he wondered if it was worth the cost."
The Telegraph was the newspaper most virulently opposed to equal marriage, of course [See Fagburn passim ad nauseum].

'What they don’t want is to roll up to a church and find Derek and Clive having their wedding”: thus, in a conversation early in 2013, did the Prime Minister explain to his advisers the resistance of Tory party members to same-sex marriage.
The image of Dudley Moore getting married to Peter Cook – the original, awesomely profane Derek and Clive – was an arresting one, and not quite what Cameron had meant. His point was that Conservative activists were generally opposed to gay marriage only if it meant change in their places of worship.
A secular reform could be managed, he believed. As he would later admit to the same colleagues, he had radically underestimated the scale and depth of the hostility in his party to same-sex unions...

You can read the extract here - I have some things to do, but will collect my doubtless thrilling thoughts, and a bit later Fagburn may finally reveal my big conspiracy theory about how Cameron came to support gay marriage.

It's so exciting I guarantee your knob will drop off.**

[Edit: Now decided to save it for my tell-all memoirs -Dave's said it's all balls, by the way, but he would say that, wouldn't he?].

The cartoon above - drawing a somewhat tenuous link between same-sex unions and the European Union - is from the Telegraph in January - if you want to Google them there's a heck of a lot of cartoons portraying Cameron and Clegg as a gay couple.
HAHAHA! etc.
This one pleased the Coalition For Marriage so much, they put it on their website. 

* Fagburn feels the need to point out once again that McBride's publisher, Iain Dale, is a violent hooligan, who Sussex Police have left free to troll the streets.

** Offer only applies to men. Sorry.

David Frost: Hello, Good Evening And Goodbye

Some crazed pot-smoking anarchist hippy types invade The David Frost Programme - live on Saturday night ITV in 1970.
See if you can spot the two that became multi-millionaire businessmen.
Clue: One of them says; "Capitalism's just another word for stealing."

Peter Cook was once asked what was his greatest regret in life?
"Saving David Frost from drowning."

Drimble Wedge And The Vegetations: Bedazzled

"You fill me with inertia..."

So bored with hearing about Thatcher now, it's actually painful.
Maybe this is her final act of cruelty?
Wake me up on Friday.

PS I'm bored.

PPS "I'm living in this movie, but it doesn't move me... Boredom!"

On Success/Happiness/Optimism: Apropos Of Nothing/Something/Everything

"I don't give a toss if people say I haven't fulfilled my promise. I think my values are right but I don't want to impose them on other people. I've been lucky enough to be born in a democratic country where I can say what I like, with parents who were decent, intelligent people, where I'm reasonably well off, and where I've met a lot of interesting people and been to some interesting places. How much luckier can you get?
"Life is a matter of passing the time enjoyably. There may be other things in life, but I've been too busy passing my time enjoyably to think very deeply about them." 

Peter Cook.

"What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do."

Bob Dylan. 

"I believe the key to happiness is: someone to love, something to do, and something to look forward to."

Elvis.

"Whether a person feels positive or not is kind of a comment on their personality and of no great interest. You can find positive signs or you can find negative signs. How you evaluate them depends on something that happened in your life recently or something like that. There's no objective way to do it. The important thing is you try to commit yourself to making the positive signs more real. Suppose you felt that there's 99 percent of a probability that human civilization is going to be destroyed in the next hundred years, but one percent chance it won't be, and that one percent offers some opportunities to do something. Well, you commit yourself to that one percent."

Noam Chomsky.

"Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, 
A medley of extemporanea; 
And love is a thing that can never go wrong; 
And I am Marie of Romania."

Dorothy Parker.

"Fuck' em."

Mick Jones.

"Oh, what's the bloody point?"

Kenneth Williams. 

"I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will."*

Antonio Gramsci. 

* There's some debate as to whether Gramsci ever said this, and it's nicked off someone else whatever, so don't write in Marxist pedants.

 

Peter Cook: Genius At Work

There's a short Peter Cook season at the BFI starting Monday, and marking what would have been his 75th year.
Rather neatly it leads into the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival - whatever that is.

Richard Dawkins: The Gay Gene!

This turns into a Peter Cook sketch.
Hilarious!

E-Petitions: Please Ignore This Post

Leading e-petitions at 7pm yesterday:

* Petition to retain the ban on Capital Punishment (3,241 signatures)

* Keep Formula 1 Free To Air in the UK (1,501)

* Restore capital punishment (1,421)

* Legalise cannabis (577)

* Britain wants referendum to leave EU (564)

* Absolute right to self-defence within ones [sic] home (380)

* Return of Hanging for Serious Crimes (333)

* Decriminalise recreational drugs (270)

* Remove the ban on gay blood donation (233)

* Formula 1 and other sports events (221)

The Independent.

I do hope everyone will boycott this ludicrous populist distraction.
Or start the most ridiculous "e-petitions" they can think of.
Starting sensible ones about ending the gay blood ban won't make any real difference to government policy, and just give credence to all the "Bring back hanging for paedo drug dealers" Daily Mail bollocks.
Incidentally, does anyone remember the Peter Cook film, The Rise And Rise Of Michael Rimmer?
It's about an advertising executive who becomes a smooth/smarmy Tory MP and begins ruling via endless opinion polls.
Daft, I know.