Weird how a runaway mouth can in a moment bring about a downfall; Fanny Cradock with her “You’re among the professionals now” whose broadcasting career came to an end at that moment, Oscar Wilde who sealed his doom when he said he never kissed a boy because he was too ugly, Jonathon Ross with his little bit of obscene joking with Russell Brand. And who might Russell Brand be I asks? He’s a comedian is he? Right, I’m with you. But it evidently was a joke that back-fired on his friend Jonathon. It seems to me if you want to become a multi-multi millionaire in showbiz you need to have been deprived of toys as a child and, like Peter Pan you don’t want to grow up unless you can have all those toys of which you were deprived, viz Michael Jackson with his Never land and Jonathon Ross whose mother evidently still gives him toys at Christmas, or so I read in the paper. Then you can have the obligatory four to five homes and fleet of cars that seem to be the symbols of success. I’m not ranting here, Frank, merely musing on matters material. The fact is that Jonathon’s Ross’s £14000000 contract with the BBC was outrageous and Graham Norton’s milking the old cow as well. Meanwhile producers of smaller shows are scraping the barrel for cash. Ah, well, now that he is no longer with the Beeb we must wait with bated breath to see what Jonathon gets up to next. How are the mighty fallen, not that, with all his wealth, he need worry about the pennies, but there is the possibility that away from the fans boredom will quickly set in. It’s a strange old, world, Frank, isn’t it? Stranger still, here I am writing about someone I simply do not know, not personally or as a performer because that I suppose is what a DJ is basically. I have never seen Jonathon Ross on television and have never listened to him on the radio. His talent and why the BBC nabobs considered him to be worth so much money is to me a complete mystery. Mind you, I never saw Michael Jackson in action either except for snippets on television so, apart from what seemed like some sort of supercharged electrical energy and a sinuous body, particularly around the hips, did he have that made him the super-star that he was? That I will never know.

“And here may I speak of what may be written about you? Never be either elated by good notices or dejected by bad ones. If you have failed in a part you will be quite aware of the fact, and to be told so in print, although a little humiliating, is something which the greatest actors have had to put up with, so why worry? If you have been savagely attacked take it philosophically. To be praised of course is very pleasant, but only get really excited about it if the writer of a good notice is someone on whose opinion you set great score. A certain section of these gentlemen endeavour in their notices to be thought extremely clever themselves (Kenneth Tynan perhaps?) and, this being so, only the minority are to be taken as profound and unbiased experts.”
Admittedly Seymour Hicks here is discussing performance, and as a stage performer I have always been fortunate enough to have been treated kindly by the critics but, as a playwright, that is an entirely different matter. I have had two plays put on in London and twice the critics with hardly an exception have given the play a thorough mauling so I think I know how an actor would feel getting the same treatment. I am writing this after my previous remarks about the actress playing Mrs Barrie in the movie “Finding Neverland”. Stage performances are ephemeral: if you’re bad in a play it can be for the most part forgotten, certainly never resurrected; film unfortunately is not and if you have been pretty rotten it is there for keeps. I was never much good at acting for film until very very late in life when I was cast as a murdering paedophile in a BBC docu-drama “The Lost Boys”. Fortunately all the parts I had in film and television up to that point were small so did not attract the attention of any critic, clever or otherwise.
Things got so bad with the critics that at one point The Royal Court in London threatened to ban them from the theatre. This set up howls of outrage and cries of depriving journalists of their livelihood. What do critics think they do in turn when the boot is on their foot? Those who have read my autobiography “No Official Umbrella” will know a whole chapter is devoted to my play “The 88” which was produced at The Old Vic thirty years ago. It took fourteen years after completion for it to be produced and it came off in fourteen nights thanks to the critics. And was it the play that was at fault? Was it really as bad as they made it out to be? Judging by audience reaction I would say not, but it was most certainly the subject t matter they took objection to – this was not fair on the play itself and, as Douglas sometimes reminds me, even after thirty years it still hurts.

Been watching movies previously seen, “Cabaret” which holds up really well. Based on Christopher Isherwood’s autobiographical stories, Berlin 1931, the year of my birth and the burgeoning of the Nazi party. Almost strange to think all that horror took place nearly eighty years ago. It would seem that emblem, the swastika, had half a nation in its thrall. There was just enough of what was going on to give one the shudders without overdoing it; for example ash blonde youth singing a beautiful waltz “Tomorrow belongs to me,” the song intensifying as it moves along and everyone joining in, camera panning down to swastika on the boy’s arm, the song ending with the Nazi salute. Strange also, the one and only stage production I’ve seen of this musical I did not take to at all.
Next was “Total Eclipse”, what the Americans might call a bio-pic I suppose, about the affair between the French poets, Verlaine and Rimbaud: David Thewlis playing Verlaine and Leonardo di Caprio playing Rimbaud. Great performances apart, For once amazingly good look-alike casting. Okay, with Verlaine, the baldness is half the battle but what about the adolescent Rimbaud? I really knew nothing about these two, not their lives or their work but, having watched the film again, I looked them up on the internet. I don’t think one exaggerates when calling di Caprio beautiful. There are no two ways about that, but looking at photographs of the eighteen year old Rimbaud the resemblance is amazing, except that Rimbaud’s face was much thinner, this despite Verlaine referring to it as chubby. The features though are strikingly similar to di Caprio’s except I would say Rimbaud was pretty rather than beautiful.
Leaving aside obvious shows like “La Cages Au Folles” there was a time not so very long ago when no actor, let alone a big star, would dream of playing a gay character, especially in a film showing actual love making, but how things have changed. Hugh Grant, James Wilby, Rupert Graves all did it in "Maurice." Naturally a film about Oscar Wilde and Bosie demands it, so Jude Law had no compunction about stripping off and getting down to it, if you’ll pardon the expression, but Russell Crowe has done it in an early movie (this aspect of the character in” A Beautiful Mind” was avoided though), di Caprio has done it, Michael York in Cabaret did it (bisexual) and now it is the turn of Colin Firth evidently who is starring in another Isherwood based work “A Singular man”.
Last evening I watched “Finding Neverland” which is a lovely film but I would have enjoyed it that much more if I had been able to hear the dialogue. I’m fed up with mentioning this so will out of charity put it down to our television set causing sound to be muffled though, in truth, Mrs Barrie was telephoning in her performance it was that dull. Playing a little grey mouse is a very difficult thing to do and not be dull. Next time I will watch it with sub-titles.
Seymour Hicks has wise words to say about critics so – next time.

The UK is in the grip of deep winter; snow, ice, plummeting temperatures and Douglas is due to fly out today but Gatwick is closed so he obviously won’t be flying from there. Hopefully he’ll get a refund on his cancelled flight. He has booked another from Heathrow as an alternative. Hopefully that one won’t be cancelled as well. Meanwhile here in Crete we are having spring like weather. Last night I didn’t even bother to light the wood stove or turn on the heating it was that warm. But it’s an ill oboe nobody blows good. The worry is that all the nasty little things that should have been killed off in the cold are thriving. Does that mean a real plague of mozzies this summer? Also with no snow on the mountains, what about the water table? We haven’t seen rain for days. Still it’s early days. Maybe our winter is yet to come.
There are of course, in this warm weather, still flies around, especially those strange little creatures I’ve mentioned before that fly around in circles but never seem to land anywhere. In high school we had an Afrikaans set book called Die (pronounced dee) Skarlakin Eskadril, The Scarlet Squadron, all about a secret squadron stationed in what is now Namibia. I don’t know why it was there or how the story evolved but I still remember the title after all these years and the little flies going around in circles invariably remind of it. Tenuous connection I know but that’s how the brain works I suppose. Another Afrikaans set book was called Toiings, all about a black man of that name, and I still have that in the bookshelf. Why? I must have carted it around for fifty odd years from address to address, but why? As an eight year old in boarding school I read a book called Lost On The Prairie all about a little boy like me of course, far from home. It had me weeping buckets I remember and I have always wondered if I would ever find a copy again. Every secondhand bookshop I go into I look for it but, alas, so far obviously without any success. It is nineteenth century in the Henty tradition although not one of his. The nearest I’ve got to it was in Perth, Australia where in a bookshop I came across a reference to it. But that was it. Now there are no secondhand bookshops near for me to search so I doubt whether I will ever find it again. Another of my favourite books at the time was The Sea Hawk by Rafael Sabbatini and I remember later on I was terribly disappointed when I watched the Errol Flynn, Flora Robson film of that name which had no connection with the book. But there you are, there is no copywrite in titles. We have the film on cassette and what a lot of old codswallop it is.

I wonder how long it will be before newspapers as such, the paper bit I mean, are a thing of the past. They are already on line and complaining bitterly that advertising revenue has dropped considerably as well as circulation which is hardly surprising and some have already gone to the wall. I remember a time when newspapers were so affordable that even on a small income or hardly any income at all, we used to get half a dozen of the Sundays, during the week a morning paper and an evening paper, plus The Stage once a week and, moving to the country, a local paper once a week. As the price of newspapers increased and the income didn’t increase in proportion gradually the Sundays were whittled down until only The Sunday Times was left. And we carried on getting the Sunday Times here in Crete until one day we stopped even that. Why? Because of an executive decision or somebody’s decision for a plan to save the paper money. The S.T here costs 5euro, the equivalent of roughly, depending upon the rate of exchange, £4.65 and, all things might be relative but that is a not inconsiderable sum to pay for a newspaper. Fine though if one were getting what readers in the UK get for their money but … here for a start the magazine was never included and gradually all the other extras were withdrawn until finally we were left with the main pages and situations vacant. Now why situations vacant? Nobody here is looking for employment in the UK. If they were looking for employment in the UK that’s where they would be. The final straw was when the Culture section was withdrawn. There were howls of outrage of course which somebody at the office tried to smooth over by saying the paper did take its readers’ objections into account and oh blah blah blah. Of course there was no reversal and since that time the Sunday Times has been boycotted. That means we have saved over a thousand pounds and the paper has lost over a thousand pounds, about £1209. If ten households had followed suit that would be £12090 and, if a hundred or more had followed suit, well, serve them right for NOT taking their readers’ objections into account. So, after having been a loyal reader for nearly fifty years, all I can say is piss on The Sunday Times. We now get the Culture section sent to us every few months from friends in England and all it costs is the postage, the equivalent of about one edition of the paper.

Evidently porn channels on the internet are going to be banned in India. Strange, temples decorated with every known Karma sutra position in bas relief are tourist hotspots but porn on the internet is banned.
A member of the Irish parliament has proposed an anti-blasphemy bill that has Ireland Atheists up in arms and not surprising. What gives with these people who never seem to realise what idiots they make of themselves when sex or religion or both raise their heads? I’m talking about the Irish parliament being idiots not the atheists.
There is certainly far too much pornography on the internet, waves of it, sex of all kinds, some of it rather dark and horrid in my opinion, but if that’s the way certain people get their kicks and it isn’t harming anyone else, why not just let them get on with it? At least cybersex, if you’re into that sort of thing, is physically safe. No chance of STDs or AIDS, no unwanted pregnancies, no S and M going disastrously wrong (unless you’re doing it solo), no unnecessary violence or queer bashing and, with the advance of technology, it was pretty inevitable anyway. I don’t know whether any has ever been found but I’m sure it is possible some form of sexual carrying on could be painted on a cave wall somewhere. The Greeks proudly produced a terrific amount of pottery the decoration of which showed a whole lot of naughtiness going on. The Romans weren’t averse to plastering their walls with it and then later on came illustrated books, magazines, photography. Is it true that in Norwich cathedral beneath the choir stalls there is a frieze showing monks doing naughty things with donkeys? Or is that a myth? Then came video cassettes, followed by DVDs and finally in natural progression the internet.
What is the difference between pornography and erotica? Is there a difference between pornography and erotica? Can erotica exist without porn? I ask these questions because a friend has just lent me a book, “The Mammoth Book Of New Gay Erotica” over 30 original stories. Why can’t that be 32, 34, 35 or however many stories? Actually it’s 32, I counted. Anyway we are informed there are over 30 masterpieces of homoerotic desire. Wow! That is some claim, masterpieces? The book is edited by Lawrence Schimel (unfortunate name, could easily be misspelt) who advises the reader to skip ahead if a story doesn’t appeal and I am afraid that is exactly what I have been doing, so much so that I am three-quarters through at the rate of knots. Virtually every piece is little else but pornography and in consequence, for me anyway, dull and uninteresting. Of the five or six I’ve read right through because they have been beautifully written, even a couple of these authors couldn’t resist descending into porn towards the end. These stories though involve some unusual situation or deal most importantly with emotions rather than mere raw sex and these are indeed erotic. The rest, far from being masterpieces, are crap.
Okay, you say, if you’re such a critic, how come you haven’t written an erotic story? Well, I must confess some years back I did, just for the hell of it. My story takes place in a gay bar which has just hired a new barman – a drop dead gorgeous young Greek god who every customer entering the place immediately lusts after but he will have none of them. The story ends in the washroom. He is by himself and has just ejaculated over a mirror and is standing admiring his reflection. The story is called “Narcissus”. Erotic? Or pornographic? I like to think the former which maybe answers my question anyway.

New Year ’s Day started off with great warm gusts of wind courtesy of Colonel Gadaffi. It could have been a spring day; hardly a cloud to be seen. After lunch the winds dropped and anyone wanting to sunbathe would have really enjoyed it. No need to light the fires in the evening it was that warm. Evidently though because of the unseasonable weather, allergies are rampant. You can’t win.
We didn’t bother to see in 2010 but took a book to bed about ten thirty and fell asleep before those midnight chimes. I’m surprised I didn’t wake up with the sound of gunfire as I am sure there must have been any amount of it; that is the way Cretans celebrate an occasion, as well as fireworks. For us the quietest New Year’s eve ever.
An interesting e-mail from The Pardoes in America wishing us all the best for the New Year (it has just got to be better than 2009) and saying they were very surprised to see a long article on Vamos in the N.Y.Times, so I looked it up on the internet and very interesting it is indeed. It appears our olive growers’ co-operative has been cooking the books and taking the European Union for a very big ride with the subsidies. They have presented unbelievable figures in order to rake off a pretty considerable sum of money. For example, an olive tree should evidently produce about fifty kilos of fruit, enough to make five litres of oil but, according to our fraudsters, the trees around here have been producing something like 150 and there are hundreds of thousands of trees! So what’s new? When organisations can cover up their members naughtiness, like the Teamsters or Tammany Hall used to be in America, the boys will feather their nests and enough is never ever enough. Unfortunately in this instance the farmers the co-operative represent lost out. But then the workers in the Teamsters Union also lost out, didn’t they? Anyway, any little piggy who can get his nose in the trough is bound by his very nature to do so and, what is more, squeal when caught.
Caught an enormous rat in the downstairs bathroom trap last night. He was very pretty, not just grey, or just brown, but a bit of both. Don’t think I’ve seen that before. I always feel so bad when one of them is killed like this but they are unfortunately destructive little buggers. This one, or one of his mates, had even started chewing through the plastic waste pipe and that could have been a small disaster. So RIP Mister Ratty.