It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (7 page)

From here on in, it’s effectively a well-behaved striptease, with Werle shedding her jacket top, the arms of which she waves like hoofers’ tassles before draping it upon Harry’s tutting head. He moves to throw it away, but winds up using it as a pillow, while all the time continuing his Benny Hill-style parody of sleepiness – the man tired but tempted, the woman needy and naughty, a dynamic which seemed to be the norm for all nudge-wink ‘family entertainment’ in those days. The clothes continue to come off, but there’s little
chance of nakedness – after five minutes of theatrical undressing Ms Werle is still covered from head to foot in the most modest of undergarments which seem to exist in never-ending layers of mystery. If she walked out down the street like this today she’d still look overdressed.

Suddenly the sound of castanets fills the air and things take a decidedly Latino turn.
Hola!
Harry bangs his head on the bedstead – things are hotting up. He laughs. Charley sings some more. She caresses her corset and deftly drops her petticoat revealing pink garters with little blue bows on. Harry is undone. She drops the petticoat on to his chest and starts to slip one of the garters of her leg. Harry is clearly aroused. He lifts the petticoat toward his face – to do …
what
?

To put it over his head so he can go back to sleep.

Clearly he’s impotent. Or gay. Or English.

It’s time to bring out the big guns. Charley drapes herself around a four-poster pole, raises a knee, and pulls on a straw boater.

And
that
does it. Forget the corsets, the frocks, the petticoats, the garters, the ribbons, the laces, even the red shoes which I notice now she still has on. It’s the straw boater that finally seals the deal for Harry.

And clearly for me. Because
now
, after all this song-and-dance hanky-panky, we finally get the
other
bit of the scene which I remember; the bit in which the woman walks away from the man, apparently done troubling him, at which point the man, who up till now has been so reticent to get involved, calls her back by reaching out and catching
hold of the lace which trails behind her.

Only, that’s not what happens. Not quite. Clearly I’ve transposed the bit with the lace from earlier in the scene when he was whipping off her skirt – with her consent, of course. By now, however, Harry has clearly gotten off his horse and drunk his milk and is in no mood for namby-pamby niceties. No Sirreee Bob. Now that his bloodlust has been inflamed by that damn straw boater it’s time for manly action. So as Charley turns to walk away in something approaching an unsatisfied strop, Harry reaches out, grabs her by the wrist, and hauls her giggling with gaiety on to the bed where the happy couple are finally conjoined in three seconds of laughter-filled canoodling climaxing in him patting her once again on the bum.

Cut to the engine room, and a shot of huge pistons pounding in and out, up and down, in an orgy of mechanical thrusting and pumping.

Really.

I stop the DVD, and take stock.

All said, it’s pretty depressing. There was I imagining that my young mind had somehow latched on to something profoundly Freudian and symbolic, something which would have suggested a deeper appreciation of the mysteries of the adult world than befitted a six-year-old boy, something which proved that even at an early age my eyes were looking
beyond
the screen to the story
behind
the picture.

The truth is far more mundane; at an early age I watched Barbara Werle stripping down to her corset and petticoat and showing off her garters and clearly I have never got
over the impenetrable longings which that experience provoked.

This is emblematic of so much of my early life, and the sooner I face up to the fact that my entire adolescent world view was informed by the fairground thrills of exploitation cinema the better.

In my formative years, everything I knew about politics I had learned from
Planet of the Apes
.

Everything I knew about pop music I’d learned from
Slade in Flame
.

Everything I knew about heartbreak I’d learned from
Jeremy
.

Everything I knew about religion I’d learned from
The Exorcist
.

And, apparently, everything I knew about ‘adult matters’ I’d learned from
Krakatoa: East of Java
.

And you thought
you
were messed up.

Just as watching movies defined my childhood, so writing about cinema became an early obsession. At around the age of nine or ten I brashly embarked upon an unauthorised novelisation of
2001: A Space Odyssey
(not realising that Arthur C. Clarke had beaten me to it), cramming my own messed-up memories of the entire movie into four badly typed pages for which I then constructed a ‘hardback’ cover using cardboard and Sellotape. I don’t have a copy of that magnum opus any more but I remember that it didn’t make much sense – although you could say the same of Kubrick’s movie (but not, crucially, of Clarke’s novel). From here I graduated to compiling ‘books’ of film reviews which I would then place casually upon bookshelves around the house in the forlorn belief that someone would start reading them without noticing that they were home-made. It wasn’t until my teenage years, however, that my written work became
available outside of my own home and, like so many wannabe journalists in the seventies and eighties, the first thing I ever wrote that actually got published was a schoolboy letter in the
New Musical Express
. Although it was nearly thirty years ago, I can still remember clearly the substance of the letter, which took the form of a short play (I was a pretentious arse even back then). This Beckettian gem, which was essentially a rip-off of the surreal ramblings of genius cartoonist Ray Lowry, took the form of an argument between two of the
NME
’s most flamboyant (and therefore greatest) writers: Paul Morley and Ian Penman. If memory serves, these two journalistic behemoths were portrayed as squabbling in fluent lavatorial
Goon Show
gibberish before the fey arrival of Japan frontman David Sylvian who announced simply ‘I have no make-up’ and then died. At which point, the entire
NME
cast turned up ‘dressed as Monty Smith’s stomach’ to sing an enthusiastic roundelay of ‘Show me the way up my own bum’.

And they say satire is dead.

The worst thing about this hideously smug and
faux
anarchic missive was the fact that I had clearly thought about it for a
long time
before sending it, hence my word-perfect recall almost three decades later. I can’t remember a single line of Shakespeare, Milton, Keats or any of the other immortal poets and playwrights whose wonderful works I studied at O level, A level, and university. But can I remember
every
sodding word of a stupid letter I sent to the
NME
back in the late seventies? Of
course
I can. I’ve got a head so full of junk there’s no space left for the good stuff to go.

Equally shameful is the amount of effort I expended attempting to appear utterly ‘off the cuff’ and hilariously flippant. Plus, the entire satirical aim of the piece was clearly
not
to mock the writers in question at all, but to appear somehow ‘in’ on the gag in a way which would make me appear to be ‘one of them’. People ask me nowadays why I’m so vitriolic about anything which could be described as vaguely quirky or madcap and the honest truth is that I cannot forgive any sin in which I am so deeply steeped.

I signed that letter ‘Henry P’ which was an obscure reference to my favourite band of the time, Yachts, whose frontman Henry Priestman I idolised. By a peculiar twist of fate, that name stuck thanks to the mocking derision of my very close friend Simon Booth who
saw
the letter and
knew
at once that it was from me. Some time later I would move to Manchester, where nobody knew me, and where the university was awash with people called ‘Mark’. So, for the first few weeks of the academic term people would politely ask my name, and I would reply ‘Mark’ and they would instantly forget because they already had fifty other ‘Marks’ backed up in their ‘which one are you?’ cranial databanks. Then, sometime around week three, Booth came up to visit me in Manchester and was overheard to refer to me as ‘Henry’ – of which there were few others. So the name stuck. And for the rest of my six years in Manchester I was known almost interchangeably as ‘Mark’ or ‘Henry’, or even occasionally ‘Mark Henry’ which sounded like some moonshine-drinking dungareed mountain-dweller from
The Waltons
. After a while I got used to it, and convinced myself
that I had acquired the ‘Henry’ nickname after Jack Nance’s generously bequiffed screen icon in the cult movie
Eraserhead
– more of which later.

Getting into Manchester University had proved something of a slog because I was not much cop at school and had unimpressive grades to prove it. In fact, on my first UCCA form (known now as UCAS, I believe) I got
five
flat rejections, being turned down by everyone including my ‘sure-fire safety net’ fifth choice which the good folk at careers advice assured me ‘never rejected
anyone
’. I didn’t just get
rejected
– they asked to see me
in person
before deciding that I was not the sort of chap they wanted cluttering up their esteemed seat of learning. This was an important life lesson, because it taught me that if someone isn’t sure that they want me to do something, whatever it may be, then actually
meeting
me will merely confirm their worst fears. To this day I have
never
got
any
job for which I have had to be formally interviewed or do an audition.

Never.

Ever
.

I think that says a lot about how charming I am in person.

Anyway, after a brief and foolhardy flirtation with the entrance examiners for Mansfield College, Oxford (who also told me to get lost, but in a very nice and affirmative way – I was apparently their ‘top rejection’) I applied again to Manchester and finally got in which was great because it was the only place I really wanted to go, having read all about it in the
NME
. On my first day there I trotted down to the Hacienda club (brainchild of Factory supremo Tony
Wilson) and obtained my beautiful yellow and silver constructivist-style designer credit-card membership ID. These cards are apparently now valuable collectors’ items, and I would happily sell mine on eBay were it not for the fact that I cut it up to make plectrums after falling upon hard times during an intense ‘rehearsal schedule’ with my never-to-be-famous band Russians Eat Bambi. No, nobody else has ever heard of them either.

Like Hunter S. Thompson’s San Francisco in the mid-sixties, Manchester in the mid-eighties was ‘a very special time and place to be a part of … whatever it meant’. Part of what being in Manchester ‘meant’ was getting caught up in the heady tide of hard-left student politics which swept along the Oxford Road and guaranteed that at any time of day or night your passage could be impeded by balaclava-clad protestors demanding equal rights for Latvian yoghurt farmers, angrily stamping on Nestlé chocolate bars, and threatening to burn down Barclays Bank. Along with its fashionably industrial music scene, Manchester was the UK’s premier hotbed of sub-Trot NUS militancy – no wonder the
New Statesman
dubbed it the ‘crucible [in which] a generation learned its politics and went on to become the heart of New Labour’. Today, people still talk of the role of the ‘Manchester Mafia’ within modern politics, since so many of those who were radical young turks in the eighties grew up to be rather less radical old farts in the nineties and noughties, helping to put Blair and Brown in power (hey, thanks for that!).

As for me, I was always going to be a sucker for revolutionary politics because I’d spent so much time
watching
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
. So, with my usual flair for moderation in all things I mutated during my time in Manchester from snot-nosed
NME
-reading angsty teenager to red-flag-waving bolshie bore with a subscription to
fight Racism fight Imperialism
and no sense of humour. I also developed an addiction to stern gender politics which made me both unfunny
and
unattractive – a real double whammy. Whilst many of my more well-adjusted peers were taking drugs, having sex, and experimenting with new and exciting forms of liver abuse, my student years were defined by a profound belief that a hard rain was indeed going to fall and this was no time to be
enjoying oneself
. In the words of
Withnail & I
’s prophetic guru Presuming Ed, we had spectacularly ‘failed to paint it black’ and there were going to be a lot of casualties …