Chapter 6: Submission to the camera

What is it that young boys find so fascinating about malign, middle aged, bisexual, almost emasculated middle class men? These are not the Alpha Type males, but they are certainly portrayed as evil buggers, from Emperor Ming through the Master on Dr Who, to Zachary Smith on Lost in Space, to the Child catcher who was obviously very balletic and very emasculated in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. And what of the King of that strain in the culture, the Joker in Batman? How can you be made to laugh at a genocidal lunatic who is in some state of hyper-understanding? It's a strange phenomenon but it goes back a long way. Think of Ariel, in Shakespeare's The Tempest, or the Norse god Loki. Loki was not macho, was he? Thor was macho, Loki was not. It is interesting to me that we have perhaps demonised the wrong end of the male psyche. To my mind, we should have had it in for The Rugby Player, like Redman.

Well, Darwin had something to say about people like Redman, and this is the part of Darwinism that Karl Marx actually found very amusing. Men like Redman himself would say that he was the Alpha Male. He was born into a position that made him automatically more of an Alpha than you. Physically he is more of an Alpha than you, and therefore it is more in the collective interests of the human species for him to procreate and improve the gene pool than a wheezing, Dickensian discontent, walking with a slight stoop and a stern look on his face. That strain of the human male psyche will inevitably be superseded by the Übermensch. Well, that is what Redman would say, but Charles Darwin had a different perspective. Darwin pointed out that in a battle situation, and this is the bit that Marx picked up on, it is the Alpha Males who rush to the front and get wiped out, while the other males in the tribe who are standing back and going, "Hmmm, that doesn't look quite right," well, they are the ones that procreate and gradually take over. This has been happening over many millennia. As the modern American proverb goes, "It's the second mouse that gets the cheese."

This is where Redman and I were the stand-off really. Kiran referred to both him and Gerard Braughn in a very insulting way. She said it to Gerard Braughn's face when we met him at the end.

'I can't take you seriously,' she said. 'You've modelled yourself on James Bond.'

He was not happy about that.

'Oh,' he said, 'I thought all women found James Bond absolutely irresistible.'

Not my other half. She is more like one of those femme fatales who wants to kill him. Slowly. In fact, it is the classic 1960s' scenario, where those coppers were just thinking, "The other side's got all the best skirt! What's going on here?" It is a terribly immature thing for me to say, but it leads me to another relationship that sadly cannot have a chapter on its own. You see, I came up with all sorts of ideas during the week and this is why the director had not done anything like this before. He was very malleable. I kept saying I was his Rasputin. I was his guru, his shaman, his high priest. Everything I suggested, he tried to do. Now that has not happened to me before. This was me being the Alpha. Normally the public are putty in the media's hands. They are supposed to say, "Tell me where to be and what to do, tell me what to say..." Everything had flipped right round here, and I was referring to him as my personal manager at points, which unsettled him.

'You're not very objective are you?' I said. 'You'll do anything I want you to do.'

'I can't help it Craig,' he said. 'I can't help it. It's really great stuffing it up them. Isn't it?'

You have got to remember he was a lot younger. Eleven years younger, in fact. He was really thrilled by it.

'My dad always wanted me to do something like this,' he said. His father was an arc welder, he said and so he was not from the normal end of society that directors come from. He had quite a hard-line, workerist, Leninist upbringing.

'I saw a documentary about the battle of the beanfields,' he said, 'earlier this year and it drove me to tears,' and he said, 'I realised you've been having it really hard and you've been taking on the state and that's why you've been having it hard. It's easy for people to sit in their offices talking about change but you've got to go out and do direct action, and all that. That's why I wanted to go out and find someone like you,' he said. I used to think crusty hippies weren't trying hard enough but earlier this year I found this to be wrong.

Now, I take that verbatim. I don't think he was lying or exaggerating. I spent a lot of time with him and he was more like me and the people I know than I could ever possibly have believed without spending as much time with him as I did. People like him keep their beliefs closely guarded in case they threaten their ability to climb the ladder, but I got them out of him. I got so friendly with him and we got that much to trust one another that we both opened up on things that shocked and amazed both of us. It was a big, big moment for him too. This is why I do not think it was just another job. This could be arrogance, this could be me assuming that I am that important and that interesting that I have to be central to everyone's lives, but I do believe this was as big for him as it was for me.

I told him about some of my drug experiences and he was absolutely shocked. I have seen shock on people's faces. I can tell when people are faking it up to a point. I told him about a mammoth salvia and psylocybin trip I had in Bristol earlier this year.

'Here Luke,' I said, 'I think I died and came back.'

'You what?'

I told him I had left my body to an extent where I saw what death was like and I had come back.

'Not just the tunnel with the light at the end of it but what exists on the other side.'

'Do you want to have a go?' I said. 'Because let's face it, you won't know until you try.'

I could see he was just bristling with both fear and anticipation. Wow. I was burning around in one of the hundred thousand pound range rovers really fast while I told him this, just to make a point. I was not driving the way people in those kinds of cars normally drive I was stopping, starting, overtaking people and the car kept talking to me. In a very middle class, female voice, every now and again, that car would say, "Sorry". It did this every time I touched something I was not supposed to.

'You ain't done nothing wrong.' I said. 'Luke, Luke, the car ain't done nothing wrong. I should be saying, "Sorry" if I touched it in an inappropriate place. Doesn't that just symbolise what the possessing owner class want of their employees? And now they've symbolised it in a robotic voice that's always constantly submissive. You can't expect another intelligence to be submissive so, next thing you know cars are going to be saying, "I'm sorry, but I can't let you out today. We've got problems with your driving. And I fear for your mental safety..." You know what I mean?'

Luke looked at me as though he honestly thought I was like Catweasel, that I was in this world from another era, by magic.

When we were having this conversation, I was driving the Range Rover wearing my top hat and it looked like a funeral car. It was black and on this particular journey, while he was outside checking locations, I sat on my own, parked. A load of school kids from a local council estate came walking past. They hated me. They thought I was rich and I was especially put out. I wanted to lean out of the window and say, "it's all right, it's only a life swap!" but they'd never have believed me. They were looking and scowling at me in the way that I have seen kids scowling at people my parents had brought me up to hate. I suddenly realised what people with money actually have to go through. This was like psychological warfare on a very primitive level, throughout humanity. What could I say? I was delighted! I was in one of the most expensive, newest cars on the road, because Gerard replaces his cars every few months. It is a status thing for him to have a car that new, and here I was sitting in it with a top hat on. Well, it is amazing I was not lynched and the car burned out. "That's taking the piss now," they would be thinking. "They're wearing hats like that again!"

Every night, for up to an hour each, if not longer in some cases, depending on how fractious the day had been, Kiran and I filmed a video diary. First we were interviewed for about a half an hour about how our day had gone and they asked questions to basically draw out thoughts for how the day had gone and how we felt and everything, a little like the Big Brother diary room.

'So, Craig,' Luke said, 'what did you think about Redman's behaviour today?'

'Well,' I said, 'he was a bit out of order on one topic, but...'

'Hang on, stop there,' Luke said. 'Right, what you've got to do, Craig, is, when we say "How's Redman's behaviour today?" or "What did you think of the horse?" you have to answer in a way that rephrases the question so it sounds like you are just talking spontaneously. So, start it with: "Redman's behaviour today was blah, blah, blah..." or "Well, the horse today, I found it..." In fact, on second thoughts, don't say "Well, the horse today..." because you've got to remember you're not answering a question...'

'Well,' I said, 'that's a bit fake, isn't it? You're asking me questions and I'm answering them but you're making it look like I'm volunteering the information.'

'But that helps you, doesn't it?'

'Actually,' I said, 'I accept that it does. But it's not real is it? It's not reality telly.'

'No,' they said, 'It's a documentary.'

'That is bollocks,' I said.

Anyway, a lot of that went on. I was willing to go with it. That same process was used all day when we were asked things and eventually it became an easy thing to do. This was not like reading off an auto cue, though, because I had to run with the theme. Sometimes they would stop me because I was going off the subject and that was fair enough too, though, I imagine they were a little liberal about letting me say what I wanted. In fact, they wanted me to say more. It was crazy. For once in my life I was being encouraged to go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and they could not get enough of it.

'Right, stop there!' they would yell every time I opened my mouth. They would then put all the cameras on me and go, 'Go, go, go!' Then they'd leave us with the cameras for an hour or so, each, me and Kiran separately, so she'd be in the room with just the camera, nobody in the room with her, and this did not just involve sitting down. I walked about and talked. I do not know what Kiran did, because neither of us watched the other, and this was a very good technique for us. I cannot remember what came out. God knows what we said. I am sure it was the most extreme stuff of all. Suddenly we were on our own and there was this big camera on a tripod and we could do whatever we liked with it. I sang. I recited lyrics some of the time. At other times, I just discussed what had happened. Where the lyrics were concerned they warmed to that and again rather than saying, "This isn't relevant..." it did have a lot to do for them with what was going on, and I was quite encouraged. What they used to do was take the film back and when they were in their hotel room, they would have a glimpse of what they had filmed that day, but, usually, the easiest thing to see was the last thing that had happened. So they would treat themselves to a ten or fifteen minute blip before they all crashed out just to have a look. One set of lyrics excited them a lot.

'Oh, we must have more of that,' they said the next day. 'You are, you know, a self-confessed bardic traditionalist. This is fantastic.'

As a consequence I wrote lyrics there, of course I would. Where else would I get the chance to write a poem, and quite a long poem at that, in an environment like that? I expected them to say, "Self publicising poetry isn't what we were after Craig..." but no. Then I wrote this poem while I was there, that they were really excited by. One of the cameramen, Lionel, said, 'Oh, that's really clever that is,' Well, you know you're getting somewhere then. Why would it be assumed that it wouldn't be? Maybe I'm not being stupid enough, maybe if someone like him likes it I'm being too revisionist.

Surrounded by corpses stuck on the walls,
Blind eyes staring at polo balls,
Soulless cadavers, woodland prey,
Ritual slaughter, play for today,
Subservient slave, mass animal grave,
But they've got a chopper so they can look down,
On those with far less in woodland & town,
But up in that “bird”, feeling absurd,
A worrying thought suddenly occurred,
The Vale of York stretched away far below,
Emptied of trees & leafy meadow,
Arid & flat it seemed to me,
A potential desert, not one single tree,
The few that are left are sprinkled about,
The planet's lungs stripped before it could shout,
Enclosed land obsession, Albion's recession,
No leafy vale allowed to prevail,
Nowhere for Robin to hide,
Nowhere for his hoodies to reside,
Roads & flat fields have demystified,
The ravishing beauty of the old countryside,
Bought off land, real estate,
The paymaster's brand,
On his industrial estate,
One thousand one hundred acres are owned,
In a country where some are not properly homed,
Like pigeons astray, frightened & lost,
Sitting duck prey, shot at what cost,
The skies have been cleared of birds, bees & clouds,
The sun beating down on lifeless old shrouds.