Phobias are, by definition, irrational fears, though it would
seem that some are more irrational than others. A fear of heights
on the top of a skyscraper could certainly be deemed rational. A
fear of spiders, especially in the outback of Australia,
doesn’t seem too crazy. Triskaidekaphobia, fear of the
number thirteen, or fear of antique furniture (Billy Bob
Thornton’s personal nightmare), would appear to be a little
farther down the wacky scale. I used to be terrified of sharks.
At the time though this seemed perfectly rational to me, evil
little killing machines that they are, the mockery of my family
told a different story. They weren’t much better though. My mum couldn’t go
within ten feet of a caterpillar and my dad wouldn’t
accompany me on a big wheel when I was a kid. My brother
wasn’t scared of a thing. As I grew up and began to delve into myself a little more, I
learnt the truth behind fears – from phobias to totally
rational terrors. Phobias are, of course, a fear of life
manifested as a fear of death – Woody Allen told me this
himself. But seriously, phobias keep you limited, they keep you
from taking risks. The fear of death keeps you from feeling fully
alive. If you overcome these fears, you feel levels of excitement
in areas you haven’t touched before. Overcoming my fear of
sharks certainly made taking baths a lot more fun. All phobias are the same, they all come from the same fear,
and the way they manifest just demonstrates the level of that
fear. So a phobia that isn’t very restricting, like
Triskaidekaphobia, doesn’t affect a person’s life
significantly, there isn’t much they won’t do.
Agoraphobia, on the other hand, speaks of a much deeper level of
fear, since it thoroughly stops the sufferer from participating
in life. In a sense all fear could be defined as irrational.
Rationality is measured by the degree of correlation between the
internal and external state. So a fear of sharks that stops you
taking a dip in the local swimming pool seems significantly more
irrational than the same fear that makes you think twice before
testing the waters in Brisbane. But the fear is the same, only
the external circumstances have changed. If you were to walk
through a field and see a snake, you’d probably feel a
little scared: your pulse would quicken, you’d remain still,
you might worry about extricating yourself from the situation.
Then, on second glance, you realize it was a rope. Suddenly
everything changes, you’d step over it and keep walking. It is only ever your internal thoughtthat define your fears.
If you never learnt to be scared of anything you wouldn’t
be. Of course it’s quite right, people tell you, to be a
little scared of some things – it’s called being
sensible. But you can still be sensible while realising that fear
– all fear – stems from your own thoughts about life
rather than life itself. Life is straightforward. It will tell
you that if you jump into the lion’s den you’re likely
to get mauled to death. So if you don’t want to die,
don’t do it. That doesn’t mean you need to be scared of
the lions. And since we encounter lions in life about as often as
we encounter sharks, you might find that fears in general are
pretty pointless. And, if you challenge your fearful thoughts
about life, you’ll find you’ve got nothing to fear.ARCHIVE: 2nd week TT 2004 

There are very few things that are seriously wrong with
Britain at the moment. OK, so the weather might be crap, the food
nowhere near as refined, or varied, as continental cooking, and
our standing on the world stage after the war in Iraq might be
lower than an earwig’s jockstrap. However there is hardly
anything that is seriously, grievously, and disturbingly wrong
with this country. In fact, the only thing that gives me serious
cause for concern is a newspaper. The Daily Mail’s reputation is well known. To anyone who
knows anything about the press, the mere name of the paper will
conjure up images of full-page, attention-grabbing headlines, of
lurid tales of celebrity “scandals”, of clumsy
“lifestyle” articles, and, most distressingly, of the
neverending stream of articles telling the reader why immigrants
are a bunch of sweaty, ignorant, thieving, disease-ridden
freeloaders. Barely a day goes past without an article of this
sort wriggling its noxious way into the Mail. If you go into a
newsagent’s today and pick up a copy – don’t buy
it, you’ll only encourage them – I’d be willing to
bet that somewhere inside its pages, either as a news piece, an
editorial, or a column, is an article attacking immigrants.
It’s as inevitable as finding maggots in a dead body, or
finding tossers in the Union. You just can’t get away from
it. What came as a surprise to me was to find out that attitudes
that would clearly offend modern morality, not to mention the
Race Relations Act, were prevalent in the Daily Mail quite some
time ago. Go back to the 20 August 1938, when the Mail declared
“the way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in through
every port of this country is becoming an outrage…a problem
to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed.” Or perhaps
3 February 1900, when the Mail described Jewish immigrants thus:
“When the Relief Committee passed by they hid their gold and
fawned and whined in broken English asking for money for their
train fare.” Or how about the headline they ran just before
the Second World War, “Hoorah for the Blackshirts”, in
praise of Mosley, Mussolini, and Nazi Germany? Today, such reporting would come nowhere near the presses, and
to judge attitudes from the early part of the last century by
modern standards is perhaps not entirely fair. Yet given those
modern sensibilties, which we are entitled to see respected, the
paper’s current stance is clearly unacceptable. When presented with a wave of immigrants that they think pose
a threat to “the British way of life” (even though
British history is itself a history of immigration, rather than
the ancient, staid, traditional history that they would like it
to be) the Mail has always placed itself firmly on the side of
the average, self-respecting, middle class homeowner – the
classic “Middle England” stereotype – and has
attacked the immigrants, whether they be Jewish, Caribbean,
Indian or, more recently, asylum seekers, with a ferocity that is
simultaneously astounding and alarming. Barely controlling their
rage, barely managing to swallow the bile that is oozing between
their lips and onto the page, Mail writers tear into their chosen
target like a famished tiger tearing into a goat. It’s not
pretty to see. So why is this piece about “Phobia”? What’s the
link? Simply this: by constantly attacking foreign immigrants in
this way, the Daily Mail is tapping into the fear of outsiders
that is so powerful in an island nation. The image of foreigners
arriving on this island, a crafty smile on their lips, eager to
make a fast buck for themselves either by begging money for their
train fare from the Relief Committee or by milking the benefits
system, is a powerful one, and it hasn’t changed since the
Mail started using it. People who live on an island are bound to
be wary of outsiders, since foreigners who come from overseas
seem somehow more outlandish than someone simply trotting over a
land boundary. The Daily Mailtaps into this fear and milks it for
all its worth. One way they do this is by setting up basic stereotypes of the
people they tend to deal with. Asylum seekers, for example, are
all devious, grasping, cheats. Tax-paying single mothers are all
hard-working heroes, nobly refusing to bow to reality, stoically
struggling on. Young people all wear baseball caps, hang around
on street corners, steal cars, and mug grannies to raise funds to
pay for their drug habit. Princess Diana was a saintly, flawless
Princess of the People, who was treated horribly by the
stiff-lipped, inbred, fools of the Royal Family. And so on, and
so forth. By constantly referring to this wellthumbed album of one
dimensional, grotesque, stereotypes, the Daily Mail ensures that
their articles can be understood by absolutely everyone because
their aims are so blatantly obvious. The Mail lives in a
pantomime world of heroes, villains and good and evil, except
their world isn’t as funny as a pantomime, nor as logical. As I said at the beginning, the Mail’s reputation is well
known. What concerns me is that it is one of the most popular
newspapers in the country. Its circulation figures for March this
year are disturbing: almost 2.4 million copies a day. That’s
2.4 million people being spoon-fed a one-dimensional, misleading
and poisonous diet of middle- class, knee-jerk xenophobia every
single day. What concerns me even more is that there are 2.4
million people in the country who are willing to believe this
sort of tripe, and willing to pay for the privilege of reading
it. The Daily Mail, clearly, is immensely successful at what it
does: targeting its audience and tapping into the fear that they
feel, which is, after all, one of the most powerful emotions
humans can feel. And unless Middle England has a freakish
collective change of heart and decides that foreigners are
alright after all, we’ll be seeing a lot more of Lynda
Lee-Potter and her poisonous ilk for some time yet.ARCHIVE: 2nd week TT 2004 

How did you get into journalism? Slogged my
way through local papers from the age of 21, sleeping with
anybody who could help me (I was beautiful then, of course) until
I enjoyed overnight success at the age of 47. You can meet anyone living or dead. Who do you chose?
Well, if I had to meet somebody who was dead, I would prefer it
to be somebody who had corpsed at least 150 years ago, because
there would be no chance that they were still reeking of
putrefaction. Oh, I see what you mean; for entirely immoral
reasons Marilyn Monroe before Arthur Miller got to her. How would you advise a woman to respond to the
advances of a potential ‘microwave man’? Hey!
“Potential”? You either are a Microwave Man, or you
aren’t. I would advise her to sleep with people she wanted
to sleep with, and not to hang around waiting for men to make the
running, which is, frankly, an act of craven passivity which sets
back the cause of liberation by decades. What would be the perfect start to a day? The
phone rings. It’s my publisher. Not only does the UK love my
new novel, but it has taken the States by storm. David Letterman
wants me (in a media way), Tom Cruise wants to be me (in a
cinematic way) and Rupert Murdoch, shocked to learn of the meagre
salary I have been receiving from his faceless minions, and
determined to make amends for the years of wage slavery, wants to
court me (in a slacks-and-sensible- shoes way). Is a microwave meal best eaten shared? Hell
no; it’s best not eaten at all. Having said that, it is
pathetically easy to switch on a woman’s caring instincts by
inviting her round for a meal and then dorkishly
“preparing” something for the micro from Tesco’s
Finest range – it’s a short step to a post-nutritional
sympathy shag. Which fruit would best describe you and why? A
bruised peach, because it sums up the roughness of my surface
texture, contrasting so poignantly with my soft, internal
vulnerability. Or possibly an enormous banana (but not as
yellow). Do you ever worry about being too exposed? Hardly:
my body is a mausoleum. All people really want to hear about is
shagging. And you would be surprised by how upset a shaggee can
become when she reads an account in a national newspaper of how
much fun I have just had with a third-party. But hey, as I always
pompously say: invite an artist into your bed and you are bound
to get paint on your sheets. It’s no dejeuner sur
l’herbedown here in the gutter, I can tell you. Last words? Read me in T2, every Friday in
The Times, email me, offer me money and I will mention you in my
upcoming book. Unless you’re a bloke, obviously. Or studying
engineering.ARCHIVE: 2nd week TT 2004 

If asked to name a play by Yasmina Reza, surely every avid
theatregoer would suggest Art, the play that achieved global
success in the last decade of the millennium and cemented
Reza’s reputation as a talented playwright. But her first
theatrical work, written in her native French and only translated
into English after the triumph of Art, is just as intricately
constructed. Director Andrea Ferran has chosen a play which is rarely
performed, yet full of subtlety, and with the help of a competent
cast and an acute sense of the tragic, she has created a
production of unusual humanity. The play is concerned with the responses of two brothers and a
sister to the death of their father, coupled with the
complications developing from the unwelcome presence of Elisa
(Cassie Browne), formerly the mistress of one brother and now in
love with the other. The burial of the corpse has unearthed hidden enmities which
force themselves to the surface despite great efforts to conceal
them. The cast rise admirably to this challenge, presenting a
crowd of characters all unable to express themselves properly to
each other. Edith (Poppy Burton-Morgan), the wistful daughter, sits with
her knees clasped to her as if trying desperately to protect
herself, and her brother Nathan (Alex Baker) represses his inner
turmoil under masculine bravado. The stand-out performance is
that of Tegan Shohet as Julienne, trying to articulate
unutterable emotions in a faltering stammer that is
simultaneously funny and sad. The most poignant aspect of this play is that the
characterisation is instantly recognisable from reality.
Reza’s merciless portrayal of these men and women does not
sentimentalise family life at all. She has been attributed with
saying that “human beings are vile” – and judging
by this play, her insight is horrific and true.ARCHIVE: 2nd week TT 2004 

The difficulty in verbalising emotion, that holy grail of
lovers romantic and refined, to enunciate a feeling so acutely
felt, is evidenced both in the heroic failings of great
literature and in the squalid endeavours of universalising
roses-are-red greetings cards. Sir Tom Stoppard’s great achievement in The Real Thing is
to have isolated something deeply rooted in human psychology:
that, as an exercise, to articulate feelings at their most
profound is not only inevitably futile, but just as unavoidably
insipid. The ‘Real Thing’, be it in relation to love,
truthfulness or the nature of presentation (this play’s
central concerns), or pertaining to a more general strand of
sincerity, is where we arrive when all synthetic filters are
removed, the mundane dilutions of life. These ideas are applied
to a set of relationships revolving around Henry (Andrew
Mortimer), a playwright – it’s one of those: plays
about and within plays, levels of theatricality etc –
confronted with the limitations of his art. His yearning for the
perfect word(s) to express that certain feeling clashes against
such glumly-cogitated obstacles as “Love and being loved is
unliterary” and “I don’t know how to write
love”. Indeed, for Henry, so confused has the boundary become between
“the real thing” and his sophisticated attempts to
express it in words, that an urge to simplify and interpret what
lurks behind the pretence of wit overtakes. However, insecurity and alimony payments oblige him to write
disingenuously, at one point reworking the abominable script of a
political agitator, Brodie (Sam Brown), whose notoriety has
aroused the interest of Annie, Henry’s mistress. Of course,
Stoppard’s trademark verbal legerdemain remains, most
compellingly in the coruscating exchanges between Mortimer, an
actor for whom scowling seems to come as naturally as breathing,
taking the role of Henry with a beleaguered mixture of
retaliatory snarl and sullen, humiliated dismay, revelling
masochistically in the face of an excoriating, emasculating
performance from his wife, the consummately waspish Charlotte
(Caroline Dyott: acid personified). As Annie, Sarah Teacher
tartly evokes the duplicity and exhilaration of an affair in her
transformation from jittery, diffident houseguest to an
emotionally stripped-down and sincere lover. Slightly unsatisfactory, but no fault of this
production’s, are the unwieldy two-year gap between the acts
and the awkward way in which Debbie, Henry’s daughter by
Charlotte, is handled, but these are nits that hardly need
picking. The key here is to reconcile structural intricacies with the
characters’ sentimental concerns without downplaying the
customary high quality of the jokes. Director Olivia Jackson has
struck a fine balance of humour and humanity, and pilots her
aptly-chosen cast through a variety of crisply accomplished
technical challenges. In a 1979 interview, Stoppard said, “Plays are events
rather than texts. They’re written to happen, not to be
read”. Either way, this work still stands scrutiny,
especially when performed with such conspicuous bite and polish.
Don’t let The Real Thing happen without being there to
witness it.ARCHIVE: 2nd week TT 2004 

If the idea of an actor dressed in a tailcoat covered in Jammy
Dodgers intrigues you, then you should go and see Alice. A
must-see for connoiseurs of the weird and the wonderful, this
outdoor performance based on the books by Lewis Carroll is a
faultless piece of theatrical whimsy. The premise is that Alice makes her way across a giant
chessboard meeting various characters in her quest to become
Queen. Although not entirely faithful to the books, the script is
familiar, incorporating well-known characters and events such as
the Mad Hatter and his tea party. Yet it remains fresh enough to
keep even the most devoted Alice disciple guessing throughout. It
should be said that this is no kiddies’ production. They are
welcome, but there is no Disneyesque slice of saccharine. The Mad
Hatter (Iain Drennan) is a perfect mix of menace and black
humour, while Pia Fitzgerald shows her versatility as both the
imposing Red Queen and the frivolous Live Rose. The acting is
uniformly excellent, finding the difficult balance between
childlike innocence and dark comedy (particularly in the case of
Amy Jackson as Alice). The set, in an atmospheric walled garden of Queens College, is
transformed into a fantastic fairyland of sparkling glass
raindrops, twinkling lights and looming plantlife. Clever use of
perspective makes the scene appear much bigger than it actually
is, and reinforces the fantasy element of the play by delineating
the space between the actors and the audience. In short, this
brilliant and original play makes it strongly advisable to take a
trip into Wonderland (and hopefully it won’t rain).ARCHIVE: 2nd week TT 2004 

Take one perennial play of the English tradition, stage it in
the beautiful surroundings of the oldest college in Oxford, and
watch the magic unfold. Nothing could be more of a sure-fire
success than Univ Players’ garden production of An Ideal
Husband, a feast of witty repartee and biting social comment set
in the dizzy heights of upper-class London. It is beautifully
presented, with careful attention to detail and a dazzling array
of period costumes, and enthusiastically performed by a cast made
up of Univ students. Directors Zeynep Kayacan and Naomi Wilkinson have shunned
modernisation in favour of a completely traditional approach,
down to the gloves, hats, canes and classical music. The ladies
are all elegant distaste and archly-raised eyebrows, while they
allow themselves to be escorted by the gentlemen to supper. The
ensemble acting is polished and almost fautless. Nanw Rowlands is
wonderful as a “frightfully plummy” Mabel and Jamie
Rann turns in a first-rate performance as Viscount Goring, while
Lady Markby is played with a fabulously aristocratic tone by the
hilarious Heather Oliver. The whole atmosphere is one of propriety and etiquette, under
which the sordid matters of power and money bubble. Wilde takes
care to remind the audience that scandal is both the requirement
and the destruction of the whole social structure. As Mrs
Cheveley (Rachel Clements) points out, “it is the game of
life as we all have to play it.” This energetic production is packed with laughs, and stands as
unquestionable proof that the Univ Players are a force to be
reckoned with in the world of Oxford drama.ARCHIVE: 2nd week TT 2004 

There’s no doubt about it; John Holmes was big. He made
over 2,000 films during his career and, aided in no small way by
his prodigious appendage (the exact stature of which, Cherwell
cannot divulge) became porn’s first superstar during the
industry’s seventies heyday. Not bad for a skinny guy from
Ohio, with a crap moustache and a dodgy lung. Predictably, though, this fame was fleeting, and the beginning
of the eighties found him washed up. An impressive pharmaceutical
intake took its toll and, as past, present and future disappeared
up his nose, Holmes became increasingly reliant on the wrong kind
of people. James Cox’s film takes up the story of his life here, in
1981, eschewing the dubious past glories to focus instead on the
one-time king of the adult movie world’s involvement in the
brutal murders of four people at a house on Wonderland Avenue. His precise role in the slayings never came to light; whether
an active participant or an unlucky dupe, Holmes was acquitted,
and never revealed the truth. As such, Wonderland employs a Rashomon-esque approach,
exploring the various possibilities by taking separate looks at
conflicting versions of the story, all with the flashy editing
and grungy hues seemingly obligatory for any film depicting
drug-fuelled depravity. It’s not so much gritty as soiled, the world inhabited by
the burntout skin flick star revealed in all its scuzzy glory,
and though we do occasionally see a more human side to the man
– the strange triangle formed by him, his wife and his much
younger girlfriend is one of the most interesting, if
underdeveloped, parts of the story – this comes second to
his portrayal as a cowardly, desperate fuck-up. Wonderland relies to a great extent on Val Kilmer’s
performance, imbuing his seemingly worthless character with
enough faded charm to suggest that there may be varying levels of
truth. The real John Holmes was a mass of contradictions – a
vociferous campaigner for mandatory AIDS testing in his industry,
he nevertheless continued to make films despite learning he had
the disease – so perhaps it’s only right that here we
are left with questions rather than answers, both about events on
Wonderland Avenue and the nature of the man himself. Naïve victim or craven manipulator, it’s difficult to
know, and though this lack of conclusion does leave an empty
feeling, it seems in keeping with the subject that all should
remain largely mysterious.ARCHIVE: 2nd week TT 2004 

Never is a cinematic experience more depressing than when the
mobile phone advert at the beginning of the film is the best
thing about it. Unfortunately Van Helsing was such an experience. This is a $150 million dollar film that isn’t funny,
isn’t scary and isn’t sexy. Even the delectable Hugh
Jackman turns in a rather uninspiring performance. The film opens
with Van Helsing (a comic book super hero out to rid the world of
vampires, werewolves and deranged psychopaths) in a gothic
nineteenth century Paris, fighting an oversized Dr Jeckel who he
finishes off by throwing from the top of Notre Dame. Spectacular?
No, only vaguely amusing. Van Helsing works for The Order, the
self-proclaimed ‘last defence against evil’ who reside
in the Vatican under the direction of the Pope. The Order equip
him with Nineteenth Century versions of James Bond gadgets. He
has his very own Q, a geeky little friar who accompanies him on
his adventures and provides him with such inventive machines as a
gas propelled arrow shooter and explosive balls that stimulate
the heat and light of the sun. To cut straight to the uninspiring chase, Van Helsing finds
himself in Transylvania to fight, you’ve guessed it, the
invincible Dracula. Of course Dracula isn’t really
invincible, it’s just no one knows how to kill him. And of
course Van Helsing finds a way which has something to do with
lightening, Frankenstein’s monster, mutant Dracula babies
and the love of a good woman whose brother happens to be a
werewolf. If that little summary doesn’t put you off, you’re
probably one of those sci-fi aficionados who’ll like this
film no matter how dire it is, and will go and see it regardless.
For the rest of you, I implore you to save your cash for other
activities. For the geeks out there, here is a little more of the
story. Kate Beckinsale is said good woman, a big screen version
of Buffy, clad in leather trousers and a tight bodice with a
flowing main of silky locks to complete the sex-object. Beckinsale is Anna Valerious, the last of the Valerious line
whose job it is to kill Dracula. She has some good attempts but
needs the arrowtouting Van Helsing to close the deal. Cue Dracula
and his posse: Igor, a bunch of dwarf nasties, and his wives who
like to indulge in erotic clinches of the lesbian variety. Anna
and Van discover, horror of horrors, that Dracula intends to
unleash into the world hundreds of thousands of his mutant
babies, no doubt clanging the death knell for mankind. Anna does
her part by getting captured and breathing heavily in her tight
bodice. Van does his part by turning into a Werewolf, killing
Dracula and thus all his mutant babies. The world is safe once again. That is until Van Helsing 2 is
born. Oh, God, please, no.ARCHIVE: 2nd week TT 2004 

Paul Morrison’s first film, 1999’s Solomon and
Gaenor, was a tragedy about an Orthodox Jew’s illicit affair
with a miner’s daughter in the impoverished Welsh valleys of
the 1910s. His second is another period piece but it is a much
more palatable one. Set in 1960, it tells the story of one long
summer in the life of 11-year-old David Wiseman (Sam Smith), a
Jewish second-generation immigrant whose passion for cricket far
outweighs his ability. David’s German-born parents are viewed with suspicion,
but with the arrival of the Jamaican Samuels family next door
they are displaced as the neighbourhood scapegoats – it may
be only 15 years since the end of the war but it is only two
since the Notting Hill Race Riots. Friends encourage David to
ignore his new neighbours, but after Dennis Samuels, (Delroy
Lindo) father of the new family, erects a cricket net, the
usually shy David cannot resist the lure of the game. The story is predictable. David flourishes and is picked for
the cricket team; becomes more confident and more popular until
he thoughtlessly betrays his mentor. Ultimately though, he of
course realises that friendship is more important than athletic
prowess, missing an important fixture to prove his loyalty.
Wondrous Oblivion is saved from cliché however by some wonderful
performances and the quiet privileging of individual
characterisation over emotional histrionics. There are a couple of major movies where cricket games take
place (Joseph Losey’s Accident) and there has been one film
about first-class cricket (Anthony Asquith’s The Final
Test), but there has never been a first-class film about such a
potentially slow sport. Wondrous Oblivion doesn’t break the
cinema’s duck in this area, for while cricket provides the
film’s dominant motif, it is a metaphor for self-respect,
friendship, teamwork and living in amicable rivalry. In its
portrayal of human relationships, it is in a league of its own.ARCHIVE: 2nd week TT 2004