Enemy Within by Roger Cottrell
I’m starting to get some comments on my blog and so I’d like to acknowledge these, before launching into today’s tirade. Firstly, thanks to Kim Fleet for her interesting comments on how the decline of British crime fiction has been complimented in a similar decline of British comedy. This is both important and true and I’ll come back to it in a minute. I also want to thank my good buddy Stuart Christie down there in Brighton and to plug David Douglas’s important new book on the miners’ strike that Stuart is publishing.
GEORDIES WA’ MENTAL is a realist account of the miners’ strike by a Geordie anarchist that sort of compliments my own book, ENEMY WITHIN – a crime thriller that occupies similar space and territory or at least moves through it. I’m told that David (whom I’ve never to my knowledge met) wants to review ENEMY WITHIN and that of itself is worth a plug. You can look his book up on Stuart’s BRIGHTCOVE site which is on google. Basically, we’re back to the relationship between the realist novels of Alan Sillitoe and the crime thrillers of Ted Lewis (again) with the one being the alter ego to the other. I think we’ve covered this in a previous blog.
For those who don’t know who Stuart Christie is let me introduce you. In the 1960s, when he was a young lad of 18, he was involved in a courageous but not very well thought through plot to assassinate Franco in Spain. Having served actual time in a fascist prison, he returned to the UK just as things were hotting up in 1968. All of this was before my time of course but it is visited in my self publsihed book, HOLLYWOOD BOWL, the ISBN for which is ISBN 978-1-4092-0565-4 You can order this from http@//www/lulu.com/content/2720961 But I digress.
Stuart was framed as a member of the Angry Brigade who also feature in my book as fictionalised characters. As my novel is total fiction, I have the whole Angry Brigade manipulated as part of an Italian style strategy of tension during the Cecil King military coup plot against Harold Wilson which in this novel actually happens. It’s parapolitical street history, OK, and was the reason that Stuart and I came to know each other.
Basically, I sent Stuart a copy of HOLLYWOOD BOWL which he liked. He DID reprimand me for representing several members of the Brigade as middle class hippy flakes (particularly Hillary Creek and Anna Mendelson) and I’ve apologised for this since, particularly to John Barker – another former member of the Brigade. Nonetheless, Stuart liked it enough to commission me to adapt his anarchist memoir , GRANNY MADE ME AN ANARCHIST, published by AK Books in Edinburgh, as a vfeature film. I’ve since written this script and have to say that both Stuart and myself are rather pleased with it.
On Kim’s remarks about comedy, I am in agreement – the last really good comedies I can remember on British TV were RAB C. NESBIT and RED DWARF although I’m a sucker for STILL GAME on BBC2 about those two old boys on a Glasgow housing estate that looks like my ex brother in law’s gaff in Paisley. In the early 1990s, when I’d been fired as a provincial journalist for being a Trotskyist git and wasn’t really cutting the mustard as a freelance, I had a sortee into the world of financial services and for a time (based on this experience) was working on a TV series called SCUMBAG HOLIDAYS with a stand up alternative comic from Worcester called Shane. It never came to anything. The premise was that a dodgy holiday firm was being run by a failed spiv in a provincial West Midlands town whose catch phrase was “there’s money to be made in this game” and who drove around in an MOT failed 1970s Ford Cortina which looked like it had been in too many car chases back when the Sweeney was still being filmed in Dulwich. All his employees are total rejects and losers who’ve only taken the job because they’re under threat of having their giro pulled. The best scene, for me, was when this Jack the lad was trying to sell a dodgy timeshare deal on the street to a well heeled elderly couple in Solihol. Next moment, along comes FASHION CASUALTY COLIN, his drug dealer, armed with a shotgun and demanding money with menaces. Fashion Casualty Colin, I should add, is a white guy in an Afro who was still wearing flares in the early 1990s and mimed to Barry White in his bedroom mirror. I have to admit I think I’m better at thrillers than comedy but then again, I’m trying to get some work on the new MINDER and some of the SCUMBAG HOLIDAY sketches would work in Arthur Daley land.
Final blog tomorrow folks. It’s been fun. x
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MESSAGE FROM ADMIN: I have seen the final blog. I thought he was leading up to saying he’s now a Tory. But nah, he’s not. But then again, he did mention Peter Hitchens in an earlier blog . . .