Warming Up

Star Wars episode II today. I don’t think I’ve actually ever seen this one before. I reckon that Anakin Skywalker is going to turn out to be a wrong’un. No spoilers please. Seemed to be the worst of the films yet for me. I don’t know why Padme doesn’t run a mile when Anakin tells her about him killing kids, but she seems to go on to let him impregnate her, so she either didn’t hear him properly, hates kids or is racist against whatever those aliens he killed were. Also Anakin says “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” apparently without any irony, when he is chained up and some big dinosaurs have been led into the arena with the sole purpose of eating him and his mates. Yeah, I’d have had a bad feeling about it a bit earlier and I can’t even use the force. I think your force is a bit off mate. Maybe it was all the child murder. It was almost Airplane style timing and could only have been topped if he’d said it when he was in the dinosaur’s mouth.

Frank Bough died today, a man who lost his job for having consensual sex with adults and taking drugs.  It’s hard to work out if he would have weathered the storm if it had happened in the last decade or so, though as often seemed to be the case he suffered because he had such a cosy, family man image on screen. But does that make him any worse than someone who appears rebellious and is thus forgiven. 

I came up with my greatest ever one-liner upon his initial fall from grace (he apparently had a second bite at the cherry, but then was embroiled in another scandal, though I don’t see how it was really any business of ours. “Too many cokes spoil the the Bough.”

I did the joke on stage in front of maybe 40 students at the fortnightly comedy club (one of them tweeted me to remind me about it today, some 32 years later), which was a bit of a waste, as that was professional level quality. And sadly I’d never think of anything as good when I was doing this for my job. I am not sure there was a wry satire programme on that could have used it at the time, but you can imagine Angus Deayton delivering it, before then being led out of the building for his own similar “crimes”.  I was in a position to use the joke at that point, but “too many cokes spoil the Deayton” is not quite as strong. 

I did however do a joke involving him a few years before when talking about the Groucho club (hang out of drug taking celebs - I guess the clues were all there) I said, “I wouldn’t belong to a club that had Angus Deayton as a member.”

Just my typical rebellious attitude towards the generation before ours rather than a real attack on him.

But maybe I have some kind of power where I am able to predict the fall of great showbiz stars through the medium of wry one-liners.

The irony of any individual in showbiz being brought down by drug and sex scandals is pretty rich. It’s weird how one person occasionally gets picked off to be shot down from their perch, whilst the others all carry on and hope that nothing catches up with them. I suppose it’s the kind of hypocrisy that keeps pretty much everyone quiet about their own failings as others have their lives ruined by the revelations about theirs. Being a human being is a weird game of blind-eye turning to yourself. I wonder who decides who will be destroyed and who will be allowed to get away with it. If everyone who had taken drugs or paid for the services of a sex worker had to resign, I wonder how many people would be left with a job. Probably just the sex workers.

The drug and sex trades do seem to be doing remarkable business given the lack of people partaking in them.

RIP anyway Frank. I think we can all agree that you were the most immoral person the BBC ever employed and thank goodness no one turned a blind eye to what you were up to.

Oh my other joke about the curse of the world’s/UK’s oldest person also paid off again today. My jokes are the things that are cursed. I wouldn’t like to be Adolf Hitler once this news comes out.