One of the key considerations of any Web professional such as myself is the downloading times of files and ensuring that the reader needs to download as few files as possible.
For that reason, 253 makes an additional footnote promise: not only do I promise that all footnotes are likely to be misleading and false. I promise there will be no more than one footnote dedicated to each passenger. It's more than a promise. It's a certainty. The naming convention for the site is "ftnt203.htm" . If I tried to have two footnotes from the same passenger file, only one could be saved under that name. Deathless prose would be lost down the maw of the replacement function.
So, this footnote deals with the following subjects:
Confessions
Confessions of a Window Cleaner really did exist as a film. It was terrible, but not as bad as its sequels. The Confessions films were meant to be similar to the Carry On series, only cheaper and dirtier. They starred Robin Askwith, a beefier version of Peter Noone of Herman's Hermits. I think he was meant to be a kind of identification figure for thuggish beer-swillers. He certainly was ugly enough with a small enough dick.
The absolutely lowest moment of the series was in, I think, Confessions from a Holiday Camp ... the title has been blotted out of my memory. The target of Askwith's unbridled lust was a black woman. The script was so racist that plainly no attractive black actress could be found to stoop so low as to take the part. I seem to remember the camera focussing on a butt in hot pants while Askwith's voice-over went something like... "the jungle rhythms of her body pounded a primitive beat into my brain..." Yes folks, in the 1970s, you could still make films with dialogue like that.
The joke was that the only actress they could find to accept the part was fully Askwith's equal in terms of physical charms. It's hard not to be unkind, but she was not qualified to take the part of an attractive person of either gender. The effect was strange: it was almost touching that ugly, loutish Askwith was drawn to woman who were his match.
Films were the bane of my existence in the early 70s, because I had to see them. I was a trade reviewer; it was unprofessional to leave. It was a privilege, after all, even to be admitted to trade showings. It was a privilege to sit next to Marge Bilbow of Screen International . It was a privilege to listen to the Sight and Sound completists read full credit lists into tape recorders, spelling out all the foreign names; it was a privilege to be next to the deadbeats who managed to talk their way in as journalists, like the mad Czech with staring delighted eyes who couldn't see why people were so shocked by the bugging devices in The Conversation. Or Smelly Derek, someone whose devotion to films meant he forgot to wash, scrape the green from his teeth, or find accommodation. I last saw Smelly sometime in the 1980s, leaning against a wall in Soho. He was plainly staring at the ruin of his life, at the top of the buildings, muttering. He didn't answer when I said hello.
In addition to the superb company, it was the 1970s. No other medium in history has accepted material as bad as the dying national film industries of the 1970s. Spanish Westerns that did not star Clint Eastwood, extraordinarily badly dubbed kung-fu movies, the first vituperatively women-hating slash nasties, increasingly feeble British horror movies or laugh-free versions of TV series like On the Buses , British rock movies like Slade in Flame or anything starring David Essex , low budget American "thrillers" starring Susan George. Such films simply never hit screens any more unless in the straight-to-video market.
It put me off movies for the rest of the 1970s. Except for Robin and Marian , even Sean Connery in the 1970s was having trouble.
Sean Connery
Proof positive of the unrequited love affair the English have for Scotland. Not only was James Bond, the only post World War Two English national film hero, played by a Scot, but research shows that the English trust people with regional accents more and people with Scottish accents most. The person they would most want to hear at the end of a helpline is someone who sounds, specifically, like Sean Connery.
He is of course, a Scots Nationalist, who wants to free his country from the colonial grip of the Sassenachs. That's what the English get called on a good day. The Scot hate and loathe the English. The English dream of hard, tough, straight-talking folk who you would trust you life savings to. Having dreamt of them, they decided that they must be Scottish. The current (1997) success of the Labour Party is due in part to the Scottish accents of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and the regional accents of most of the others. How else can explain that someone like Mo Mowlam has a career in national politics at all?
The Brits don't feel this degree of admiration for the other Celtic peoples. They see the Welsh as little nittering, harp-playing elves with a strong line in double-dealing. They cordially regard the Irish as forelock-tugging peasants who are either at your feet ("Top o dah mornin to yah!") or at your throat (bombs). In return, the Brits are seen as murderous at worst, lying at best, imperialists. At least the feelings are mutual.
The Scots, however, are seen as hard headed, forthright and reliable. All of which shows that racism, even when it says positive things, is still racism.
Which brings me to my next topic.
The Lion King and English accents
I'm not alone at in noting how anyone not very nice in American movies sprouts an English accent. In Disney's The Lion King the nasty, faggy uncle in a family of American lions, is British for no reason other than his decadence. In Pocohontas all the evil Englishmen sound English and the nice ones sound like Mel Gibson. Mel is smart. He's an Aussie, but he now gives interviews as himself with an American accent. Most Americans think he is one too and Mel knows that's how they like it.
The simple fact is that America is another unrequited British love affair. The Brits think Americans like and respect them. They in turn patronize the Yanks, but have made up another race of people to love: open, friendly, polite, energetic and likely to open fire at any moment. Brits fondly imagine that they have a special relationship with America. Most Americans don't think about Britain from one decade to to the next, and have the most peculiar notions about the place. When I migrated to Britain, an American saw I had a issue of Esquire magazine and warned me in all seriousness that I should hold on to it carefully: the British didn't have nice magazines like Esquire and might be driven by lust for glossiness to steal it. Americans moan continually about the British loss of Empire; something that Brits never talk or think about as most of them weren't born when the Empire collapsed and simply want to get on with making money to become as successful as Belgium.
There is another problem. Despite their wealth, their air of sophistication and confidence, American are curiously certain that they will be snubbed by the Brits. They fear that the Brits will be smarter and more erudite than they. This is pretty rich when you compare the educational achievement of the two countries and the relative quality of the newspapers.
Thinking someone is smarter than you is bound to make you dislike them. English voices make Americans feel creepy. Whenever Americans wish to indicate high-toned prejudice, over-wordy pomposity, over-nice precision, they edge towards a British accent. For them the accent is the embodiment of closed and corseted, twisted emotions. They are right of course, about that. But emotional constipation is not the same as villainy.
I felt the same thing when I first arrived in Britain. I was billeted in a medical school and bubbled with pre-emptive loathing of the very smart people in British universities who were bound to snub me. Instead they rapidly became friends or lovers, their response conditioned by the mask of Americaness that I wore. They were disappointed to learn my parents were English. "So you're really just a Brit," said one of them glumly.
All right, spit it out. A lot of Brits have a sexual kink for Americans. They went off me very slightly when they found out I wasn't. See what I mean about positive racism?
The British think they would love to live in America. What the Brits don't know is that there is no freedom in American life. Everything is ruled by the dollar and its logic and there is no escape. Just great movies and great manners and terrible religion to mask the imprisonment, and get people through to the end of their lives.
What Britain is now achieving is the commercial slavery of America, but with no movies, no religion except possibly Islam, and the worst, most sullen manners in the world.
And the people they love least in the world are themselves.