'You look as if you've been sucking on an out-of date-pickled onion garnished with decaying maggots.'
'I feel perfectly fine actually.' You can tell Martin's a writer, he practises his lines on you as you walk through the door.
'Well remind me to give you a miss when you feel lousy.'
I'd phoned him up to tell him about Tickler. Needless to say he was furious. Two days later he phoned back to say sod it all he was going to Denmark. I said I'd go round to talk things over. He wanted to meet in The George, a street away from him and famous for its Guinness. So we did. It wasn't quite 11.15.
'Bit early, even for you.'
Martin slid a pint of the black stuff towards me. 'Well, you know what Hemingway said: "An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with fools." '
'Present company excepted, I presume.'
He ignored my desire for exemption. 'Here's looking at you kid.' His first gulp annihilated half a pint.
'A woman drove me to drink and I didn't have the decency to thank her,' I said, looking at the glass gingerly.
'W.C. Fields.'
'Never miss a beat do you Martin.'
'But you are a fool Anthony. You wound me up about Tickler and then you tell me forget it.'
'Martin, what can I say? The whole thing was genuine. Until it wasn't.'
I hadn't made a diary entry about this, partly because I was too embarrassed but also, why make an entry about something that didn't happen? Basically Tickler cried off. Temporarily, he insisted. But he'd taken a commission from The Tony Blair Institute, heaven forfend. I'd yet to meet him again in the flesh but we'd had an extended phone call where I had arranged for him to interview Martin for his suitability down at his Dorset estate sometime early September. By which time me and Jerome would be old pals again, as we were when treading the boards together in the 1970s. We would come to some agreement over a preliminary book deal which Kieran would look after and everything in the garden would be lovely. And then he phones Sharon - Sharon for pity's sake, not even me - to tell her he's going to have to put things on hold. Although he's older than me, and I think putting things on hold at my age is tempting fate.
'It's only for six months Martin,' I said, in an effort at amelioration.
'That'll take us into next year. In the meantime, you know, I have to eat.'
'Yeah, but Denmark? It's full of pastries! '
'And all the great Danes are dogs. Boom boom. Now wait for the racist police to come through the door.'
'Technically that should be ethnic-ist police since we're the same race. Half the Vikings invaded Yorkshire and still run pubs up there.'
'Well, no doubt some moron will call you anti-semitic.'
'Writing about the delights of eating a bacon sandwich would make you anti-semitic these days.'
'Well all meat eaters are Nazis.'
'Mention ''The Merchant of Venice'' in student circles and you're anti-semitic. And if you point out, no, Shylock wasn't the merchant and yes, it's supposed to be a comedy you'd get de-platformed and cancelled by every university campus out there.'
'The Tony Blair Institute! Eff eff ess Anthony!' (That's FFS you understand, phonetically. And, yes, we're back with Tickler after a little detour around some of the current insanities of the modern age.) 'Rubbing shoulders with that egomaniac and war criminal makes Tickler about as trustworthy as snake venom in a Glaswegian pomegranate sauce.'
'They don't have pomegranates in Glasgow.'
'Precisely.'
''I think you'll find he's been rubbing shoulders since he entered Parliament with the Blair intake of 1997. And you don't ghost a politician's memoirs because they were trustworthy.'
'Why's Tickler got more appeal than the average lying self serving scumbag squatting as an MP?'
'He was in the Defence Ministry during Iraq for starters.'
'Defence! What a neat euphemism.' Martin's derision was blacker than his Guinness.
'His time there would be worth the price of his memoirs alone.'
'Oh come on, he's not going to tell us anything revealing. Let alone truthful. He's bound by the Official Secrets Act. You'd get more veracity from Baron Munchausen's diary chronicling his pregnancy.'
'Munchausen was a bloke and fictional to boot.'
'You want to be more careful. One, because these days he can identify as whatever he wants to be and two, he could construe being called fictional as offensive.' Martin deposited his empty glass and turned to his second pint. It seems the barman will keep pouring until Martin says stop. That'll be about mid-afternoon when he's on the floor. Still, under the circumstances he's earned his right to rant and I sense we're just warming up.
'We're so bloody frightened of offending anyone.' He brandished his glass at the ceiling as if he was on a Zoom call to the Almighty. 'In a country that claims it has free speech you should have the right to say anything!'
I thought I should give him some support and so, for some inexplicable reason, I too found myself shouting at the ceiling. 'Back in the 1970s it was your duty to offend. You weren't doing your job as a writer if you didn't upset someone.'
Good job I don't have a reputation to worry about anymore. Petitioning the ceiling of a suburban London pub in lieu of some deity wouldn't go down well if reported in the pages of 'The Stage.'
'Unfortunately these days you get arrested for speaking your mind,' Martin continued. 'Did you know the United Kingdom was the birthplace of free speech? You should do, you know everything. Can you believe that? And yet we have far more arrests for social media posts in this country than they do in Russia which has a population of nearly one hundred and fifty million and which the hysteriat (yes I just made that word up) in the West thinks is a dictatorship, so what does that make us?'
No answer from behind the chandelier and its moulding, but then maybe God thought the question was rhetorical. Or maybe the Zoom connection had dropped. So Martin turned to me, the only other two legged creature in the bar, aside from the barman who wasn't interested.
'Now we have a Bill before Parliament which will make it illegal to say things others might find offensive in the workplace. So if I describe someone as Butch and someone else overhears - even if it's not addressed to them - they can complain and have me arrested. I think Jonathan Swift would be astonished to be alive today. His "A Modest Proposal'' wouldn't be seen as satire, it would be considered a good idea! Even so, he'd still be arrested for portraying the people of Lilliput as midgets. That's downright offensive.
'You know what,...' (pint number three) '... if Dostoyevsky were alive today he'd get nicked and probably prosecuted for having Raskolnikov murder the pawnbroker and her sister. Some trans-gender wonk of the thought police would consider it a hate crime or at least "capable of giving offence". There'd be warnings in libraries and the Society of Authors wouldn't do a thing to support the writer because, as an organisation representing authors, it has crawled so far up the backside of Woke (bloody stupid word) you'd need a suction dredger up there to pull it out again, covered in the faecal remains of emasculated literature malabsorbed by the iniquitous digestive system of conformity. And what a hapless rescue it would be, for these organisations now have the bite of a toothless slug and recommend sensitivity readers - sensitivity readers! - to look out for passages in literature that might cause offence. Try travelling back in time and telling Hemmingway he needs a sensitivity reader scrutinisin ‘‘Death in the Afternoon”. He'd have you in the bullring trying to defend your anal chastity from a raving picador endeavouring to ram his lance up that place where the sun never shines. But these days, no, Raskolniokov can't kill the pawnbroker and her sister with an axe. He has to give her a choice of eighty-odd genders which confuses her to death. Meanwhile Sonia wouldn't be a prostitute selflessly selling herself to feed her drunken father, she'd be a primary school teacher altruistically preaching the evils of non-existent climate change to shivering pupils who have walked through hailstorms to get to school as their parents aren't allowed to drive them because we all have to avoid getting poisoned to death by carbon dioxide.'
Martin drained his third pint by way of putting a full stop on his tirade.
'If I didn't know better I would have thought you'd had that prepared.'
'You don't agree with me?' Lifting his fourth pint, Martin looked a little taken aback.
'I agree with the sentiments, though I think your rewrite of ''Crime and Punishment '' needs a little work.'
'Imagine what they would have done to Dickens after he published ‘‘A Christmas Carol''. There's no suggestion in the text that Scrooge was Jewish but it wouldn't matter to these bigots. They'd argue in court that the whole thing was an anti-semitic diatribe and a hate crime which condemned the elegant and unsung virtue of thriftiness. And then Dickens, having done so much for the poor and downtrodden, would be cancelled and drummed out of the Labour Party for betraying his class.'
'You must ask yourself why you carry on sometimes.'
Martin ignored me. 'You know Ginnie Stone was at the BBC last week pitching a new drama series - '
Ginnie's an old mucker of Martin's made somewhat famous - and very financially successful - by a soap she had written set in an experimental school. Martin loathed the drama but had a soft spot for Ginnie having briefly had a fling with her ten years before after Pattie, who had just taken on Martin, introduced them at a party. Ginnie was fifteen years older, had more spare tyres than a Kwik-Fit garage and could drink Martin under the table. Which, in retrospect, was probably the appeal since the carnal element would carry a significant risk of suffocation.
'This nine year old commissioning editor said he thought Ginnie's central family, who are travellers trying to integrate into the community, should be mixed race. Which rather drowns the theme of integration but never mind. So Ginnie sarcastically suggested that maybe, of the children, one should be Asian, one Arabic and one South American. The same parents you understand? The editor said he'd commission a pilot on those grounds! I'm not joking! I mean who are these virtue signalling twats? Then he asked her, in all seriousness, how she was going to work climate change into the storyline. If I didn't need it I'd cut my dick off and stick it down the throats of people like him.'
'Throat singular I presume,'
'You know what I mean.'
I thought about now was the time to discuss the wisdom of him taking a commission in Denmark even though I knew he would say since I'm not his agent anymore it's none of my business.
'Martin - '
'You don't agree with me?'
'Are we in an echo chamber here? I've said I agree with you. Though I draw the line at stuffing my old fella down someone's throat. Well, these days anyway.’
'Bloody commissioning editors. Useless. What are they for? Most of them couldn't produce a fart after a dinner of baked beans and artichokes.'
'Martin, what planet are you on? When was the last time drama at the BBC was radical? Try thirty years back.'
'Guess I came to the party too late. When I was sixteen I desperately wanted to be involved in drama, in the theatre. To explore ideas, to be part of a rebelliousness - '
'Martin when you were sixteen you were in a youth theatre run by a radical who has since been ostracised by the mainstream for being so rebellious. You talk about being cancelled, when was the last time Tony Preston worked?'
Tony Preston, a brilliant young director, ran a radical youth theatre in north London for sixteen to twenty three year olds. It was so popular there was a massive waiting list. Twenty years ago he commissioned a play suggesting HIV didn't cause AIDS. It outraged vested interest groups, particularly a certain element of the gay lobby who had - they know who they are - profited from the official lie. The same lobby who is pushing the official Covid/transgender/climate change narrative. Puts me in mind of the Jewish Gestapo in the Warsaw Ghetto.
'I wanted to be a writer because I had ideas. Drama seems to be the last place I can express them these days. I'd be better off starting a Substack.'
'What's that?'
'A thing on the internet. Some decent radical writing there. Unlike the bloody theatre.'
'Martin, you of all people should know that when repressive forces have taken over the media and TV stations, the press as it once was, they will come for other platforms of expression. The Nazis burnt books and banned jazz. For the best part of eighteen months now we have been subjected to a psy-op battering, aided and abetted by once illustrious organs like The Guardian - now taken over by Gates - to get us to think and behave in a certain way. Gender dysphoria, climate change, BLM, Drag Queen Story Hour are all part of the same playbook. Pattie saw this coming years ago. She knew she was never going to sell some of her writers, unless they changed their perspective. At least for consumption's sake. Radically. Drag Queen Story Hour has been going since 2015 for god's sake, It's not new. So why the big fuss now? What's new is people like you just noticing. It's been going on for years. You've heard of the boiling frog syndrome. Covid is the equivalent of the D-Day landings in the war on freedom. I should know, I was around in the 1970s. You've no idea what a different world it was then. And then came the technocrats.'
'Yeah but what's the end game? What's the purpose?'
'Why are you asking me? You're more of a conspiracy freak than I am. '
'Yes, but I don't understand the appeal of having complete control of everyone and everything. Where's the love, where's the joy?'
'Maybe lizard people don't have the same emotions. I know psychopaths don't. And most world leaders have a little bit of psychopathy.
'I have never said I buy into the lizard people.'
'I don't know then, Martin. You'll have to ask a wiser person than me. Desexualise the human race? Complete control? Transhumanism? I know what's going on, I'm not sure I know why. '
'Since you pretty much agree with all this, why do you put up with me ranting on about it?'
'Because we need people like you to galvanise your generation. In case you hadn't noticed I'm too old to man the barricades anymore.'
'Galvanise my generation? Most of them just put up with it. They don't speak out. I've got actor mates who are outraged by the concept of intimacy coaches. The idea that you've got to get someone in - likely younger than you and with the sexual experience of a celibate caterpillar - to tell a forty something, in the business for over twenty years, where he or she can or can't put his or her wandering hands. FFS!!!!'
I could sympathise with that. When I was acting nothing was sacrosanct, but it felt like a much healthier, less neurotic world back then. If you don't want to be touched then don't be an actor.
'What are we, children?' Martin continued. 'Isn't that something you work out with the director and the actor you're working with? Why do you need a so-called specialist? Some of these self-appointed coaches divide the body into red, orange and green areas. Red being no go. Actors are not bloody traffic lights!'
'How would intimacy coaching work in porn films do you think? ''Having indulged in every sexual conjugation known to humanity on camera little Cruella de Semen was encouraged to object to the use of the speculum in the doctor scene because it violated her intimacy.'' '
But Martin didn't want to indulge my absurdity. He was still on a rant. 'They're treating us like infants in a nursery Anthony! And the infantilisation is deliberate. And my friends just put up with it. They don't push back.'
'It's fear. No-one wants to stand out for fear of losing work. How many in the health service think the vax mandates are a good idea? Or masks? Think about it. Give people a jab which might kill them or lose your job.'
'So don't think about it. It makes life easier.'
'That'll be the rationale. Less than 5% of the French were in the Resistance during World War Two.'
'I'm glad I'm going to Denmark. At least all the bulshit will be in a foreign language I don't understand.'
'So how will you write - ? '
'Because Rob's bilingual Anthony. He'll translate.''
He saw that feeble obstruction coming. Rob was Martin's pal from the same Tony Preston youth theatre twenty years ago who married a Dane and eventually started a production company in Denmark. He's been trying to get Martin to go over for years but had never been in a position to offer him work until now. I still don't think it's a good idea for him to go but since I'm not his agent nor am I offering him any work I don't see how I can persuade him otherwise. I tried another feeble rationale:
'Not sure it's the best move reputation-wise.'
'Probably not. But I've always thought that when my ship comes in I'll be waiting at the airport. '
'Six months out of circulation in the UK though?'
'The world's got smaller Anthony. I can be back in a couple of hours. I'm not Charles Darwin circumnavigating the globe on The Beagle. '
'Where?'
'What do you mean where?'
'Where in Denmark.'
'Copenhagen.'
'Ah, wonderful wonderful.'
'I walked straight into that didn't I?'
'Congratulations. You got the joke.'
'It wasn't funny. Oh yes, I've seen the film. And Danny Kaye you ain't.'
Martin's encyclopaedic knowledge extends to old movies as much as it does to Pythagorean mathematics. Danny Kaye sang the song 'Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen' in the 1950s musical 'Hans Christian Anderson'. And I take exception to the disparaging comparison to young Danny since I've held my own belting out numbers on a West End stage in another lifetime.'
'Is your going to Denmark a way to keep your profile a little lower?' I asked, deliberately stirring the pot in retaliation
'You what?'
'You'll be off the radar so to speak.'
'Why do I need to be off the radar?'
'Things getting too hot for you to handle? In respect of the private research you were doing for Pattie.'
'I wasn't doing any private research.' I sensed I was irritating Martin, like that out-of-reach itch just over the back of your shoulder.
'Oh come on! Pattie said someone was. And methinks you protest too much. Why are you so desperate to interview Jacques Bunot?'
'I'm not anymore.'
'You're in denial Martin, don't play all innocent with me. You denied it so vehemently in La Espanola it must have a ring of truth about it.'
'I was drunk.'
'You're a terrible liar when you're pissed.' I think we're about to have a row.
'You should write thrillers, Full of paranoid spies. Because I have no idea where you get such stupid ideas from. Pattie wasn't murdered, she killed herself. Get off it.'
This is so unlike Martin, who can see a conspiracy in a bowl of cornflakes. But suddenly the affable tone of our exchanges has been superseded by the tone of a clan leader who's stubbed his toe and I sense not to push it. The iron has come down in the theatre.
'I got the stupid ideas from Pamela. Your ex. Via Sharon,' I said somewhat weakly.
'Pamela was just stirring things. I told you.'
'What does ''Eyes Wide Shut'' mean to you Martin?'
'Kubrick's last film. Not his best.'
Martin looked away, apparently disinterested. That was definitely a full stop. I wasn't going to get any further. I didn't want our relationship to descend into acrimony so I threw up my hands in resignation.
'You don't have to protect me from guilt by association Martin. If The Globalists come after me because you're digging down on them and I used to be your agent it's the least I deserve.'
'Drama queen or what? Ant, you're a complete fantasist.'
'Sorry Martin, I let you down. I fought your corner and failed. I wish you well in Denmark. In the meantime, if you're going to keep on denying you were investigating anything for Pattie I'll ask Tanya Parker about ''Eyes Wide Shut.'' She mentioned that Pattie had wanted to talk to her about it.'
'You won't. Not right now anyway.'
'You know Tanya?'
'She's reviewed me a couple of times.'
'Why won't I?'
'Because as of yesterday she's in the Royal Free Hospital - in a coma.'
'What? How do you know?'
'Pamela told me. Tessa Rogers and Tanya used to be an item. '
I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out.
'Just because I don't believe that I, or Pattie as was, or you for that matter, are being targeted by forces unknown to us doesn't mean I can't accept that the government have been trying to force upon us medical interventions which are positively harmful. There's conspiracy theories and then there's conspiracy theories.’
Brilliant! Way to sneak in a meta point: Substack!
So, that whole intimacy coach rant: I see what you did there. :) I’m one hundred percent in agreement.
Thanks for the laughs.