Throughout our lives things happen to us, good
things, bad things, things. You always think
that you, as an individual, have suffered more than most that is until you meet
someone else and listen to their story. I found myself acting as a sort of letter
writer for many of my neighbours, well; not a sort of letter writer but
actually writing letters for them, creating CV’s, even completing various
forms. One neighbour needed quite a comprehensive
set of forms completing included in which was a brief summary of his life. I couldn’t believe how harrowing it had been
and I knew that in reality, compared to this fellow, I should consider myself
lucky. As he told me his story he did so
with a smile on his face. Last night
something terrible happened to our family, I’m finding it very difficult to
smile at the moment.
It was one of those things where words will not
suffice, just another blow, another wrinkle, another deep scar on the
heart. Irene and I sat quietly with our
own thoughts, text messages and telephone calls flashing between family
members, making sure all were informed, trying to explain that these things happen,
but never being able to say why they happen, but more importantly why they have
to happen to us, and then you feel selfish, because what about my poor son
James and his partner Angie and of course little Sienna Jae who none of us will
now ever meet. Then Irene turned to me
and told me to go and write my blog, because when the time was right it would
be one of the things that would cheer Angie up.
I suppose this is where you look up from
yourself and you see the rest of the world moving about and understand that
life goes on. That no matter how
pointless it all seems, life still goes on.
And that is why I have not just been laughing at myself but encouraging
others to laugh with me. For otherwise wouldn’t
we all be mad. Sometimes events came
along mob handed. As Freddie Starr was
the newest and therefore client I was most focused on, the stories I had been
told about the Liverpool docks were morphing into a fine tale indeed, something
I was really looking forward to getting stuck in to. Then Freddie’s agent contacted Jeffrey and
put the brakes on the project, Freddie Starr was depressed, weren’t we
all. The book would have to be put on
hold but when Freddie was feeling more up to it we could put the wheels back
on.
No problem, I still had the Lily Savage deal,
the Emmerdale deal and the Father Ted deal.
There was also the Chris Eubank project which may have happened if I had
pushed hard enough but truthfully I couldn’t be bothered with the man. The more I studied individual celebrities the
more the mask fell away, the more ordinary and mundane they became. The first writer I studied was Anthony
Burgess, who wrote A Clockwork Orange, his best known novel, although his greatest
novel would have been Earthly Powers.
Burgess was one of the best known English literary figures of the latter
half of the twentieth century which is why I decided to study him and his
work. Apart from churning out sixty plus
novels he composed musical works and wished to be known as a composer rather
than a writer. I began with his first
novel and was going to work my way through all sixty plus of them, learning how
he had progressed and improved as a writer over time. After book five I stopped as I found the only
two themes that ran through his books were false teeth and haemorrhoids. If I could feel like this after only five
books, how was this fellow so popular, why was he regarded as such a great
writer? Surely there couldn’t be social
workers employed in the publishing industry.
Similarly with Paul O Grady and his character
Lily Savage I discovered that he was incapable of producing new material for his
character which is why he allowed Lily Savage to die, claiming that she had been
bricked up in the chimney of a French convent by the Mother Superior. With Chris Eubank, once you got past the pure
buffoonery of his dandyish persona, was blank, empty, someone who might hit you
if you didn’t agree with him. But one
fellow I did admire, as did most of the people in Ireland, Dermot Morgan, the
actor who played the central character of Father Ted, in the television series,
died. He was only forty six years of age. Immediately the Father Ted book was put on
hold, and understandably so. The project
that would have had the most earning potential was the Manchester United
project which was dead in the water, but I could not think of another football
team that I could base the proposed project around. Well; there were plenty, but it would have
been a heartless exercise, a pure money making scheme and I didn’t really fancy
that.
The Emmerdale project was still hanging in
there, well; I thought it was, until Jeffrey telephoned me and said that he had
contacted the fellow at Yorkshire Television who had given my book such a good
review. He had been replaced as Granada Television
had bought a controlling stake in Yorkshire Television and the new person in
charge had decided that the Dingle family, the family I had based the book
around, were to be made more main stream, more drama and less comedy, so a
comedy book would not fit the new direction they were taking the characters
in. Good bye. Like with the events of last night you
immediately realise that there is nothing you can do about them. It’s happened, suck it up, as we used to say
in the armed forces, pain is just God’s little way of showing us we are alive.
I had managed to track down a new client, my
heart wasn’t really in it, but I had been given permission to write twelve adventure
books for characters from the television series Gladiators, an adaptation of
the American format American Gladiators.
London Weekend Television owned the rights to the show and the characters
so it was to be a simple fifty, fifty, split between London Weekend Television
and myself. This was purely a financial exercise
as the participants in the show were already proving that they had no moral
standards with their outrageous sexual antics and drug taking. Everything was agreed so I telephoned Jeffrey
and explained that I needed him to formalise the deal. Jeffrey like myself knew the participants
were not on the ‘A list’ and actually said that he considered them too down
market for me to write for.
As you can imagine there was only one course of
action I could take and that was to sit down with a bottle of whisky and shout
at the Lily Savage television show. I really
didn’t want to watch it as I felt nothing but contempt for Murphy and O Grady. I was pouring either my third or fourth
whisky when Jeffrey telephoned. He had
noticed, as I had, that some of the material from my novels had made its way on
to the television and so had some of my sketches, but low and behold only one
person had been credited with writing the show.
Paul O Grady was now stealing my work.
First thing the following morning I was on the telephone to Well Bred
Productions. Murphy claimed that O Grady
had never seen the books or even the sketches; however I could actually prove
that he had.
Paul O Grady, the housewives favourite, was
actually a liar, a thief and a cheat. I
knew that I could prove that he had actually read my work, but more importantly
I had every telephone conversation on tape.
I was really angry, but I was angry that Paul O Grady had stolen the
food from my children’s mouths. I wasn’t
interested in money, well I was, but it wasn’t the driving factor behind my
reason to write. I wrote because I loved
it and was good at it, to be able to provide a decent lifestyle for my wife and
children would have been a secondary bonus, Paul O Grady had stolen that from me. My first course of action was to work out how
long I had spent writing both of the novels and the television work and present
Well Bred Productions with a bill. I
actually billed them for just under forty thousand pounds, which was the going
rate at that time.
According to Jeffrey all we could now do was
sit back and wait for them to reply.
Like myself Jeffrey didn’t expect them to pay up, this was going to have
to get legal. But I knew that Savage would use the media to claim his
innocence, it was his realm, but I could also try to use the media to destroy
him. At the time there was a show
business gossip columnist, sort of celebrity himself, Matthew Wright, who worked
for the Daily Mirror newspaper. He now
has his own daily topical discussion show which is almost as embarrassingly
awful as the Jeremy Kyle show. I
telephoned Matthew Wright and asked for his help. I didn’t expect to hear him moan about how
everyone always wanted his help, I asked that if I could prove to him that Paul
O Grady was a lying, thieving, cheat would he be interested. He said yes, but only if I could back it up
with a barrister’s letter stating that I was one hundred per cent in the right. I could see that the big boys were getting
their cheque books out; it was how they played the game. I could see that I would have to get myself a
pretty decent team around me, so who did I know that were good at influencing
people? Ah yes, people like Tim Lort and Grahame Duffield, and like barristers
they had been called to a bar many, many, times over too.
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