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Monday
Thanks to marK for (oh, GOD) this article about (oh, no no no no NO!) this.
Maybe we should start an ANTI icons or REAL icon list: my first two nominations:
*Danniella Westbrook's missing septum; *so-haunting CCTV footage of murder victims walking through depopulated 'dead space' 10 minutes before their lonely unobserved End...; *the Rettendon Range Rover full of de-faced Essex 'faces';
The latter links in with marK's thoughts on 'backwater England'... In 1996 I wrote a script for Chris Petit about the events - the social shifts, as well as the drug strafed individuals involved in the 'real' scene - that led up to the Rettendon mini-massacre. It was called Cottonfields (I still love that title, tho I say it myself), and was set on Wimpey show-home culs de sac, industrial estates, container lorry parks, two in the morning motorway Little Chef carparks, Essex satellite town discos, sub-Hut pizza takeaways, so on... the sort of England, as marK sez, that doesn't tend to feature in our heritage-fudge film industry; when we do tackle these criminals, they tend to be poeticised or shot like GQ fashion pages - and it was just this deluge of post- and even sub- Guy Ritchie product that scuppered Cottonfields.
The only place you do see this Otherland England is in dodgy SKY documentaries at one in the morning: Britain's Toughest Pubs 3 or Britain's Roughest Seaside Resorts, etc: a world not of broadsheet columnists, 'must have!' moisturiser and Blackberry addiction, but missing teeth, lowgrade ultraviolence, 5 am Shopping Channel purchases, 10 am cans of 79p SUPERCider, knock-off samurai swords, Third Generation devil dogs and z-list celebrity dogging...
posted by Ian 1/09/2006 01:07:00 PM
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