Low life
A film star writes
Jeffrey Bernard
Ihave been complaining about television programmes for very nearly two years now, since I was banged up almost a prisoner in this flat by my disability. It is not going to get much better — the television I mean since an independent film company has just finished making a documentary about me which will be shown, I think, in the early spring.
One day last summer, an enthusiastic young man called Marcus, who sports a pony tail and a bundle of filth on a lead which he says is his dog, ambled in here and said that he wanted to make a film about me for television. I took no notice, but a couple of months ago he came back with a director and a contract and offered me peanuts to do it. I managed to raise his company to what you might call brazil nuts and we have just finished after about seven days filming. Eisenstein must be turning in his grave.
Unlike those bores I used to bump into frequently in pubs who were fond of saying and telling everybody, 'I've got a tale to tell. If only I could write,' I have nothing more to add to a not very interesting tale that I've been telling week in and week out for some time now. But Marcus, Russell England and Channel 4 think otherwise. It was all rather flattering, I suppose, and it was also something of a bore.
Apart from interviewing me, there are shots of Vera pottering about and I now see her as some sort of Joan Crawford but much nicer than that old bitch. I look for- ward to seeing a shot of Vera putting up some Chinese decorations — a tatty bit of gold paper and some wasted mistletoe which was shot at night from the rooftop of a block opposite me and with just the lights on in my flat and a zoom lens. Shades of Rear Window.
They also filmed an old friend from years ago in St Bernard's Hospital, Bill Haddow, who had the cheek to tell the director that his weekly visits to see me were for him a form of aversion therapy. What he doesn't realise is that I only buzz him in through the front door because he acts as aversion therapy for me, not having had a drink for ten years and looking so disgustingly healthy. They also shot some footage of the fish in my aquarium and my putting on a CD of some Mozart. Insomniacs will do well to watch this riveting slice of the life of a semi-comatose hack.
The signs were there half way through the filming when Marcus fell asleep between takes in my bathroom. His enthu- siasm for the facts and the way of my life have waned considerably, as have his girl- friend's, who is editing the film and whom he brought along here one evening purely socially. He told me that she, Amanda, had said before she met me in this awful flesh that, from what she knew of me, she would most likely fall in love with me. If that was love, perched at the other end of the sofa, looking as anxious as a bomb disposal per- son, then give me bleak detachment. Any- way, she cheered me up no end by telling me that my fish and my sofa look very good. I made a successful effort not to smile since my visiting dentist hasn't replace a tooth he extracted last month so I suppose I look as miserable as any viewer will who can sit through it.
Unfortunately, there were no nice loca- tions of old holiday haunts like Barbados and Bangkok, just a little bit of smoking cigarettes on the hospital landing by the lifts at the Middlesex and a sortie in my wheelchair down the market outside my front door with some of the stallholders being derisory. Not for a split second at any time did I feel anywhere near fulfilling my fantasies about being a star; in fact, the only picture that did keep crossing my mind was that awful portrait of Rock Hud- son that appeared in all the newspapers when he flew home to die. What Marcus should have budgeted for was a make-up artist, and she or he could have worked miracles for him and his dog as well. It will be unfair if Vera doesn't get an award of some sort for her part in the story.
`It's a stunning breakthrough.'
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