Releasing Wadjda

Wadjda is an 11-year old girl living in a grotty part of Riyadh who chafes under the restrictions of life for females in the ultra-conservative kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where a strict interpretation of religious dogma permeates every aspect of life.  She is friendly with Abdullah, a boy in the neighbourhood, and desperately wants to own a bicycle so that she can beat him in a race.  Doing small deals isn’t going to bring in the cash she needs to buy the new green bike she covets, but then she hears about the Koran-reciting contest at school, the prize money from which would be more than enough to buy her dream machine.  Unfortunately there are two problems with her scheme.  Firstly, the contest requires a lot of memorisation, and the opposition is tough.  Secondly, even if she wins, girls just don’t cycle, so she will face severe opposition if she tries.  Women must be virtuous, and bicycling falls into the category of immodest actions.  Meanwhile Wadjda’s father, disappointed that her mother cannot give him a son, is thinking of taking another wife and is absent for much of the time to show his displeasure at wife number one’s lack of procreative ability.

In a country which forbids to women human rights taken for granted elsewhere, such as to vote or drive, it is impressive that a woman has managed to make a film, especially as she had to obtain permission to do so from the government.  Not that director Haifaa Al Mansour learned her trade in Saudi Arabia.  She had to study film in Australia, and for her film’s outdoor scenes had to direct from a van, watching on a monitor, because of the prohibition on men and women congregating together in public.

Wadjda is the sort of film that Western liberals will coo over, believing that here is a depiction , in a deeply repressive culture, of a positive female role model.  If young Wadjda can follow her dream, there is hope for other women in Saudi Arabia: it won’t always be the bigoted, misogynistic country it is at present, they‘ll think.  Unfortunately that view is somewhat rosy, and Wadjda, and the director who put her adventure on screen, are very much the exceptions that will prove the iron rule.  The achievement is certainly remarkable, but as a piece of social propaganda it will not make a jot of difference to the everyday lives of ordinary Saudi women.  Even if they were able to see it, something that depends on the will of husbands and fathers, how would they relate it to their own lives, and to what extent would the men viewing it consider the power they wield to be unjust and without moral legitimacy?

What is particularly dispiriting is the way in which women are shown to be complicit in their own repression.  Wadjda’s mother, clearly an intelligent woman, is shocked that a friend is working alongside men at the local hospital, and has her face uncovered.  She initially scoffs at Wadjda’s cycling aspiration, and tells her that girls who cycle can’t have babies.  The head teacher at Wadjda’s school, with her sour face, ensures that her charges internalise the restrictive mores of society.  Even Wadjda’s baseball boots are considered transgressive and she is told by the head to wear conventional black shoes.  Wadjda’s response, to colour the white caps with a black felt-tip, is a very minor act of rebelliousness, one that only works by not being noticed.  Yet the boots are seen as emblematic of her defiance of social norms in the English-language poster.  The Italian-language version seems rather more honest in its summation of the film, though pink is impossibly racy even for Saudi girls who, like their elders, stick to regulation black in public.

 What then of Wadjda, and her yearning for independence in a society that prohibits it for women.  By making her pre-pubescent, her actions can be discounted, because what she can get away with would not be acceptable if she were several years older.  Also the film has an easy way out by having her father away from home most of the time, thereby removing him as an authority figure from the house Wadjda shares with her mother.  Waad Mohammed, who plays Wadjda, turns in a fantastic performance, but you wonder how different her life is from that of the character she plays, and how typical is the freedom she enjoyed, given that she was allowed to act in a film at all, compared to her peers.

In real life, if Wadjda carried on in this way she might be expected to be married off as a troublesome daughter (and one of her classmates, not much older, comes to Koran class and says she has been married to a 20-year old man), or even find herself the victim of an ‘honour’ killing.  This is after all the country where a father murdered his daughter for chatting to a man on Facebook, and where a brother shot dead his two sisters for mixing with men to whom they were not related.  Wadjda is a fantasy, a superficially uplifting film that seems to bear little relationship to lives as they are actually lived.

There is a telling moment when Wadjda is looking at her father’s family tree, which is painted on a large piece of board.  There are no women’s names on it because women don’t count so, refusing to be invisible, she writes her name on a piece of paper and pins it on next to her father’s name.  Later she finds that the paper has been torn off and screwed up.  That acts as a metaphor of the invisibility of women in Saudi society.  The film’s concluding shot is of a triumphant Wadjda looking off into the distance.  But it is the same sort of illusory freedom that Antoine experiences on the beach at the end of Les Quatre Cents Coups, and just as Antoine has not escaped, so Wadjda is still a prisoner of her society, and it will surely eventually crush her individualism.  An uplifting ending to a film does not necessarily translate into a happy fulfilled life.

As an example of this illusory freedom, apparently Saudi women can ride bicycles now – but only in restricted recreational areas.  Wadjda’s mother and other local women have to rely on a boorish male driver to get around, both sides well aware of the power he wields over them.  A bicycle is one means of obtaining some autonomy, but not if you can only use it in an area reserved for recreation, and doubtless segregated.  While the Arab Spring has brought radical changes to other countries in the region, on this evidence Saudi Arabia seems remarkably untouched.  Wadjda is not about change, as al Mansour has claimed, it is about stagnation.  There is a reason why the Saudi government allowed it to be made.  They must have thought the subject safe and unthreatening to the status quo, and they were correct.

Much of the press coverage of the film will undoubtedly use the word ‘optimistic’, but I found the experience of watching it deeply pessimistic and depressing, even while amused at Wadjda’s antics.  Al Mansour said in an interview that “I hope it will inspire many girls in Saudi to become filmmakers … That makes me very proud.”  Well that would be good, and one can only hope that her dream is fulfilled and that she herself goes on to make more films about the experience of being a woman in Saudi Arabia.  But she also said, in a chillingly offhand way, “People have contacted me with death threats, but that doesn't matter to me. Everyone in the media business in Saudi receives death threats.”  Wadjda won’t have to get much older before she starts getting death threats too, if she doesn’t mend her ways and remember her modesty.

Archie Roy obituary

 My obituary of Professor Archie Roy appeared in the ‘Necrolog’ section of Fortean Times No 301, May 2013, p.24.  There were the usual minor editorial alterations, but the editor inserted a short section towards the end relating to several of Archie’s activities which he lifted from the Guardian’s obituary.  Their inclusion in FT almost word for word unfortunately made me look like a plagiarist:

Guardian: “He also played the organ, painted and was an adequate amateur magician. His laconic ability as a raconteur and love of poetry also made him a sought-after speaker at Burns suppers.”

FT: “His love of poetry made him a sought-after speaker at Burns suppers.  He played the organ and painted, and was an adequate amateur magician.”

I’m reprinting my FT obituary here as submitted, plus a follow-up letter which appeared two issues later.  I first knew Archie when he was president of the Society for Psychical Research in 1992-5 and we both attended Council meetings.  He was as genial and knowledgeable as the many tributes indicate, and his talks were always thoroughly enjoyable.  The photograph was taken by me at the 2009 SPR conference at Nottingham; Archie is standing on the right.

Archie Roy

Archie Roy made significant contributions to both astronomy and psychical research.  The son of a draughtsman at the Glasgow shipyards, he was educated at Hillhead high school and Glasgow University, obtaining his PhD in 1954.  After initially teaching school science, he joined the university's department of physics and astronomy in 1958 as a lecturer, rising to professor in 1977. He retired in 1989. 

Professionally, he was a distinguished astronomer, an expert on celestial mechanics and astrodynamics, and with an interest in archaeoastronomy.  In the 1960s he worked as a consultant to NASA, helping to calculate trajectories for the Lunar Orbital Program.  He was a member of the International Astronomical Union, which in 1986 named an asteroid after him, 5806 Archieroy, in recognition of his contributions to astronomy.  Among his many achievements, he was a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, the British Interplanetary Society, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

The fascination with space was matched by one with psychical research.  Roy’s interest in the latter began in the 1950s when, as he told it, he was wandering round the old Glasgow University library and came across shelves devoted to psychical research and Spiritualism.  At first dismissive, he glanced at some of the volumes and saw names he recognised, such as William James, Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge.  His curiosity got the better of him and he was hooked.

He joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1973, becoming a frequent contributor to its publications and conferences.  He was President 1992-1995, and afterwards was elected a vice-president.  In 2004 he was awarded the SPR’s rarely-bestowed Myers Memorial Medal in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the field.  In 1987 he founded and was the first president of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research, remaining its honorary president.

Roy’s interests included consciousness research and the entire range of psychical phenomena, but particularly life after death.  While cautious in assessing the evidence, he felt that survival of bodily death was the most parsimonious explanation for it.  He was a valuable member of the SPR’s Survival Research Committee and sat with a number of mediums, including a visit to Scole in Norfolk to examine the remarkable phenomena being reported by Robin and Sandra Foy’s circle.  While there, he had a complex discussion with an apparent discarnate entity about astronomy at a level he thought would have been beyond all but a handful of specialists in the country.

A major initiative in which he was involved was PRISM (Psychical Research Involving Selected Mediums), a rare collaboration between Spiritualists and psychical researchers.  With his long-term collaborator Tricia Robertson he conducted a five-year study analysing mediums’ readings, publishing three papers in the SPR’s Journal.  These were generally well received, though the methodology and statistical analyses were subjected to some criticism.

Roy also investigated haunted houses and poltergeist cases, notably a poltergeist at Maxwell Park, Glasgow, in 1974-5, the handling of which influenced the approach adopted by Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair at Enfield.  These activities led him to be dubbed “Glasgow's ghostbuster”.  Always concerned about ethics, he balanced a desire for knowledge with his duty towards vulnerable witnesses, and he brought keen psychological insight to the dynamics of a situation.  His down-to-earth approach was indicated by his self-deprecating description of himself as a “paranormal plumber” in his efforts to resolve cases.

A prolific and versatile writer, he published about twenty books, some on astronomy, but also six novels, which usually included a paranormal element; more than seventy scientific papers; and many articles.  His books on psychical research, A Sense of Something Strange: Investigations into the Paranormal (1992) and Archives of the Mind (1996) were influential, but his last major work, The Eager Dead (2008), ten years in the writing, was something of a bombshell.

This is a lengthy examination of the famous cross-correspondences produced by a number of mediums, widely separated geographically, in the first decades of the twentieth century.  The method essentially was for each medium to receive, independently, parts of messages from a group of deceased communicators.  Only when the pieces were combined would a message become clear, indicating the survival of the message’s communicator.

But the aim went beyond proving an ability to transmit complex classical allusions.  Roy’s book outlines The Plan, hatched by the alleged communicators to create a new Messiah who would usher in world peace.  The scheme resulted in a child, Henry, born in 1913 to Winifred Coombe Tennant (the medium Mrs. Willett) and Gerald Balfour, both of whom happened to be married to other people.  While Henry’s paternity had been known to some, this was the first time it had been made public.  Roy details the ins and outs of the cross-correspondences (necessarily simplified) and The Plan, maintaining a remarkably non-judgemental tone.

Roy was always happy to discuss his activities and was a welcome media guest, appearing regularly on BBC Scotland television and radio programmes.  A clear and witty speaker, for many years he and Robertson gave evening classes in psychical research at Glasgow University's Department of Adult and Continuing Education.  He possessed an outgoing personality and was a noted raconteur.  His sense of humour can be gauged by his remark that “if I die and I find out I have not survived, I will be very surprised!"  One hopes that he is not in a state of surprise, and is still examining celestial mechanics.

Archibald Edminston Roy BSc, PhD, FRAS, FRSE, FBIS, astronomer and psychical researcher, born Yoker, Glasgow 24 June 1924; died Drumchapel Hospital, Glasgow 27 December, 2012, aged 88.

– O–

After publication of the obituary, I read Poltergeist over Scotland by Geoff Holder, reviewing it for the SPR website.  Geoff had a section on the 1974-5 ‘Maxwell Park’ case, and I was surprised to find that it did not occur there at all, but at Balornock, on the other side of Glasgow.  The following correction was printed in the letters section of FT, No 303, p.71, under the heading ‘Glasgow Polt’:

My obituary of Professor Archie Roy [FT301:24] contains an inadvertent error.  I noted that “Roy also investigated haunted houses and poltergeist cases, notably a poltergeist at Maxwell Park, Glasgow, in 1974-5….”  The Maxwell Park case is described in his book A Sense of Something Strange: Investigations into the Paranormal (Glasgow: Dog and Bone, 1990, pp.210-21).  He had collaborated with Rev Max Magee, and he stated that apart from his and Magee’s, the names of those concerned had been changed.  He did not, however, say that ‘Maxwell Park’ was a pseudonym.  As recently as 2008, in an interview he gave to researcher Michael Tymn, he still referred to “the Maxwell Park case” (though incorrectly dating it to 1972).  (www.aspsi.org/feat/life_after/a073mt-a-Prof_Archie_E_Roy_interview.php).

Archie had indeed altered the location: it was not at Maxwell Park, on the south side of Glasgow, but in Northgate Quadrant, Balornock, on the opposite side of the city.  Geoff Holder covers the case in his recent Poltergeist over Scotland, Stroud: The History Press, 2013, pp.158-66.  He supplies the real location and the participants’ names, and provides a number of references for those wishing to pursue this fascinating case in further detail.

Ivor Mills and the British Telecom Tower Logo

I have been reading about the history of the British Telecom Tower, and this reminds me of one of my favourite anecdotes, of which I have a number, from my time working for British Telecom.  At the beginning of 1984 I joined the about-to-be privatised BT as a junior manager.  My first job was in the 150-strong Corporate Relations Department (CRD), which housed the press office, exhibitions, corporate hospitality and various in-house publications (including the unlovely Telecom Today, inevitably referred to generally as Telecom Toady).  I found myself in CRD Administration, and one of my tasks was to write the minutes for both the weekly departmental meeting of the senior managers, held every Tuesday, and the smaller press cuttings meetings on the other weekdays.  This began before we were all crammed into the spanking new British Telecom Centre in Newgate Street, and I would walk across from our now-demolished office on the corner of Watling Street and New Change to where the nobs were ensconced in rather more comfy quarters in the also now-demolished 2-12 Gresham Street.

The Tuesday meetings were chaired by the Director of Corporate Relations, a rather bland man who was not often to be seen, but the press cuttings meetings were chaired by his deputy, Ivor Mills, a genial and well-regarded figure in the department.  Ivor, often just referred to as ‘DDCR’, had been an ITN newsreader in the 1960s and 70s, and was always ready with an anecdote about his time there, which he clearly looked back on with nostalgia.  I quite enjoyed the press cuttings meetings because I heard a lot of gossip, much of it indiscreet, and it gave me a chance to sit in Ivor’s secretary’s office to write the minutes, which for some reason often took quite a time.

The press office was the hub of the department and was full of characters, a peculiar mixture of old hacks inherited from the Post Office (BT had only emerged as a separate entity from the Post Office in 1981) and tired-looking graduates who always seemed fed up, as if they had come badly down in the world.  The former possessed a surfeit of self-esteem while the latter I always felt possessed a deficit, for which they compensated by looking down on anybody who didn’t work in the press office.  The Senior Broadcast Officer once found himself the subject of a story in Private Eye because he had taken a female journalist from a national paper to lunch where, by her account, he had got drunk, complimented her on her “outstanding attributes”, and ordered an extra bottle of wine on his expense account to take back to the office.  Long liquid lunches were frequent, and the press office, adhering to traditional Fleet Street ways, was often sparsely staffed well into the afternoon.

The senior press officers had extra lines installed at home to deal with urgent enquiries, and they could choose whichever telephone they liked.  The Senior Technical Press Officer said he wanted a hands-free instrument so that he could take calls while preparing vegetables, which raised the question how many journalists he expected to speak to with a knife in one hand and a carrot in the other.  In any case, there was a nice little flat nearby which was set aside for the use of a rota of night-time duty officers to take out-of-hours calls, which I’m sure came in very useful.  It was all a bit of a gravy train, soon to hit the buffers of privatisation.

So what is the link between ex-ITN’s Ivor Mills and the BT Tower?  For quite a long time a helicopter shot of the revolving section at the top of the tower featured in the opening credits of ITN‘s nightly ‘News at Ten’ bulletins, which was excellent free publicity.  Then in 1985, after privatisation, the company decided to add a ‘British Telecom’ logo to the top of the building.  The matter of the suddenly out-of-date News at Ten footage was raised at a meeting and it was suggested that ITN should be asked to reshoot the tower, including the logo.  Ivor said he would get in touch with his contacts to expedite the matter.  There was no doubt among the senior BT executives present that this was a mere formality.  Ivor did his stuff, and ITN redid the opening credits – dropping the tower shot altogether.  So much for DDCR’s influence.  I sat there, as I often did, wondering how these hotshots could justify their salaries and generous share deals yet be so ineffectual.

Later I moved from Admin to CRD’s corporate exhibitions unit, where the travel was fairly frequent and I was able to enjoy some decent meals on expenses myself, so I was no longer involved in press cuttings meetings.  BT Tower had been closed to the public for security reasons in 1980, following the 1971 bombing by either the IRA or the Angry Brigade – opinion is divided on which of them was responsible – but the restaurant section re-opened for corporate functions in the late 1980s, albeit with tight security, including metal detectors.  I went up to the revolving restaurant, renamed the Tower Suite, with my children in 1990, by which time I was working in BT’s International division.  We were given certificates to commemorate the building’s 25^th anniversary, and I am indebted to Keith Ruffles for providing a scan of his copy, showing the tower sporting the classic dot-dash logo.

BT Tower Silver Anniversary Certificate

Ivor sadly died in 1996 at the early age of 66, and his obituary in the Independent was written by John Egan, another CRD senior manager who knew him well.  Egan acknowledged Ivor’s bonhomie, but paid him rather a backhanded compliment by starting with: “Ivor Mills in his prime was a good-looking fellow.”  And past his prime, John?  Ivor is buried in Highgate Cemetery, and his marker bears the appropriate, if slightly cryptic, inscription:

IVOR MILLS

Journalist, Broadcaster,

Musician

1929-1996

Happy memories

of lunch and laughter

Farewell Old Bush

 

Update 17 January 2021:

It’s 35 years since I had to deal with this motley crew so there seems little point withholding their names, and I present them here for the benefit of future historians tracking the misfortunes of BT through the 1980s.  Supposedly all these people were journalists: they certainly occupied a large room referred to without irony as the press office, surveyed like a princeling from one end by Senior Press Officer Richard Czartoryski, but it would have been hard to imagine the bulk of them surviving the cut and thrust of the real world.

The editor of Telecom Today and the riveting BT Gazette (official notices and job adverts, a publication I scanned eagerly each week, and not for the notices) was the amiable Ted Dutton.  You just knew he had started as a cub reporter on a provincial paper 25 years before and this was his big break in the industry.

The Senior Technical Press Officer who thought up the stupid reason for having a hands-free telephone was the self-important Derek Willson (‘that’s with two lls’).  He seemed to know a lot less than did his deputy Andy Emmerson, a nice chap who actually liked the subject, and who, post-BT, went on to write books about telephones and other aspects of technology.

The role of the Senior Broadcast Officer wasn’t actually broadcasting but arranging interviews on TV and radio, and trying to make sure they said nice things about BT, one of those hope-over-experience things which made no difference whatsoever.  As the job title suggests, he had a deputy, and as with the technical side it was the deputy, Peter Clarke, who did most of the actual work, writing literate press releases.

The Senior Broadcast Officer who endeared himself to the female journalist so much she shopped him to Private Eye was Terry Doughty, a jowly man who always looked like he’d just rolled in after a heavy night on the town.  When his name was published in the Eye he, to employ a very apt phrase, didn’t have a leg to stand on, yet the fallout was probably at most a quiet chat with Ivor Mills and a request to be more careful in future.  Terry thought it was all rather funny, but then for these time-servers it was a bit of an old boys’ club and, based on the evidence, clubbability was prized more highly than talent.

 

Update 25 November 2023:

A full decade after sharing my memories of vintage British Telecom Corporate Relations, I was contacted by someone who had also worked in CRD, after I left so we never met.  We did, however, know some of the same people.  He reminded me of another Doughty remark in the Private Eye article which I’d forgotten – he invited the journalist with the outstanding attributes to ‘sit on my face later.’  My informant added that Doughty was finally sacked after allegedly commenting on the size of Michael Grade’s secretary’s chest to her face.  Presumably having to deal with Grade’s ire (and Grade was influential, so it was a serious issue), and perhaps tired of his antics generally, the BT big guns decided enough was enough.  And who could blame them.

So what of his post-BT career?  Here I’m fairly sure someone was pulling my correspondent’s leg, as he claimed Doughty went on to work first for the Salvation Army and then at a girls’ school.  It seems hard to believe that either would employ him, though I can imagine him enjoying being surrounded by nubile young ladies.  He would have had to keep his mouth shut, something I doubt would have been easy for him.  But the teetotal Salvation Army?  It seems highly unlikely, but it would be hilarious if he did.

Doughty was not alone in being careless.  I was told another senior CRD manager, whom I’ll refrain from naming as he was one of the few I actually liked, was caught out by a tabloid, probably the Sunday People, meriting the headline “’Bollocks to BT’, says boozy phone chief.”  It seems we were in agreement holding that opinion, but one does detect a theme.  Were they all alcoholics?  I remember working late once and going into Ivor’s office where I found him and his heads of division sitting around chatting, glass in hand.  The room reeked of booze.  I expect what passes for BT’s corporate relations department these days is a more sober place with fewer ‘characters’, thank goodness.

 

Update 26 October 2024

My reminiscences about BT’s Corporate Relations have elicited a further email from someone who worked in hospitality at the BT Tower and remembers the old days, though I don’t believe we met.  My correspondent adds bits of information that are new to me and help to round out the portrait of a long-gone era.

Unsurprisingly, Terry Doughty would invite her to come round and try his ‘casting couch’, though one assumes this was more a running joke than in expectation of success.  Apparently a drinks trolley would arrive in the press office during the late morning, which I didn’t know as by then I had written my press cuttings minutes and departed to do some actual work.  It’s no wonder BT’s media relations weren’t particularly effective.

The anecdote which really amused me involved Ivor Mills at the Tower.  Descending in the lift, he would get the occupants into a huddle and say loudly in his best BBC newsreader’s delivery, “All those who aren’t poofters tap dance,” upon which everyone would tap dance, or at least attempt some kind of approximation, until the lift reached the ground floor.  The extraversion and political incorrectness sum up those Big Bang, big braces times, and Ivor’s personality, beautifully.

My informant may possibly have helped to solve the small mystery of the words “Farewell Old Bush.”  I had wondered if it was him saying goodbye to his favourite pub, but that seemed unlikely.  Ivor was, I learn, particularly fond of Bushmills whiskey.  The cemetery administrators frowning on overt references to alcohol, could it be the inscription was a smuggled reference to something that gave Ivor joy, and hinting at the regret of losing such a valued drinking companion?  Who knows.

 

The Gold Ring Scam - How Not to Do It

The famous gold ring

In January 2013 I visited London for a three-day conference at University College London.  It didn’t begin until 11am on the Saturday morning, so I briefly visited the Wellcome Collection to see their exhibition on death.  Afterwards I was ambling along Euston Road, my mind on what I had seen, when I vaguely noticed a man walking in the opposite direction.  It was still quiet, traffic light, and we were the only pedestrians on that stretch of pavement.  As he got close, he stooped and picked up something.  With an exclamation that shook me from my reverie he straightened and showed me what was between his fingers: a chunky gold ring.

I stopped and he said something like “Look what I‘ve found!”  His accent was heavy, Eastern European.  I made some non-committal remark, slightly on my guard, ready to carry on walking.  He tried the ring on his finger but it did not seem to fit, demonstrating that it was no use to him.  Still holding the ring he said in fractured English that he was a tourist and did not know what to do with it, so would I take it.  I didn’t know what to do with it either, but said I would hand it in at a police station.  I was already wishing I hadn’t stopped because I had no idea where the nearest police station was, and it was going to be a problem finding the time to hand in lost property.

He gave me the ring and it felt solid and heavy, a signet rather than the wedding ring I had first thought it.  Putting it in my pocket I started off again, thinking he was nice for not having kept his find, which he could so easily have done.  I had only got a couple of yards when he was back next to me, gesturing to his mouth and saying repeatedly “you give me money for food”.  I still couldn‘t make out if this was a con because for that to have worked he would have needed to somehow create a feeling of obligation on my part.  He hadn’t done that because I had told him I was going to hand in the ring.  All he had done so far was to inconvenience me.

There was no reason why I should hand over money to a random person in the street simply because he asked for it, and this seemed extremely odd behaviour for a tourist, so I said no.  I started to walk away again, when he became slightly agitated, walking along beside me and saying over and over, “you give me money”.  I kept saying no, more and more firmly, and we walked on like this for a few more yards, the volume between us steadily rising.

Becoming increasingly anxious, he started pushing me towards the buildings as I tried to get away from him.  This made me annoyed and I told him to go away.  At this point he started saying “give me back my ring, give me back my ring”.  Thoroughly irritated by what was clearly a con, I pretended to be confused.  “But it isn’t your ring, you found it on the pavement.”  “It is my ring,” he kept replying, then he pulled out a large bunch of identical rings from his pocket.  “It is my ring, is my job.”

Now he was pushing me as I tried to walk, and I was being sandwiched into the front of a building.  He was a small chap so I didn’t feel threatened physically, but I was concerned he might try to pick my pocket.  I told him to go away in very strong terms, and he jumped back, looking shocked, perhaps actually fearing violence from me. At least it cleared some space between us.  I had a thought.

“Are you legal?” I asked him, and when he looked puzzled I said slowly, “Are you here legally?”  At this he stepped backwards a few paces.  This was a winning strategy.  “I know,” I said, “let’s find a policeman and sort this out.”  At the word “policeman” he set off at a very brisk pace in the direction I had come.  I carried on my way, one rather tacky, and worthless, gold ring the better, wondering at the man’s incompetence.

I learned afterwards that this is a common trick that seemingly originated in Paris, mostly run by Romanians who initially migrated here for the 2012 Olympic Games.  The conventional method is to create a sense of conspiracy by the ‘finder’ offering the ring for sale at a price that would be extremely good, say £20, if the ring were actually gold and worth something.  The moral slope is a shallow one, sharing something apparently lost rather than stolen, so it can be easier to reel in the victim.  Many of those conned curiously seem more amused than angry by the experience.

There is this alternative procedure which I experienced, but it seems less reliable as the scammer has already handed over the ring before asking for something, though it appeals to someone’s good nature, requesting a quid pro quo, in a way a cash transaction does not.  It seems that most people who realise it is a trick simply hand the ring back, perhaps more concerned about a confrontation than I was, so it is generally a low-risk activity for the scammer.  Possibly the rationale for this variant technique is that most victims will intend to pocket the ring, which does create a sense of obligation the confidence tricksters can exploit.  In that case, I suppose you can’t really complain if they succeed.

The Imitation Game, Alan Turing, and the Cynicism of Hollywood

Some time ago I reviewed a novel called The Holmes Affair, by Graham Moore.  I was not impressed by Moore’s effort, and at the end of the review expressed my concern that he had written a speculative script about Alan Turing called The Imitation Game which, on the evidence of The Holmes Affair, in particular his inability to convey the nuances of English life, would be as authentic about Turing as the 2000 film U-571 was about the capture of an Enigma cipher machine (i.e. not at all). Moore sold his Imitation Game script to Warner Bros for a seven-figure sum, and Leo DiCaprio was pencilled in as the lead.  That bizarre piece of miscasting has been rectified, with Benedict Cumberbatch now set to play Turing, and Keira Knightley as his, well, his love interest.  Norwegian director Morten Tyldum, an odd choice it would seem judging by his CV, is set to direct.

Based on other roles Cumberbatch has played – Stephen Hawking, William Pitt the Younger, Vincent van Gogh, Joseph Hooker etc – he should have no trouble making Turing a believable, and sympathetic, character.  But that still leaves the script, and the suspicion that Moore just isn’t the man to trust with a convincing depiction of England in the 1940s and 50s, what it was like to be a homosexual at that time in general, and what it was like to be Alan Turing in particular.

My fears were re-aroused by an article in the Sunday Times, 23 June 2013, written by the paper’s arts editor, Richard Brooks (‘Enigma of Keira as Code Breaker’s Lover’).  According to the piece, Turing’s biographer Andrew Hodges has attacked the script “for exaggerating a love affair and making a fictional connection to a notorious spy.”  The script was supposed to be based on Hodges book Alan Turing: The Enigma, but given Hodges’ comments, the word ‘loosely’ should be added.  The probability increases that my initial misgivings are not going to be allayed.

The two main criticisms Hodges makes are that the filmmakers have exaggerated the strength of the relationship Turing had with Joan Clarke, his Bletchley Park colleague and briefly his fiancée, than is warranted by the facts; and that they have invented a relationship with another Bletchley employee, intelligence officer John Cairncross, later exposed as the ‘fifth man’ in the Cambridge spy ring.  There is no evidence that Turing even knew Cairncross because Bletchley projects were rigidly compartmentalised and Hodges argues that Cairncross has been included in the script merely “to make it more like a thriller”: perhaps a bit like the 2001 film Enigma.

What about Turing as a man who spent a lot of time at his desk?  Hodges’ allegation is that the script fails by “showing virtually nothing of Turing’s extraordinary skills as a scientist and computer designer.”  I suppose you could just shrug and say, “Hell, that’s Hollywood,” but surely Turing deserves better.  With much the same thought, Hodges wrote to Moore, whom Brooks correctly refers to as “a feature movie novice”, with these worries.  All he got back, he says, was an assurance that Turing would be shown doing marathon running and interacting a bit more with colleagues: “This would make him less wimpish and nerdish,” Hodges concludes.  Let’s hope he’s making some decent money out of the process of being disillusioned.

So what did the film’s producer Teddy Schwarzmann, speaking from New York, have to say to Brooks about these charges?  Firstly, the film is “a drama not a piece of entertainment.”  Say that again Teddy, it’s not going to be entertaining?  Presumably he only means it’s not going to look like a Michael Bay film, for which we should definitely be grateful.  Then Teddy says, “We don’t want to fictionalise events but there are some creative liberties”, which I think means they are going to fictionalise events.  Perhaps sensing a little scepticism emanating from the other end of his phone line, he continues: “When we come over [to England], we are also going to get in touch with some other experts on that period.  We know how very important Turing is to you over there.”  That is good to know, if somewhat patronising, though the experts he has in mind will probably be there to make sure the telephones are of the right period rather than to tell Teddy that the script is nonsense if that turns out to be the case.

Hugh Whitemore’s superb 1986 play Breaking the Code didn’t need to make Turing’s story into a thriller, or distort him out of recognition.  It focuses on Turing in a quiet and persuasive way, and gives the character based on Joan Clarke just the right emphasis in his life.  It would be nice if Moore could use it as a model, but it is unlikely at this late stage; Schwarzmann told Brooks that “we start filming in the UK very soon.”  If Hodges is correct in claiming that the producers are trying to move into thriller territory, then they will be open to the charge of a disrespectful distortion of Turing’s life in the pursuit of boffo box office.

It is a puzzle why Cumberbatch would want to have anything to do with this.  Perhaps in his enthusiasm to inhabit another interesting character he has overlooked any deficiencies he saw in the script.  Or perhaps he thought he could exert some leverage to improve it.  Unfortunately it looks like the problems run too deep, a matter of vision rather than emphasis, and will not be improvable by a quick rewrite.  Given the roles Cumberbatch has played in the past, I’m sure his Turing will be great, but the danger is that his performance will be a jewel in a dung heap.

Update: 18 December 2014

Having now seen the film, I can safely say that it bears no relationship to a dung heap whatsoever.  It must have helped that Warner Bros dropped out when DiCaprio lost interest, and after falling into the hands of the Weinstein Company The Imitation Game is a workmanlike if rather stolid treatment of Turing shown in three time periods: school at Sherborne (an outstanding performance by Alex Lawther looking much younger than his years), his time at Bletchley Park, which is the heart of the film, and the last wretched period of his life in Manchester.

Benedict Cumberbatch of course shines even though, or should that be because, he plays Turing as being some way along the autism spectrum.  The film has received a fair amount of criticism for its inaccuracies and distortions, but somebody as complex – downright cerebral – as Turing has to be translated into an audience-friendly format, so far-reaching simplification of the facts is to be expected, and some spurious tension injected to keep it all ticking along.  It doesn’t always come off if the viewer has some knowledge of the subject, and the sub-Frankenstein motif, Turing trying to recreate his lost love Christopher Morcom as a machine intelligence, seems particularly misplaced.

Reservations about massaging history aside, it’s not a terrible effort overall, and better than advance word suggested.  Which leads one to suspect that while Graham Moore is credited as sole author of the screenplay (and executive producer), other hands were involved in its development as it is not the hash that one might have expected on the strength of The Holmes Affair.  Andrew Hodges’ book is also prominent in the credits (with that all-important caveat ‘based on’ to let the film off the hook of scholarly accuracy).

So in hindsight, was Hodges mollified by the way his very chunky biography was adapted into a crowd-pleasing movie?  I thought not on 17 August 2014 when my wife and I heard him give a dreadfully poor rehashing of his thirty-year old book at Bletchley Park in which he fidgeted constantly as he spoke and conducted a losing battle with PowerPoint. (Fortunately we had attended a lecture given by James Grime at Cambridge’s Centre for Mathematical Sciences the previous month, ‘Alan Turing and the Enigma Machine’, which not only lucidly explained Turing’s life and work, with brilliant AV support, but included a demonstration of the Enigma machine owned by Simon Singh.)

James Grime and Simon Singh's Enigma cipher machine

During the question and answer session that followed Hodges’ turgid presentation my wife asked him for his opinion on the forthcoming film, bearing in mind what he had said in the Sunday Times.  He was dismissive of the question and declined to be drawn, flatly refusing to offer a view and blandly stating that we should wait and see after it was released.  When she politely asked again, dissatisfied by his evasiveness, he just blanked her, an astonishing act of discourtesy.  I can see his point though.  He has made a lot of money out of the film, both from rights and selling more copies of his book, freshly reissued only two years after the last one, the 2012 ‘Centenary Edition’, with yet another new preface slapped on to freshen it up, so it is understandable that having bitten the hand that fed him once, he was loath to do it again.  But the fact that he could not bring himself to say nice things about the film implied that he had not changed his views, only learned discretion.

From the finished film it is clear that Hodges’ concerns were partially misplaced.  Keira Knightley was certainly present but Joan Clarke’s relationship with Turing was not exaggerated, nor was Turing’s homosexuality downplayed, and while Cairncross is still there to give proceedings a little zest, it would take more than that to make The Imitation Game resemble a thriller.  The scene where Turing discovers that Cairncross is a spy and Cairncross immediately blackmails him into silence by threatening to expose his homosexuality has legitimately created some upset as it suggests that Turing would have colluded in treason, but Turing does eventually tell Stewart Menzies, the chief of MI6, only to discover that British Intelligence knows about Cairncross already, so his initial reticence doesn’t really matter.

As to Hodges accusation that the script showed ‘virtually nothing of Turing’s extraordinary skills as a scientist and computer designer’, I think it is fair to say that Cumberbatch did convey Turing’s remarkable abilities as best he could within a script that had to appeal to a mass audience, while unfortunately being guilty of straying into clichéd mad boffin territory that has to combine a trade-off of unusual intellectual talent with marked personality defects.  Finally, Hodges said in the Sunday Times that when he wrote to Moore he was told that we would see Turing running marathons and interacting with colleagues, which would ‘make him less wimpish and nerdish.’ We see Turing run a couple of times, though just around fields, and of course he interacts with colleagues, the initial friction with them and their growing respect and support being a key development of the plot, so he certainly isn’t wimpish.  But nerdish?  Of course he is:  He’s Alan Turing!

Contrary to producer Teddy Schwarzmann’s preposterous claim that the film would be ‘a drama not a piece of entertainment’, it is entertaining if not always particularly dramatic.  It’s not the disgrace that Hodges and I both feared it would be from Moore’s novel and the early drafts of the screenplay that Hodges saw, even if it’s not quite the tribute that Turing deserves either.  Against the odds Cumberbatch has I think adequately conveyed the brilliance and the tragedy of Turing’s character.  The flaws that exist lie firmly with the script, which is guilty of failing to trust the audience’s intelligence.

Update: 24 February 2015

It would seem that my reservations about Graham Moore’s script were not shared by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the awards ceremony held on Sunday, 22 February 2015.  To my surprise, far from considering it flawed they thought highly enough of Moore’s work to award it the Oscar for best adapted screenplay.  The predictions beforehand certainly did not deem it a clear front-runner and its success may have had something to do with the vigour of the Weinstein promotional campaign, after The Imitation Game was overshadowed by The Theory of Everything at the BAFTAs, than with any inherent virtues of the script itself.

Still, Moore gave a heartfelt acceptance speech which was a big hit, and he came over as genuinely nice.  I think he was lucky as there may have been some horse-trading, giving The Imitation Game the best adapted screenplay award as consolation for director Morten Tyldum losing to Alejandro González Iñárritu, and of course Benedict Cumberbatch losing out to Eddie Redmayne in the best actor category.  It will be interesting to see how Moore’s career develops; after this success he may want to steer clear of novels in favour of screenplays, which will be no bad thing.