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Important background article: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2012/01/my-interview-on-critical-mass-show.html Since this radio show was recorded I’ve received confirmation that the case against me was centred around my appearance in the national newsprint media, as I always suspected; this was clearly published in the Management’s case dossier. The only thing revealed to me about the “complaint” against me was an email that was like no other I’ve ever seen from a member of the public. I was told that it was anonymous and it simply read: I have reason to believe that Ben Emlyn-Jones, one of your hospital porters is behaving in an unprofessional manner on the internet. I would not like to visit your hospital with this person as a porter in my care, or one of my family. I thought I would bring this to your attention. Thank you. And it contains a brief list of some of my videos that this “person” feels “concerned” by. However in pride of place at the top of the list is a link to the online edition of my interview in the Wales on Sunday. I’ve seen letters of complaint from members of the public before. They're usually long and rambling and tend to be self-referring, like: "I'm not somebody who often makes complaints, but..." or “This badly affected my experience of being X-rayed...” etc. This email is totally different in style: it’s short, factual and uses terminology more commonly used by political and senior administrative officers than outsiders. This very thin paper trail was to be the backbone of my defence case, and unfortunately it was too thin. Yesterday I was discharged from the Hospital Portering Service. I am now a civilian. I was so mentally exhausted last night when I came home that I only had it in me to write a brief notice on the Voice, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2012/01/porter-no-more.html
I met with my shop steward on Thursday evening to make a plan of action and we totally disagreed on what should be done. Lately he has been coming round to seeing things my way. To begin with he was very sceptical of my suspicions and denied that the newspapers had anything to do with what’s happened to me, but since the dossier came out and my prediction was confirmed he's changed his mind. However he still wanted me not to use that to defend myself and instead try to counter the specifics of the allegations; I, on the other hand, thought it best to refuse to discuss the specific allegations and instead focus on why I thought they were a complete charade to disguise the real reason I was in trouble. I don’t blame my shop steward at all; he advised me and I went against him. However if I’d gone along with his course of action I doubt if the results would have been any different. As I said in the radio interview linked above, I know how NHS management works and I recognize the symptoms of bloodlust when I see them. They wanted me out, and they were determined to get me out! They have a number of methods for doing this and many of them were deployed against me at yesterday’s hearing.
The hearing was due to start at 1.30pm and I felt strangely calm and relaxed as I walked the few miles from my home to the hospital yesterday lunchtime. This was odd because the afternoon before I had been very anxious, dreading what was to come the next day like a dentists appointment. I strolled at a leisurely pace and walked through the parkland and wooded areas on my journey, avoiding the quicker and more direct route along the main roads. For some reason that I couldn’t fathom at the time, I kept humming to myself the song Feed the Birds from the musical Mary Poppins, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABc1-6o9cF0 The hearing was held in one of the conference rooms and was presided over by a squad of six officers from the Trust’s central administration Management. It’s important to realize that this “complaint” had originated from outside the hospital; there's a rumour going round that an MP is involved. Therefore neither the Head Porter nor any of her deputies from my own department, my immediate bosses, were allowed anything to do with it. I was charged under the category of “conduct outside work”, in other words they had no problem at all with the quality of my job or anything else that went on while I was on duty; it was instead alleged that what I was saying and doing in my personal life off-duty had a direct and major impact on the Trust’s reputation and ability to perform its designated purpose. This is a highly unusual situation; most disciplinary cases are very straightforward, for instance: a member of staff turns up for work drunk or steals money from a cashbox etc. When I was first suspended I was given a copy of the NHS’ Disciplinary Action Procedure handbook and under the category of “conduct outside work” it only covers suspected criminal activity. For example, if a member of staff were accused of abusing a child that operative would be suspended to protect the children who were patients, which is fair enough. My case was totally different; it was “conduct outside work” but involved no criminal allegation, and so has no precedent in the published policy.
As I took my place at the table I had a definite strategy at hand. Firstly and throughout the meeting, I kept my gaze fixed on the tabletop in front of me and avoided all eye-contact with the presiding officers. I also kept my hands clasped in front of me and sat straight up in my chair. Many officials in Government operations of all kinds are trained in interrogation techniques, such as reading body-language and subliminally influencing the minds of other people. Organizations like Common Purpose are said run courses in it, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2009/06/alternative-view-ii-part-5.html and even TV celebrities like Derren Brown demonstrate it, see: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/derren-brown-mind-control/4od I was concerned that the people in that meeting room with me might be some of them. From the very start I knew that Management had anticipated my defence from reading my submitted statement, and perhaps also by listening to my radio show or watching HPANWO TV, because the chairman said in his introduction: “It may be necessary for me to remind us all to stay focused on the allegations themselves and not deviate onto supposedly related matters”. The Management’s advocate opened their case by repeating what was written in the dossier. The Wales on Sunday article was mentioned only when the “complaint” letter was dictated and not referred to again. The Management advocate’s whole testimony was based on the notion that some of my HPANWO material was "offensive", most notably my films Microchip a Muslim Day, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2010/09/microchip-muslim-day.html , David Icke’s New Book, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2010/05/david-ickes-new-book.html and I'm Thinking about Sex, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/04/im-thinking-about-sex.html There’s no doubt that Management have gone to a lot of expense and effort to build this case against me. They must have set up an entire office for weeks on end to create this file; regular HPANWO-readers will know how many articles and films I’ve made! Despite the 20 billion pounds cut from this year’s NHS budget and staffing levels at an all-time low, the Trust's Management felt that getting rid of me was money and time well spent. How flattering! I remember that this was what happened to Kevin Annett, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/03/kevin-annett-liverpool-lecture-12311.html . This also brings me back to the question of why I was suspended straight away, without any discussion first. For an employer, suspending somebody is very awkward; it generates a lot of paperwork, takes time and costs a lot of money. It’s something you normally would only do when you have to, if for instance one of your staff has committed an act of gross misconduct, like getting drunk on duty, as I said above. I hadn’t done that, so why didn’t they just ask me nicely first to remove the objectionable material? This is not how they normally operate, and this adds to my suspicion. However, my suspension does make sense if you suppose that their motivation was to break me down psychologically. When I was suspended I was told next to nothing about what I’d done wrong and was left for an entire week at home before they contacted me, to lie awake at night and bite my nails. This is a standard technique used by torturers and interrogators. They always lock their victim up alone in a cell for a while first, to let them “stew in their own juice”. So before the interrogation even begins, the victim is thinking: “What have I done!? What are they going to ask me!? What are they going to do to me!?” and so when they finally come for you you’re “softened up”. I suspect Management hoped that when I walked into the investigation meeting a week later I’d be a nicely-compliant nervous wreck. Well I wasn't! It didn’t work! I was offered a deal: To remove the “offensive” material and they'd reconsider my suspension, which I refused. Firstly I had already guessed that this incident was generated by my appearance in the media and so experience says I was doomed anyway; secondly, they were a bit vague about exactly what they wanted removed. It started with just the Butt vid, but then they said they were concerned that I had my uniform on in a few vids. They could have eventually decided everything I’ve ever done was for the chop; and thirdly I know people, like Kevin Annett whom I mentioned above, who have made a stand against the Man when they’ve had far more to lose financially than I do. I’m in a lower-paid job with no mortgage or anything; I’ve even got a very sympathetic landlord who’s going to let me carry on living where I am for “a few months” without paying rent, so what excuse do I have? How could I look Kevin Annett or Tony Farrell in the face and tell them I was too scared to stand up to all this when they weren’t!?
According to Management my film Microchip a Muslim Day is racist which is complete nonsense! It is, I think, a very obvious anti-racist satire; this is what I intended it to be and this is how I think it comes across. My character is smoking a fake cigarette and wearing pink sunglasses! In that entire series Butt is presented a figure of contempt. The theme of the film is to warn people not to be goaded into feeling hostility for Muslims, or other creeds and colours, which is what our media and political leaders seem to want us to do as a standard divide-and-rule tactic. However when I tried to make this point the Management appeared to feign an attitude of forced obtuseness. The chairman said: “What? It’s a comedy, yet it makes a serious political statement? That’s a contradiction.” I then had to explain, not that the film was a satire, but what satire was! I asked the chairman if he’d ever seen the politically satirical film Dr Strangelove and he replied: “that’s not relevant”. This is a phrase that they would repeat again and again; a tactic to confuse my points and twist facts. In fact using these tactics it’s possible to persuade somebody that almost anything anywhere is offensive! Skeptics are trained in the same methods, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2011/11/london-skeptics-in-pub-141111.html . The other films were supposedly considered unsuitable presumably because I’m unclothed in them, but this is equally ridiculous. I’m not any more unclothed than anybody you’d see in any public swimming pool or on the beach. If I had posted HPANWO TV films of myself naked then YouTube would quickly have removed them and given me a stern warning. There are some online video sites that don’t mind members posting videos of themselves naked, indeed some keenly encourage you to do so! But YouTube is definitely not one of them. At any rate, I refused to say this in the meeting. Apart from my discussion over the Butt film, my policy was not to address the allegations; this was the basis of my defence which I had my chance to present next.
There was one point that my shop steward managed to get struck from the record and that was the most hurtful and insulting allegation of all: That I had bullied another member of staff. What had really happened was that I and another member of staff decided to make a comedy video together for our own mutual amusement and post it on HPANWO TV. This person was a very close friend of mine at work (Still is I hope!) and I’d never dream of doing anything to harm him. This person is a grown man in the same age group as myself; however because he suffers from a comparatively minor learning difficulty and is registered as a vulnerable adult my accusers have reduced this completely harmless, enjoyable and innocent project to some kind of “happy-slapping” attack on my part. Anyway, a member of this person’s family contacted me privately and asked me to remove the video in the first week of my suspension, one of the many peculiar coincidences that have struck in the last couple of months.
My shop steward remained in the room although he didn’t speak at all for this session other than to confirm that I was presenting a case that he did not approve of. I said that I was not going to address the allegations directly because there was a fundamental difference between the Management’s view of matter and my own. I didn’t think it would do any good for my case to “play along” with Management, but instead take a step back and base my defence on the bigger picture. As I said above, my shop steward advised me to cooperate with Management by directly addressing the allegations made. If I did this, he said, I would apparently have stood a good chance of being allowed back to normal duty. After that things would probably return to normal and there’d be no reason to suppose that any further complaints would be made against me. I doubt that very much because what has happened to me has happened to several other people; and the outcome of their own disciplinary procedures has been very different. What I strongly suspect would have happened would be that more complaints would soon be made against me, Management would inevitably make more and more demands of me, want more material removed, and have me jump through more hoops generally. The pressure against me would increase until I either couldn’t face it anymore and resigned of my own accord, or got sacked for some other reason. During the investigation meeting back in October I mentioned that I was suspicious that this “complaint” had been received so soon after I had been featured in the national newsprint media and the investigating officer did not reply. Why was this not revealed to me in the investigation meeting? Why were there no references to it in the report other than the pictures? We have an “elephant in the room” situation here. The only real reason I was in trouble was because of me being in the newspapers. As you can see if you take a look, I’ve been running HPANWO for over 5 years and the HPANWO TV channel for nearly as long. I make no secret of this and have many viewers and readers among the hospital’s staff, including managerial grades, yet nobody has ever complained about me before; not once! Nobody has even approached me privately, in a friendly manner, to warn me that I am breaching regulations with my content. Yet now, less than a month after appearing in the newspapers, complaints are flooding in. Am I supposed to believe that this is some kind of bizarre coincidence? Is it also a coincidence that Kevin Annett and some other people I know of have also been harassed when they start speaking out publically in the media about certain subjects, not just given a reprimand or warning, but threatened with losing their career and livelihood!? It seems that there is a hidden policy in place to destroy the careers of people who talk about certain things openly.
The letter of complaint was very strange in tone, as I’ve said above. I can’t help but wonder if this is a genuine letter of complaint from a member of the public or something contrived and fabricated. I realize now I should have seen this coming because I speak out about the same subjects that the other people I refer to do, and they’ve all either been sacked and dragged through the courts or threatened with being sacked and dragged through the courts. These secretly-taboo subjects are, among other things:
1. That children are being abused, and even sometimes murdered, on an institutional level by the state, corporations and Churches.
2. That the attacks on the United States of America on September the 11th 2001 were a false flag military operation carried out by the government itself, rather than the crimes of foreign terrorists.
3. That the Unidentified Flying Objects that are becoming more and more common in the skies above our heads are actually the artefacts of an extraterrestrial civilization, or one that might be “otherworldly” in a different way.
(In my statement underneath all that I wrote: “This list is not exhaustive”. It was a bit of a micky-take and confidence booster because this is a catchphrase Management always likes to use in its documents!)
I added that if the notions on the list above are all “wacko”, “conspiracy theories”, the work of “nut-jobs” etc, then why are our leaders so defensive about them? What I was being accused of here is a Thoughtcrime. I think I’m being persecuted for my beliefs. For example, did the “letter of complaint” include a link to my film Butt’s Winter Wonderland because of Butt’s foul mouth or because the film is a satire against the prevailing theory of man-made climate change? Everything about this case indicated that this is what was happening to me. What is happening here is that people are expected not to express certain viewpoints about certain subjects when off-duty. This is a Thoughtcrime by every definition of the word. I have a completely clean work record and am respected by many of my colleagues, both Portering and civilian. I’ve been running the HPANWO franchise for over 5 years so the question that you should be asking, and any behavioural psychologist will back me up on this, is not: “Does it call into question his ability to perform his duties in the future?” but: “Has it done in the past?” And the answer is an undeniable and resounding “no”. In Devon there’s an MP called Dr Sarah Wollaston who is not only a Member of Parliament with very outspoken anti-establishment views, and who is very critical of current Government NHS policy, but she’s also a practicing GP. I might also add the example of one of the John Radcliffe’s favourite sons and a well-known local character, Dr Evan Harris, until recently another MP and still a man with staunch political views. So you see, if these two people are allowed to be part of an NHS profession and hold political views outside their working hours then so can I. I was always professional and respectful to the patients and other staff. I didn’t preach the subjects I talk about on HPANWO to them when I was on duty. I have never given any cause for complaint in what I do when I’m off-duty before so there’s no reason to think I will do so in the future. The evidence provided in the dossier looks suspiciously like a fabrication and the timing of this incident is beyond what any reasonable person would dismiss as coincidence. For this reason I categorically and emphatically rejected all the allegations made against me.
The chairman listened carefully to me and then replied: “So you don’t want to offer any defence against these allegations?” I answered that this was my defence. He responded: “No, this is not a defence, this is just a reason why you don’t want to make a defence.” I disputed that and the argument went round in circles. Eventually I managed to get Management to respond to my points, but their response was to state that it was not their concern and so not relevent. On the nature of the email they said: “Our job is to investigate complaints made by clients and members of the public. It’s not our place to speculate on whether the letter was written in a particular tone or how long it was or what words it used. All that concerns us is that the complaint was made.” They also dismissed my concerns over the coincidental timing of the “complaint”: “It’s not a part of our duty to ask questions like that. Our duty is to investigate complaints and a complaint has been made. It doesn’t matter when, where or how. It doesn’t matter how it relates to the timing of other events in your personal life.” And so this went on like a stuck record. I suddenly realized that I believed them! These are not the people who want me out of the Hosptial Portering Service; these are the people who were automatically enforcing the will of whoever it was above them who had demanded my removal from the Hospital Portering Service. I doubt if they know any more about the email of “complaint” than I do. They’ve just been told that their superiors want something done and so they do it, with the obedience of soldiers on a parade ground. It is these long, exponentially-increasing networks of administrators and jobsworths that allow a very small number of Elite individuals to impose their will on a vast population. It’s also why this system reacts so brutally against anyone in that chain who doesn’t play their assigned role of obedience; like Kevin, Tony Farrell and me. We are literally fatal to its function.
After this session we took a half-hour break while the panel considered, and then I was called in and the meeting reconvened for the decision. The tone became very formal, like a Crown courtroom with the chairman like a judge. I amused myself by imagining that he had a black cap over his head sentencing me to be hanged. He said that he had given me every attempt available to submit a defence and I had not done so; this is untrue, but, as I said, they refused to accept my defence as a relevant testimony. “You clearly believe that you are the victim of some kind of conspiracy.” He said (“Ha ha!” everybody else thought!). “But we’re not here to listen to a defence based on your beliefs; we are here to consider these allegations based on agreed facts and nothing else; therefore you have not defended yourself at all against these allegations. So therefore my decision is that you are to be deseconded from the company and dismissed from the Oxford University and Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust.” I then realized that what had happened was something I knew all along would happen. All I could do at that point was to make sure that I was discharged with as much dignity as I’d always tried to serve. They asked me if there were any personal belongings in my locker and I told them that I had a brew-kit consisting of some teabags, coffee, powdered milk and sugar; and that I’d like to donate those to the other Porters. When I was asked if there was anything else I'd like to say I replied: “I’d just like to say that if anybody in this room is unhappy with what has taken place here today, and you have any information you think I should know, then please contact me privately in the strictest of confidence.” It was by now almost 5PM, and I was then solemnly escorted to the site entrance from where I walked home.
I don’t feel as sad I thought I would. I think that this experience has taught me that a lot of what I’ve loved about being in Portering has already been lost, and lost a long time before I was called into the Head Porter's office that night last October and suspended. It’s withered slowly over the last few years. A lot of the camaraderie and fun has gone out of the job, and this goes for nursing, medicine and many other NHS professions too. Low pay, more difficult management systems and increasing workload have taken most of the enjoyment out of being in the Health Service. Nowadays people don’t have the time or energy to play; they have to “meet targets” and “deliver services” and “maintain budgets”, and that’s those who are lucky enough to have contracts and are not just seconded from some poxy casual agency. It’s very synchronous that a week or so after I was suspended I heard that the hospital’s Social Club is going to close down in March (See: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/05/st-theos-day-party-2011.html) Estates are withdrawing the lease. I’m frankly surprised that it has lasted this long with the lack of interest in it from the staff. I’ve known people who’ve been at the JR for years and when I mention it they reply: “The Social Club? What’s that?” When I joined the JR the location of the Social Club was an essential part of your basic orientation! Apparently the JRSSC is one of the last social clubs in any NHS hospital in the country. 20 years ago all of Oxford’s four major hospitals along with the JR: the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, the Churchill and the Radcliffe Infirmary had social clubs. This is a very poignant and revealing symptom of the breakdown of community spirit at hospitals. They’ve lost their soul. This is not by accident, it is by deliberate design, but none of it would be possible without the obedient and robotic rubber-stampers like the ones who have just taken Portering away from me. And this is why I have no regrets about what I did.
This is despite the fact that I also face major financial challenges now as my income stops. I have to find a new one, build a new monetary life for myself. But as I said above, my financial problems are minor compared to other people who have stood up against the hideous machine that society has been made into, so I have to follow in their footsteps. I’ve always said on HPANWO that words are no good unless they inspire action. I’ve done an awful lot of waffling on HPANWO these last 5 years! But waffle is all it is unless I’m willing to do something, to model my own life on my knowledge and principles at a practical level. I feel satisfaction for having done that. In fact if I wasn’t willing to do that then everything I’ve ever written or filmed is worthless and I might as well throw it all away. I should try to remain positive about the future; fortune favours the bold, as they say. When I posted my HPANWO Voice notice on Facebook last night somebody replied: “Maybe this is a time to start writing, Ben”, and maybe that’s true. Perhaps I should see this as an opportunity, an adventure. This experience may liberate tremendous creative forces in my life. In a few years time I might look back and think: “I’m glad that happened!”
One thing I have to do is not to give in to what Andy Thomas talks about when he says: “everything is designed to break our spirit”. I must maintain my identity and personal integrity at all costs. Whatever floods wash over me I must not be carried away with them. I must not be tempted into the seductive lair of Conformism. Maybe this was why that song Feed the Birds was going through my head as I walked to the hospital to attend my hearing. The song is about an old woman who sits on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral in London and sells birdseed to people for 2d a bag, hence the lyrics: “Feed the birds. Twopence a bag”. In the scene in the story, the two children whom Mary Poppins cares for are given twopence by their father and are then faced with a choice: Whether to buy a bag of the old lady’s birdseed or invest it in the bank. The following scene has song about investing money in the bank which is a brilliant satire of materialism, “Twopence, frugally invested in the bank...” see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wzTdW5_2vo This illustrates the choice given to the children in the story: follow the Conformist path to materialism or do something more spontaneous, more spiritual, more free-thinking, more compassionate and emotional, more human. I think I now have that choice too and that song popping into my head was my subconscious mind telling me so!
On a final note, I’d like to think all HPANWO-readers, all HPANWO TV-viewers, all HPANWO Forum-members who have supported and consoled me over these past couple of months. And of course I'd like to pay homage to all my Extremely Proud and Dignified Brother and Sister Hospital Porters. It was an honour to serve alongside you and I intend to stay in touch with you all. Nobody can take you away from me!
Latest HPANWO Voice articles: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2012/01/porter-no-more.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2012/01/leicester-secular-society.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-years-day-2012-race-to-line.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-come-woo-woos-never-see-santa-claus.html
Latest HPANWO TV films: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/12/its-now-2012.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/12/its-christmas-day.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/12/christmas-lights.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/12/happy-winter-solstice-2011.html
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Is the world a hologram? This question has become a rather pat truism within the latest alternative paradigm; certainly since the publication of books like Michael Talbot’s Holographic Universe and Tales from the Time Loop by David Icke, the latter of which draws heavily on the former. But is this, if not premature, at least presumptive? What does all that actually mean? Do the people who so often talk about it really know?
Descriptions of this fairly new idea have so far been described better in fictional allegory than scientific books, papers and documentary films. One very good example from cinema is Adrian Lyne’s 1990 chiller Jacob’s Ladder. I first watched this film after seeing it referred to in the excellent book The Spiritual Universe by Fred Alan Wolf. It follows the story of a troubled postman who is being haunted by demons as he makes his way though his everyday life. Mixed in with this are flashbacks to his former life as a soldier in the Vietnam War who is badly injured, and a father to a young boy who gets killed in an accident while riding his bike. As the film progresses it is revealed that the postman was actually killed in Vietnam and that the years of his life since have, it seems, all been a very long and protracted Near-Death-Experience in which his mental landscape formed his outer one. In a scene in which the postman’s friend refers to the 12th century mystical philosopher Meister Eckhart, he explained that the demons the postman perceived were really angels, but because he didn’t understand what they were he saw them as demons. Why is this? Why could one thing be another entirely different thing depending on our state of mind? This somehow struck a chord with me and I searched eagerly for any other information on the subject. Recently I’ve discovered another fictional allegory. It concerns both the work and the life of the writer Dennis Potter. I put the two words together because all of Potter’s best-known work was semi-autobiographical.
Dennis Potter was born in 1935 in Berry Hill, Gloucestershire into a mining family. He began writing in 1965, but never achieved major acclaim until 1986 when the BBC broadcast the serial (What the BBC still rather snobbishly calls a “play”) The Singing Detective. This serial was a huge hit and catapulted Potter into the league of household names. The series was based on the story of a middle aged man who entered hospital to be treated for a bad case of psoriasis, a painful and irritating skin condition that causes sore dermatitis and itchy lesions. The main character was played excellently by Michael Gambon. (The show also contains yet another very negative portrayal of a Hospital Porter which I forgot to mention in this article!: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/10/hospital-porters-in-media.html A young black man who dowdily shunts the main character around whole chewing gum and listening to headphones. See: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/12/dont-tell-em-were-porters.html) During the course of his stay in hospital the character explores the world of his memory, drifting back to his childhood in the Forest of Dean, and also a fantasy world he’s created for himself because he’s a writer. As the title suggests, his principle protagonist is a detective who is also a singer; he wears a trenchcoat and trilby hat making him a cliché Chandleresque private eye. The two mental landscapes are blended, with the effortlessly-apt and ingenious wit and style, with the real world of the character, that is Potter’s hallmark. At times, the different worlds become blurred, with characters in the real world acting out scenes from the main character’s fantasy or past. The narrative is accompanied by period popular music, another recurring feature of Potter's drama. His main character, as always, is somebody just like himself: a man of the same age, profession and with the same thoughts and feelings. Like his character, Potter originates from the Forest of Dean. In this way he is not dissimilar to my friend and fellow writer Jude Calvert-Toulmin, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2010/12/heroine-for-internet-age.html . We see this pattern continue in his subsequent serial Lipstick on Your Collar, which was broadcast in 1993. The story is set in England in 1956, on the verge of the Suez Crisis, and the main character in this series was a young man played by Ewan McGregor who is doing his national service as a Russian translator in a British military intelligence office. Again this matches with Potter’s own youthful experience as a Russian linguistic expert at around the same time; and the imagery of the series inspired me to envisage the “WL lab” in my own novel Evan’s Land: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2010/11/evans-land-online.html . This series also included some revolutionary computer-generated special effects. This was the last of Potter’s work that was produced during his lifetime.
In 1994 Dennis Potter died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 59. True to form, he managed to complete a screenplay before his death, his most brilliant in my view. This was produced after he died in a unique collaborative effort between the BBC and Channel 4. It was a two-part series; the first called Karaoke and its sequel Cold Lazarus. Like all Potter’s work his two last plays are typical of his house style: hardbitten, gothic, surreal and darkly humourous. Potter was described by Alan Bennett and his other peers are rather arrogant and incapable of self-criticism. That’s true! But I sometimes think that a certain amount of arrogance is a good thing in literature. It can drive us to achieve excellence, as we define excellence on our own personal terms and this adds colour, richness and variety to the World of Letters. There are many great artistic geniuses who were arrogant to the point of megalomania, but I bet their work wouldn’t have been half as good if they’d felt the need to pander to “Duh Cwitticks” (I have a lot to say on that subject! See: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2008/06/critics.html). If anything I’d say that most writers are not arrogant enough! They’re too eager to please the fickle readership and compromise their uniqueness to the mediocrats of cultural conformity. Another thing I like about Potter is that he refused to bow to Political Correctness; this brutal regime has blunted the literary and performing arts, especially comedy, for several decades now, and it has and bred a climate of fear that is virtually Orwellian in scale; and it’s about time dramatists stood up to it!
The main character in Karaoke and Cold Lazarus is once again the author personified into the story, a man in his late fifties, emotionally troubled and with many physical health problems, the worst of which is the pancreatic cancer that eventually kills him. Karaoke follows the fortunes of a writer, Daniel Feeld, who is working on a TV production of one of his screenplays and he’s played very well by Albert Finney. Feeld finds himself being surrounded by people, total strangers in pubs, passers-by on the street etc, whom he overhears reciting lines of his play in their ordinary conversation. Feeld is bemused and starts questioning his own sanity. He tries to explain what’s happening to his friends, but they don’t believe him; they say it’s a “coincidence” (That word so beloved of Skepperhood, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2010/08/its-just-coincidence.html) or that he’s imagining things. This element of the story is soon overtaken by Feeld’s quest to protect a young woman, who reminds him of his first love, from a brutal gangster who owns the sleazy bar in which she works. Potter’s typical blend between fantasy and reality means she also resembles Feeld’s character in the TV show he’s involved with. In the final scene, Feeld shoots the gangster dead and then returns to the hospital before the police can catch him. Karaoke ends with the mystery of Feeld’s strange experiences unsolved. It is only when you watch Cold Lazarus that you find out, and this is where Jacob’s Ladder and the Holographic Principle comes in. Cold Lazarus is a cyberpunk-ish dystopian sci-fi drama set in the 23rd Century. It turns out that when Daniel Feeld died all those hundreds of years earlier his friends had his head preserved via cryonics, a subject I wrote about on HPANWO long ago: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/08/cryonics.html A group of scientists led by a character played very enigmatically by Frances de la Tour have achieved the technology to regenerate Feeld’s cryonically-preserved head and tap into the memories stored inside his brain. They watch episodes of Feeld’s life played out before them rather like a TV show. Some of these involve his childhood in the Forest of Dean in the 1930’s, again just like the author. Others are scenes from his adult life, including the time period covered by Karaoke. A couple of the memories are very harrowing, including an incident as a small child where he is sexually-abused by a tramp in the woods. Others are happy memories, like when he met Beth, a girl he falls in love with and who is played by the same actress, and therefore meant to resemble, Sandra, the girl Feeld shelters in Karaoke. Feeld’s memory of his own death involves a classic Near-Death Experience in which he has an Out-of-Body episode and then goes up a tunnel towards a bright light. Then you hear Feeld scream in distress and he is pulled back down the tunnel and soon the truth becomes clear: Feeld is aware of his situation and is attempting to communicate with the scientists; he is suffering extremely badly and he asks that he be allowed to die. “We’re not studying him, we’re torturing him!” is a good line from the serial. In the end the scientists agree and destroy the laboratory and Feeld’s head; this is just before a media mogul manages to get hold of it and broadcast the memories on his TV channel. 
This is where the truth behind the enigma of Karaoke becomes clear and this is why it’s like Jacob’s Ladder. Daniel Feeld’s experiences in Karaoke are actually not real memories, but a world based on his memories, but constructed out of his imagination. The setting of Karaoke is not what it appears to be; it is actually taking place inside Feeld’s frozen head in the Lazarus laboratory in the 23rd Century. The way people keep reciting lines of his play is because they exist purely in Feeld’s imagination. This is exactly the same as the postman in Jacob’s Ladder. The reality of both the postman and Feeld in the two separate films is a mental construct, a very long Near-Death Experience. Both films end with the characters realizing their situation and finally dying for real... But when you examine the themes of these works you have to ask: What is real in the first place? The mind boggles! What if my experience now, sitting in front of a keyboard writing this article, is just taking place inside my mind. I might at this moment actually be a severed head on a laboratory bench in some distant future world. What if the scientists probing these memories I’m experiencing now are just the same, living a constructed life? And so on into infinite regression. This concept has elements that can be found in the very famous film The Matrix. As Morpheus says to Neo: “What is real? If you define “real” as what you can see hear, taste touch or smell then “real” is merely electrical signals from your nerves interpreted by the brain.” According to the physicist Frank Tipler we may well actually all be computer programmes living in a vastly complex virtual reality machine created by super-intelligent beings from the very distant future, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ialY2PgUIKI . The Holographic Principle is one that mainstream physics is only just beginning to come to terms with, but has been discussed by fringe researchers for some time: That everything that makes up reality has a structure that resembles an electronic construct. According to many writers, most recently Anthony Peake, see: http://www.anthonypeake.co.uk/index.php, this can explain phenomena like deja-vu and Synchronicity, something we're all familiar with and I've written about them myself many times. (EG: See my report on Brian Halliwell's speech here: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/10/uk-probe-conference-october-08.html) Recently, especially in the 1990’s, films were produced that explored this concept through fictional allegory, along with scientific books like Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe. Dennis Potter’s Karaoke and Cold Lazarus are two of these fictional allegories, less well known than The Matrix, but deserving of the same attention. Like George Orwell feverishly typing away at 1984 in his lonely Scottish island cottage, Potter left us a taunting and intriguing legacy before he left this Holographic Construct... or did he?
You’ll be glad to know that Karaoke/Cold Lazarus can be watched for free online at Channel 4’s YouTube account. Here’s Karaoke: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzW1CpIq468 and here’s Cold Lazarus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS_BVeMEZJY . (Sorry about all the adverts; it’s the price you pay for free viewing.)
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