The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
London Spy: Ben Whishaw, dreamy lover/genius Ed Holcroft and sage Jim Broadbent
Aloysius J. Gleek:
London Spy
Episode 1
"Lullaby"
In an older gay bar in Drury Lane; a drag Geisha lip syncher is miming Takeda Lullaby, a sad Japanese folk song.
Danny (Ben Whishaw):
You excited that you are gonna meet? I should've organized it sooner.
Scottie (Jim Broadbent):
A month or two, I could understand.
I'm not so old I can't remember what it's like to be smitten.
But eight months listening to you declare how wonderful
he is while failing to introduce us seems willful.
Danny:
Sorry.
Alex (Edward Holcroft):
Enters the club.
Danny:
Scottie, this is Alex.
Alex:
As usual, Alex is as wordless as he is polite, shaking hands and sitting down at the table.
Scottie:
Gesturing towards the drag Geisha lip syncher.
What did you make of her? Too much? That doesn't surprise me.
Danny's always preferred his men to be as straight as possible, a tedious form of self-loathing that I've unsuccessfully tried to wean him off.
Danny:
Embarrassedly attempting to fend off the attack
Scottie, I was telling Alex--
Scottie:
I hope you told him this is where we first met?
You must be wondering how an old queer like me ended up friends with a handsome young man like him?
19 years old, he walked through that door.
As lost as a person could be.
I saw him, in his tatty jeans, with his cropped hair, and his puppy dog eyes.
I could guess his sad story without hearing a single word.
I presumed, if I bought him a drink, there wouldn't be a single second when he wasn't hoping for someone better to come along.
What can I say, I'm a soft touch. So I bought him that drink.
And to my surprise, he talked to me for the whole night.
He didn't leave, even when others stalked him.
A small gesture, but it meant a great deal, and we have been friends ever since.
I'm the one he comes to when times are tough.
And they often are.
Poor Danny has a terrible track record for picking the wrong man.
He's an insufferable romantic, one of the last.
Does it fall to me to say--don't break his heart?
Alex:
I could never hurt Danny.
Scottie:
May I ask, as someone who has been witness to the breaking of many a heart--how you can be so sure?
Alex:
Because he is the only friend I have.
Danny:
Wordless, shocked, touched
Scottie:
Touched, pleased, and yet jealous
I'm pleased for you. I'm pleased for you both.
Outside on the street after they have left Scottie
Danny:
Had you two met before?
Alex:
No.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
London Spy
Episode 1
"Lullaby"
Same evening after meeting Scottie, Danny's bedroom
Danny (Ben Whishaw):
You know Scottie asked if you knew how I became his friend?
Alex (Edward Holcroft):
You don't need to tell me.
I love you.
Danny:
And I need you to know.
I was 19. Like he said. It was a bad time.
I left home. I was doin' a lot of drugs.
And one night I was wired.
Not happy. Not high. I was numb.
And I posted an ad online
saying that anyone could come round.
I mean anyone.
My only condition was that they didn't speak.
And people showed up.
I didn't turn them away.
I didn't ask anything of them.
And they must have thought their luck was in, cos' they didn't make a sound.
And the next day, I couldn't stop crying.
And I went to see Scottie.
I didn't know him very well,
I'd only met him a couple of times, but he was the only person I could trust.
And he took me straight to the hospital.
And I was put on a course of PEP, which is emergency medication.
I was on the drugs for 28 days and Scottie looked after me.
And 16 weeks later I had an HIV test...and it was clear.
(cries)
We were friends...
(cries)
I've never done anything like that again.
I swear I was out of my mind.
I'm always safe. Always!
I don't know what happened to me that night.
I look back, I don't recognize that person.
And I've never cheated on you.
I don't want to have any secrets from you.
I never want to have any secrets ever again.
Still later--
Danny:
What are you thinking?
Alex:
Say it again?
Danny:
What are you thinking?
Alex:
Nothing.
Next morning, Danny's Kitchen
Danny:
Let's go away for the weekend.
Alex:
Sure.
(He turns and raises the volume on the radio;
Alex always plays classical music, preferably Bach.)
I have to buy a battery for my laptop, I can't go without replacing it.
Danny:
I understand.
http://www.instagram24.com/tag/londonspylullaby
Aloysius J. Gleek:
London Spy
Episode 1
"Lullaby"
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on January 31, 2016, 01:55:53 pm ---In an older gay bar in Drury Lane; a drag Geisha lip syncher is miming Takeda Lullaby, a sad Japanese folk song.
--- End quote ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takeda_Lullaby
Takeda Lullaby
(Japanese: 竹田の子守唄 or Takeda no komoriuta)
is a popular Japanese cradle song. It originated in Takeda, Fushimi, Kyoto.
This song has long been sung among the people in the burakumin areas of Kyoto and Osaka in a slightly different form for a long time. During the 1960s, it was picked up as a theme song by the Buraku Liberation League, particularly its branch at Takeda.
Burakumin (“hamlet people”) were an outcast community at the bottom of the Japanese social order that had historically been the victim of severe discrimination and ostracism. These communities were often made up of those with occupations considered impure or tainted by death – such as executioners, undertakers, workers in slaughterhouses, butchers or tanners. Professions such as these had severe social stigmas of kegare, or “defilement”, attached to them. A burakumin neighborhood within metropolitan Tokyo was the last to be served by streetcar, and is the site of butcher and leather shops to this day.
In this lullaby a young girl comforts herself with singing about her miserable situation. One day she was forcibly sent away to work for a rich family at a village across the mountain. Every day as she works with a baby on her back she is reminded of her family, looking at the silhouette of the mountains in the direction of her homeland.
In 1969, the folk song singing group Akai Tori made this song popular, and their single record, recorded in 1971, became a million seller in three years. The song has also an additional history that NHK and other major Japanese broadcasting networks refrained from broadcasting it because it is related to the burakumin activities, but this ban was stopped during the 1990s.
English Translation:
I would hate baby-sitting beyond Bon Festival,
The snow begins to fall, and the baby cries.
How can I be happy even when Bon Festival is here?
I don't have nice clothes or a sash to wear.
This child continues to cry and is mean to me.
Every day I grow thinner.
I would quickly quit here and go back
To my parents' home over there,
To my parents' home over there.
(Strange note: for some reason--probably MONEY--the BBC America/AND the Amazon Streaming versions BOTH have removed the vocal track of the Takeda Lullaby during the scene in the club--you can only hear it during the final credits. I realized that the vocal track was missing when I found it in a youtube clip posted before the BBC America premiere--that original British clip has since been deleted. JG)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/12/london-spy-real-life-murder-gareth-williams
The Guardian
London Spy
Opinion
Drama feeds off real-life crime, but has
London Spy gone too far?
Our entertainment is filled with fiction spawned
from tragedy, but writers must respect the real
victims, such as the late MI6 spy Gareth Williams
By Boris Starling
Thursday 12 November 2015
‘The similarities between the real-life Williams and the mysterious character named Alex played by Edward Holcroft are hardly subtle.’
Photograph: WWTV/BBC
The death of Gareth Williams five years ago was always going to attract the attention of fiction writers. It seemed one part John le Carré (he was a GCHQ codebreaker), one part Agatha Christie (his body was found in a padlocked holdall) and one part E.L. James (he’d visited bondage websites not long before his death). The surprise is therefore not that London Spy, which began on BBC2 this week, has used the case as inspiration but that it has taken this long.
Tom Rob Smith, who wrote London Spy, has said it’s “entirely a work of fiction: none of the characters are real”. Maybe not, but the similarities between the real-life Williams and the mysterious character named Alex played by Edward Holcroft are hardly subtle.
Both men were fitness fanatics. Williams was a keen cyclist: the first time we meet Alex, he is sweat-drenched, running along the Thames. Both men were child maths prodigies. Williams took a first from Bangor University aged 17; Alex went to university aged 15. Both men were solitary. Williams’s landlady said he never had anyone back to his Cheltenham flat in the decade he lived there; Alex says he has no close friends. Both men were gay. And both men were found dead in similar conditions. Williams in a holdall, Alex in a trunk – and each time with the heating turned up high, presumably to speed the decomposition process.
All of which begs the question: if you were a relative or friend of Gareth Williams, how would you feel watching it? Probably not too thrilled, in all likelihood. The case is still unsolved, the press picked over the prurient details of it, and now a thinly disguised version of a person you loved is appearing on TV.
But London Spy isn’t sensationalist. Quite the opposite. It places great emphasis on the relationship between Alex and Ben Whishaw’s Danny: two fragile souls seeking a connection to each other, an anchor in a stormy world.
When Danny discovers a sex room in Alex’s flat, the focus is more on his reaction to the betrayal it apparently represented than on it per se (though you can imagine a number of awkward conversations taking place up and down the country. “Is that the murder weapon, dear?” “No, Mum, that’s a butt plug.”)
The truth is, writers are magpies: we take, steal, distort and mould endless things from real life in service of our stories. Over the years I’ve cribbed the autopsy reports of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman for the victims of an Aberdeen serial killer, transposed the case of the child murderer Peter Kuerten from Düsseldorf in 1929 to Moscow in 1992, and included the real-life figures of Rosalind Franklin and Linus Pauling in a novel set in the great smog of London. And so on.
Even the most heinous crimes are not off limits to writers. Many people said in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that it was too horrifying for any fiction writer to ever use, but of course hundreds have done just that. The Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue took the Josef Fritzl case – surely as close to the heart of darkness as most people could imagine – as inspiration for her magnificent Room, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, and has been adapted into a film.
And it was impossible to watch last year’s The Missing, which this newspaper described as “hauntingly brilliant television”, without thinking of Madeleine McCann and the never-ending nightmare of her parents.
A writer has only one real obligation when using real-life cases, and that’s to respect them. Don’t sensationalise; don’t cheapen. Use what those cases say about life and the human condition, about our hopes and fears and dreams and neuroses, to produce something that resonates.
The makers of London Spy may have used the story of Gareth Williams and, even in the narrowest sense of the word, exploited it. But they have not traduced it.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgjx1uUaGDU[/youtube]
Published on Feb 1, 2016
Music: Ain't coming back--LIVE
written, sung by Edward Holcroft who plays Alex in London Spy
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