Part of Saturday night was spent curled up on the sofa watching The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. It is the first time I have managed to catch the film. Deserving of awards, it almost manages to suggest just how mammoth the Roger Lewis book it is taken from actually is. Stephen Hopkins direction manages to make it look beautiful throughout and Geoffrey Rush is outstanding as Sellers. After watching it I thought: ‘Sod Man On The Moon, this is the bloody bar for any comedian bio-pic.’
Of course, the film does not even begin to explain the enigma of Sellers – how such a cruel and selfish brute could blaze with such brilliance. Nor does it even begin to hint at the mind-boggling nature of his life. To try and give even the mildest suggestion of Seller’s strangeness, I have decided to dust off an old entry from my Secrets & Lies book and post it on this blog.
Directly after The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, BBC2 ran Being There, which has led to Mr. Grasso and I sharing thoughts on Chance the Gardener and our prospects of ever writing The True History of the Water Rats novel during our usual email tennis.
Aside from Being There being a classic movie, it has an emotional and creative resonance for me. My Aunt Barbara, the only member of my family who ever believed I would write books, was a huge Peter Sellers fan. When I stayed with her and my Uncle David as a child, she would always make me laugh over cornflakes with her Bluebottle impressions. She was thwarted in her first attempt to take me to see Being There in 1980 due to its ‘I like to watch’ sexual elements getting it an AA certificate. As a wonderfully subversive influence, she could not see what all the fuss was about and persisted in trying to expose me to Sellers’ genius, finally finding a cinema that did not care too much about the niceties of age restriction.
I am not sure how much of the film I understood at the age of nine, but I know it left me with the burning impression that a secret group of men in suits fixed who would be President of the United States and a fool could turn out to be the most important person around. Twenty-five years later, I cannot help but see how those two ideas have had some influence on my published work.
2 comments:
i'm still not sure how much of that film i understand, it's so packed full of symbolism.
sellers was indeed an interesting character. i prefer to just love him for his work, rather than his personal life. if i cared about celebrities' personal lives, i wouldn't like anyone.
I have always been able to separate my interest in Sellers as a strange, monstrous man from any laughter I find in his work.
It may be unique to my experience, but of all the ‘celebrities’ I have interviewed or worked with over the years, I have tended to find it those whose output I have total indifference for I have got on best with at a personal level.
I suspect I would enjoy having another pint of Guinness with Luke Goss more than I would with Luke Haines – despite my near-pathetic adoration of Haine’s music.
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