Notting Hill...pig-shit dump by any other name....

August 30^th – I suppose it’s the safety factor that causes it; although there was little of that evident when Divine Brown took front seat. No safety involved then, not even a belt, just a wild fling. BJ and gone…whoa, not so fast there young ‘un…!

In Four Weddings… I actually thought Hugh Grant was OK. It was his first big role and he acquitted himself quite well, playing the bumbling, slightly dazed, atypical English fop. One or two sections irked but, all-in-all, a decent stab at the genre (I bet the whole cast will be so pleased to read my opinion on their work) which had a schmaltzy if proper ending to the tale (did anyone else think Ms. MacDowell was a little miscast?) Then came Notting Hill, where Hugh Grant acquitted himself quite well, playing the bumbling, slightly dazed, atypical English bookseller… Then came Bridget Jones where Hugh Grant acquitted himself quite well, playing the bumbling, slightly dazed, atypical English advertising exec… Then came Love Actually where Hugh Grant acquitted himself quite well, playing the bumbling, slightly dazed, atypical English Prime Minister... It’s that safety thing working. Once you find a character that you can do and the public respond to, you walk in fear of stepping outside of it, outside of the comfort zone where you run the risk of losing the support of your fan-base; what’s called type-casting. Every actor walks in fear of it yet welcomes the work and the safety it brings to their bank account and public persona. No, if you want to branch out then you’re far better to pick up a high-class hooker and a public place in which to park and enter into conjugal relations with her. Good work, Hugh.

What he did to demolish his carefully built personal image however, was reversed by the sudden surge in the des-res appeal of the subject, London borough of one of these films; I refer to that of Notting Hill. Once an area used for brick-works and the storage of pig-shit, it took a racecourse and an influx of writers to make the place better known then finally the production of a predictable movie to create a piece of real estate that attracted the better sort and saw house prices rise significantly, post the movie’s release, this area, now known more famously in the modern day for its carnival each year witnessed a carnival of other sorts kicking off on this day in 1976.

The Notting Hill riots saw black youths clash with police when race relations reached an all-time low in our country. Long before anyone had the courage to admit that racial bigotry was endemic in the police forces of the UK, the random harassment and arrest of black youths at the carnival-proper sparked retaliation on a massive scale as running battles were fought between black youths and the police. The Special Patrol Group (SPG – legal gangs of police thugs now disbanded but still very much a part of the force) inflicted most of the injuries and it was not long after this that riot gear was developed and issued for use in possible riot situations (‘horse-cart-before’ spring to mind) and it was from this outbreak that The Clash wrote their White Riot track which, effectively, called for the white population to take similar action.

With political uncertainty prevalent at the time (Harold Wilson had resigned and ‘Uncle’ Jim Callaghan had taken his place) Edward Heath, following on from two paranoid and inept leaders, imposed a three-day week further dousing Britain into the depths of a recession with levels of general unemployment well past the 1,000,000 mark, and with the black population specifically taking a larger share of the youth unemployment figures, so it was hardly surprising things kicked off. But the call for a white backlash to the largely black and poor-white conditions of the time was largely ignored…until the Poll Tax riots of 1990 that is. Mrs. Thatcher and her divisive policies (the Poll Tax being just one of them) became the fuse that ignited the powder keg under smug whitey’s arse causing him and her to sit up and take notice of just what was being done in their name and to their society…made such a difference, innit?