Back in Highgate after an impromptu mini holiday in Bruges, and feeling much better.

I’d woken up on Wednesday morning, grumpy and ill from a headachey virus that’s apparently doing the rounds, and wondered what it might be like to just run away and leave the country for a spell. I had moments like this all the time while on the dole.

This time, I could actually afford it. Couldn’t face a plane with the headache. Had to be a stylish and Decadent location reachable by Eurostar.

Been to Paris before, but not Bruges. Always wanted to go there after reading those books by Georges Rodenbach: ‘Bruges-la-morte’, ‘The Bells Of Bruges’, and ‘Bruges 3 – This Time It’s Personal.’

Then there’s the recent Colin Farrell movie about two gangsters escaping there: ‘In Bruges’. It’s got everything you could possibly want from a movie: comedy, morality and extreme violence.

I’m also aware – after the event – that Bruges is where Stephen Fry ran off to when he had his mid 90s nervous breakdown. And I’ve just found it was the setting for ‘The Nun’s Story’, that Audrey Hepburn film that always seems to be on TV at lunchtime.

So by 3pm I was sipping champagne with free refills on the Eurostar (Leisure Class wasn’t much more than Standard). By tea-time I was in a 60% off four star hotel room in Bruges, courtesy of one of those ‘we find you the cheapest deal’ websites.

So: Bruges. Cobbled streets, medieval brick houses, Gothic churches, canals and bridges, bicycles, every other shop either selling chocolates or Mr Farrell’s ‘gay beers’, one Tintin shop, one Phial Of Holy Blood, and one enormous tower with a belfry, The Belfort, which plays a pivotal role in the Farrell film.

I spent most of the three days trying to think just what The Belfort reminded me of. One of the Two Towers in the Lord of the Rings? Not quite.

Then it hit me. It looks like one of those rotating gun-like industrial machines that puts buttons onto clothes. A massive, sinister, Gothic button machine.

Just occurred to me that I may not have mentioned I’m DJ-ing at The Beautiful & Damned tonight.

Well, I am. Boogaloo, 312 Archway Road, near Highgate tube. Live acts and Dj-ing from 8.30pm till after midnight. £3 entry. Come along. Dress up. Drink. Dance.

It’s a bit like the club in ‘Slaves Of Freedom’ from Rutland Weekend Television. With slightly more people.

I’ll be airing Brigitte Bardot’s ‘Everybody Loves My Baby’ along with the usual showtuney dizziness.

‘Anger is the most corrosive of the emotions in its ability to increase heart strain. Avoid contact with irritating people; instead, write them a letter, then tear it up before sending it.’ – Dr Graham Jackson, cardiologist, 1998. As quoted in Matthew Engel’s ‘Extracts from the Red Notebooks.’

Sound advice, but it does need updating. I’d add: ‘And don’t put your words in an email or online…’ All that’s then achieved is adding to the amount of petty irritation in the world. I’ve been all too guilty of it myself.

So I’ve imposed a new rule on my day – 1 hour online maximum – usually the first hour after waking up. That’s plenty to clear emails, answer the ones that need answering, skim-read the online words of selected others, then switch off and do the things I actually want to do.

In my case, my internet connection is dependent on a USB stick, as the built-in wireless on my main laptop is broken. I could get the machine fixed, but I rather like being able to say (aloud) ‘Enough! Basta! Get OFF the internet!’, rip the USB wireless stick out of its socket and hurl it into a far corner. There – internet off. The computer becomes a typewriter, and not an entertainment centre. A tool of creation and contribution, rather than a thief of whole days in the cause of passive spectating and giving permanent life to petty vexations. How dismal to think you might be outlived by some casual moan you made on a message board, one bored and unguarded hour in 2002, and that it might haunt you to the grave and beyond. ‘Trivia longa, vita brevis’.

***

Monday last week – to Cad & The Dandy in Hanover Square, Mayfair, to be measured for a new suit. I also order a new waistcoat and white shirt – both tailored. A specially made shirt does seem an indulgence beyond indulgences, but it was always on my list of ‘One Day…’ things.

I love the thought of Dickon-shaped bits of material. And how wonderful to be able to choose things like types of lapel, numbers of jacket vents, ‘kissing buttons’, colour of the lining, colour of the piping of the lining – the bit that goes around the lining edge, number of buttons and pockets, types of buttons and pockets, angles of pockets, and more. And then do the same again for the waistcoat. It’ll be ready in a few weeks’ time. Can’t wait.

Sunday last – to The Shady Dolls Cabaret at a venue called The Last Days Of Decadence, on Shoreditch High Street. Beautiful Beardsley-esque stained glass windows, plush sofas inside, performance area in the basement. The Shady Dolls themselves are a couple of young ladies performing little comedy skits and musical turns – one of whom is Vicki Churchill’s sister Laura. There’s a few other acts including a burlesque dancer, plus a particularly good male duo called Moonfish Rhumba.

The venue is absolutely packed, and though the show is a seated affair, many have to spend the evening standing at the back, or sitting on the floor in the front. Cabaret – even ragged-edged, Fringe Revue-type cabaret like this – seems very much a popular draw at the moment.

Again, I do think this current scene would been unthinkable in the 90s. Back then, young people who were keen to get on a stage and artistically express themselves – and feel part of the world too – pretty much had to form a Britpop band or else. They had to fit in with or react against Blur, or Oasis, or Pulp. There was a ‘loungecore’ scene, granted, but it was very much on the margins. Today, role models are just as likely to be The Mighty Boosh (surreal, idiosyncratic comedy), or Flight of The Conchords (ditties, character interaction), or Dita Von Teese (burlesque dancing) as the latest guitar band.

I meet Jo Roberts – there with Charley S – in her offstage persona. Am more used to seeing her onstage persona fronting the Rude Mechanicals, in a beehive blonde wig and whiteface make-up, all deadpan glowering. Meeting her brunette, charming and friendly ‘normal’ self is a little thrilling – like meeting Lady Jekyll after witnessing Ms Hyde.  I’m always in awe of performers and actors who go in for transformation. I find it hard work enough just being myself.

Yet again I leave the diary unchanged for days on end, then come back with an entry that’s far too long. Apologies.

***

One of my favourite and certainly unexpected Christmas presents was an advance DVD of the new Quentin Crisp film, ‘An Englishman In New York’. I’m extremely grateful to the kind person in question, who worked on the production and thought of me. They did try to get me IN the film itself, lurking in the background. This didn’t happen, but as a Crisp fan I’m more than happy with being able to see the finished product so soon. They’ve asked me to hold off from writing about the film until now. It’s just had its official premiere at the Berlinale film festival, and will be on ITV in the Spring.

So: ‘An Englishman In New York’ is both a biopic and a sequel. It follows ‘The Naked Civil Servant’, the 1975 ITV movie that dramatised the incredible life of Quentin Crisp, the Soho dandy, wit, artist’s model and unabashed lifelong ‘visible’ homosexual. It showed him – and the changing face of London -  from the age of 20 in 1928, through to what was then the present day. At the end a 67-year-old Mr Crisp walks through 70s Chelsea and muses on how the fashions of the day have finally caught up with him: men with long hair, beads, flamboyant shirts with big collars, flares and so on. ‘Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day…’

As Crisp noted, the film originally went out at a time when there were only two other TV channels.  BBC2 was usually a repository for the Open University or darts (when it was transmitting at all), while BBC1 – ‘the other side’ – would have been showing the Nine O’Clock News. So one has to remember that pretty much everyone who was spending an evening in with the TV that night in 1975, and who didn’t fancy the news, would have seen ‘The Naked Civil Servant’.

‘If it had been a cinema film,’ reasoned Crisp, ‘the only people who would have gone to see it would have been gay men… Oh, and liberals wishing to be seen going into and coming out of the cinema.’

Given such mainstream attention, ‘The Naked Civil Servant’ changed the life of its subject overnight. Crisp became nationally famous, a regular on TV chat shows. His one man stage show – in which he doled out his advice on life like a Wildean self-help guru – became his day job.

But it also changed the life of the actor who portrayed him, John Hurt. So much so that Crisp would say Hurt was still playing variations on the Crisp role for years afterwards. ‘The Elephant Man was merely me with a bag over my head.’

There’s a great moment in the 1990 documentary Resident Alien, where Hurt catches up with Crisp at his New York bedsit, and asks him about this.

Hurt: You said I was just playing versions of you.
Crisp: You play victims.
Hurt: But I wouldn’t necessarily call you a victim.
Crisp: Oh, but I CLAIM to be a victim…
Hurt: How so?
Crisp: Because I am at the mercy of the world…
Hurt: (laughs) Aren’t we all?

(It’s too easy to just go on quoting QC – so many gems)

Now Mr Hurt has returned to take up the part once more, covering the NYC era of Crisp’s life from the late 70s to his death in 1999. And fittingly it’s another ITV movie.

‘An Englishman In New York’ takes its title from the 80s hit about him, by the artist Crisp referred to as ‘Mr Sting’. And though the lion’s share of the film is indeed set in New York, there’s a few London scenes at the start showing the one most abiding aspect of how overnight fame affected his life in Britain.

We see him answering the phone in his Chelsea bedsit.

Crisp (voice over): My lifelong tormentors now had a name to go on.

Man on phone: Is this Quentin Crisp?
Crisp Yeeeeeeesss…?
Man: You dirty poof. I’m going to smash your f—ing face in.
Crisp: Do you wish to make an appointment?
Man: What?
Crisp: I have some time on Tuesday afternoon if that is convenient for you.

(click!)

In the UK, suggests the film, fame is resented. Celebrities are punchbags, then as now. Certainly, interminable BBC3 programmes like ‘The 100 Most Irritating Celebrities’  – a six hour long show that went out last Christmas – would bear this out.

As soon as Crisp gets to New York, of course, the disco music plays, people smile and compliment him as he goes by, and he’s in a kind of heaven. He is granted Resident Alien status, moves into the Lower East Side, and spends his days Being Quentin Crisp professionally, delivering quips and aphorisms in his local diner, or at parties, or at his stage show.

That’s pretty much the real life tale in a nutshell. It’s a film that starts with a happy ending. There’s no conflict or journey or quest or antagonist, unless you count getting old itself. So rather understandably the script lunges for incidents of dilemma.

There’s the accusations of him being a kind of gay Uncle Tom figure, accused of ‘playing to the straights’ by Angry Gay Man 1 in one of his audiences. There’s his comment that ‘AIDS is merely a fad’ leading to him being cornered by Angry Gay Man 2 in an alley. The film uses these episodes to get under the Crisp skin, with a Boswell-style character at his side, Mr Steele, forever in a state of frustration. He knows there’s a Public Crisp, all sweeping statements and droll misanthropy – a kind of Grumpy Old Queen – as well as a Private Crisp, who is compassionate, kind and generous, who sends off cheques to AIDS charities.

And somewhere in the middle the story takes a complete detour to focus on the struggling artist Patrick Angus, who Crisp does his best to help. Again, the film thinks it needs to lunge for a message, ie ‘He Was Different In Private’. It’s pertinent that the script is by the writer of ‘The Curse Of Steptoe And Son’.

But sometimes you don’t watch a biopic to see years of untidy facts corralled into suspiciously convenient arcs of conflict and pathos. Dramas needn’t always be dramatic. If there’s no plot, you shouldn’t force one.  It’s perfectly okay to just want to spend time with the characters. Movies (and novels) can be like dinner parties. And that’s fine. That’s more than enough.

You come for  – and get – John Hurt returning to play Quentin Crisp, saying all the funny and wise and witty things Crisp said. You also get Miranda out of Sex and the City, visibly enjoying herself as the performance artist Penny Arcade.

You also get a wonderful recreation of a scene in the 1992 film Orlando, with Hurt playing Crisp playing Queen Elizabeth 1st (and a non-speaking actress playing Tilda Swinton playing Orlando as a young man – wish that had been me…).

And you get this marvellous line as a 90-year-old Crisp sits in his filthy NYC room (which you can almost smell):

‘He who famously said ‘after the first four years the dust doesn’t get any worse’… He was wrong! The dust took its AWFUL revenge…’

Highgate this morning. Chaos on the roads, happiness for schoolchildren everywhere: