Authors: Ray Winstone
I never forgot the way he went to work with me. There were moments when he’d just whisper in my ear and make me very calm and relaxed by saying, ‘Don’t worry about them, just concentrate on what you’re doing.’ Then there were other times when he’d say, ‘You’re fucking me about here’, and that would upset me, because I had a lot of respect for him. Obviously, he was just saying that to wind me up, but it worked because I’d get really fucking mad.
I’ve learnt to use that technique on myself over the years. Sometimes on a set even now I’ll call myself a cunt or whatever to liven myself up. It’s the acting equivalent of having Jackie Bowers in your corner. The director might think I’m angry with him when he hears me grumbling away to myself, so I’ll have to explain that I’m not being horrible, I just talk to myself a lot before a scene. It’s funny sometimes when I come out of it to see other actors looking at me as if to say, ‘Well, what’s the matter with you?’
Most of what you’re taught at drama college relates to the theatre rather than cinema, so you have to kind of start from scratch once you make that shift. Being in front of a camera never worried me in itself. Of course, the first thing people will tell you is: ‘Forget about the camera. Don’t even think about it, just do what you do.’ I actually found that advice very easy to follow at first. ‘I’m not going to worry about the camera, let the camera worry about me’ was the way I approached it.
Ignorance is bliss on a film set, because when you’ve got no idea of what’s happening, you can just get on with it. Things only start to get complicated once you learn more about the technical side – what the different lenses are and how close the shots are going to be. That’s when you start to second-guess yourself. One minute you feel perfectly at home, and then you know too much. Suddenly your only option is to relearn how not to be aware of the camera by making the knowledge you’ve picked up work for you on a technical level without it looking like that’s a conscious process. That’s when acting becomes a whole different game.
One thing I would say is that the old saying that the camera never lies is bullshit, because it does. I’ve done things I thought were blinding and when I’ve seen them played back they were shit. It works the other way too, but when you watch something you thought was going to be terrible and it actually works, that’s normally because the director, for whatever reason, didn’t let you in on what they were trying to get.
The most important thing when you’re shooting out of sequence – which is how it’s normally done – is learning to sort the script out in your head as you’re going along. People often think it must be difficult to do things in a different order to how they’re seen, but it can actually work out better that way. For example, if you do the end before anything else, you understand where you’ve got to get to and you can start to think about all the different shapes you can put in along the road. In other films –
Nil by Mouth
would be a good example – you don’t need to have so much of a journey through it so you can just play each moment and not worry about the next one.
Alan Clarke was well known for having a clear political agenda, and as my little disagreement with Vanessa Redgrave showed, I wasn’t always in tune with left-wing opinions. If anything, my
family background pushed me more to the right. Even though he’s working-class, my dad would always vote Tory.
Some people find that difficult to understand, but there’s a long tradition of grafters who run their own businesses being quite right-wing – Margaret Thatcher’s dad was a grocer after all. You’ve worked hard to get what you’ve got and you don’t like the idea of other people getting something for nothing. I can appreciate and even agree with that opinion, but my political views have never been quite as fixed as my dad’s were.
Sometimes I’ll watch documentaries about working-class people fighting for their rights and see the kind of conditions they lived in and think, ‘Dad, what were you talking about?’ I’m not saying I’ve got more left-wing as I’ve got older, but maybe I’ve moved a bit closer to the middle of the road. Socialism doesn’t add up in my mind, but it wouldn’t make sense for me to be a Tory either. After all, both sides of my family came out of the workhouse, and the Conservatives are the kind of fuckers who put us in there. You can’t say that’s not a conflict of interest, so why should I fucking vote for them now?
As a rule I try to judge individual issues and political personalities on their merits. What I look for is that quite rare brand of politician who makes an honest attempt to do what he or she has said they’re gonna do. They don’t necessarily have to succeed, they just have to give it a go. The other mob – the ones who promise one thing and then do something totally different the minute they get in power – are much more numerous. But as far as I’m concerned they should be held to account under the Trades Descriptions Act, the same way a butcher who sold you venison which was actually horse would be.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I didn’t really have a problem with the underlying politics of
Scum,
which were what a
lot of the controversy surrounding the film was about. I didn’t view it so much as a political thing of left versus right. For me it was a simple matter of people who were in authority – whether that was the warders or the other boys – treating the kids who were under them like shit.
We bang kids up in these fucking conditions, but at the end of the day whatever you’ve done you’re supposed to go into the system to be rehabilitated, and that just wasn’t the way it worked at the time. What you see happening in
Scum
is more about punishment, and while I do think there are certain people who need to be punished, it’s not a good principle to run the whole system on.
Because of the
Scum
connection I was invited to Rodney Wing at HM Prison Portland a few years after the film came out to see the work they were doing there trying to rehabilitate people. The idea was to come in and have a chat with the kids and try to do a theatre group with them – just to give them the idea that if I can do it, maybe you can too. I must admit I was very apprehensive about doing this at first. I just thought, ‘Fuck me, some of these kids are probably in here for murder. How am I going to help them become better people just by doing a bit of acting?’
In a way, I still think that. But when I saw what those warders were trying to do by sitting the kids around and talking about their problems, I started to see the potential of it. They were trying to do something really proper but – and sadly this is how it always works with human beings – the screws in the grown-up nick next door didn’t want anything to do with it. Their mentality was: ‘We’re here to punish these people, and that’s what we’re gonna do.’ Never mind how many statistics might show them that these kids are much less likely to be a danger to others when they go back out on the street if someone’s actually given them a chance.
Wherever you stand on this, there’s no denying that the reason the criminal justice system should exist in the first place – which is to rehabilitate people so they won’t commit any more crimes – has kind of got lost as more and more of the system’s energies go towards defending its own status quo. You could see that very clearly in the way the political establishment clamped down on
Scum.
It was like the film itself was the rebel character Archer – played by David Threlfall in the first version and Mick Ford in the second – and Parliament and the BBC were the screws.
Of course, I wasn’t overly bothered about all this at the time. I had enough going on in my life not to be too invested in it. So, in the autumn of 1977, when the original TV
Scum
actually got banned – which for all I knew meant my first leading role was going to go forever unseen – I just thought, ‘Well, there you go’, and effectively retired from the acting business for eighteen months.
I’ll get onto how I made ends meet in the next few chapters, but obviously there was a fair amount of rebellion in the air in that particular Jubilee year. I didn’t dress like a punk – the safety-pin gear wasn’t for me, although the drainpipe trousers were alright – but I liked the Sex Pistols’ music. Live gigs still didn’t really interest me though. I went up the Marquee Club once and got in a big row with some pogo-ers, and that was about the end of it. If you’d told me that within two or three years, not only would Sid Vicious be dead but I’d have acted with all three of his surviving bandmates, I would probably have been a bit surprised.
One musical opportunity I wasn’t going to pass up in the meantime was the chance to DJ for nurses’ parties. They love a dance, don’t they, nurses? And everyone knows that it’s any patriotic Englishmen’s duty to try to bring happiness to as many nurses as possible.
How this important landmark in DJing history came about was that Tony Yeates was working as a photographer at St Thomas’ Hospital by this time – taking photos of all the operations for their records. He was, and is, a really good smudger (as photographers were always called on my plot), and it was an interesting job, if a bit gory. He took some amazing pictures of surgeons’ hands as well, and when someone offered him the chance to fake a different kind of dexterity by DJing for a nurses’ party, Tony was hardly going to say no.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll do it,’ he’d told them. ‘Me and my mate Ray have got all the equipment.’ Of course we ain’t got any of the equipment, and we ain’t got any DJing experience either, but if Tony Blackburn can do this, how hard can it be?
Luckily, Tony’s younger brother Steve had some turntables we could borrow for the night, and we also borrowed Steve, who came along to show us how to use them. We set off for deepest darkest South London in an optimistic frame of mind, blissfully ignorant of the fact that there’s a mob out of Brixton who had the job before us and got sacked, who are not best pleased about losing their gig to a couple of East London pumpkins. So we’re in there on the night, making it up as we go along with all the nurses having a great time dancing to our random selection of old singles. (I remember Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie May’ going down particularly well. ‘Mr Blue Sky’ by ELO was another winner – that was about as up to the minute as we got.) Then we look over to see this angry-looking black guy with a big velvet pimp hat on standing at the back with all his cronies.
The message somehow gets through to us that this used to be their gig. Tony goes, ‘It’s on us,’ and I’m thinking, ‘Uh-oh. We’ve nicked their gig, on their manor – we’re in trouble here.’ It seems like whatever’s gonna happen is probably gonna happen, so I go for
the ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’ strategy, and put on that song ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ – Carl Douglas, I think it was – with a special dedication: ‘And this is for the pimp and his mates at the back.’
They’re all getting a bit lively at this point but nothing actually happens, so I’m thinking, ‘We might have fronted ’em here.’ It’s only me, Tony and his kid brother with all this expensive DJ equipment which we’ve got to get back in the motor, because if things had gone off that would’ve probably been the first casualty of war. So, at the end of the night we pile it all into this green Triumph Herald estate we’d picked up from somewhere which you could only start with a screwdriver.
As we pull away, we look round and see three car-loads of this mob following us. A car chase ensues, only it’s more like
Steptoe and Son
than
Smokey and the Bandit
(which was on at the pictures that year) because we’re staggering along in this knackered old Triumph throwing records out of the window at them for a laugh – only the pony ones, not The Jam or anything like that. They finally catch up with us around the back of the Italia Conti stage school in Farringdon.
At this point we’d be very happy to discover that the whole thing is some kind of on-location improvisation workshop, but sadly that doesn’t look likely. I ask Tony if he’s ready, he nods, and we get out of the car. These geezers are all around us and they’re more than mob-handed, so I go up to the guy in the pimp hat and say, ‘Alright, mate. There’s obviously enough of you to do us, but are we men? Put up your two best, me and him [I’m pointing at Tony now because Stephen was only a little fella and we wanted to keep him out of it] will fight them, and whoever wins, wins.’
Now I’m clutching at straws here, but we ain’t got no chance otherwise, and the tactic seems to be working because they’re
back-tracking a bit – it’s like they’re not sure about us. Taking advantage of their moment of hesitation, I go round to the back of the car, because I know I’ve got an iron bar in my bag and they’re not gonna want to fight one-on-one with that. The minute I reach in the car to pull it out, they think I’ve got a shooter. One of them shouts, ‘He’s got a gun’, and it’s just starting to feel like we might get out of this alive when another car pulls up and another big black guy gets out.
This geezer’s a mountain and we’re thinking, ‘Oh fuck! We’re for it now.’ He comes up to us asking, ‘What’s the trouble, boys?’ So, trying to keep calm because I don’t know who this guy is or what his connection is to the other mob, I go, ‘Nothing, mate – the boys are just putting it on us a bit.’ At that point he turns round to them and goes, ‘You fucking lot, get outta here.’ He’s literally the biggest black man in the world and he’s telling them to fuck off, which they promptly do.
It turned out not to be a black and white thing to him on any level. They were a gang who were picking on us, and he was just a nice guy passing through who saw three kids in trouble and decided to help us out. We shook his hand with a big sigh of relief, in fact I gave him a grateful cuddle, then off we all went into the Clerkenwell night. Result! In fact, a Triumph, although strangely enough Stephen never offered to lend us his DJ equipment again . . .
CHAPTER 18
THE 277 BUS UP BURDETT ROAD
I had some funny old motors in my first few years of driving round London. I knew nothing about cars whatsoever, but I did have a happy knack for getting hold of dodgy MOTs, which wasn’t just useful but vital given the state of some of the heaps I was at the wheel of.