FILMS OF FIRE

Ideas

‘Maverick works with [me] on a project that looks at how far Briatin has progressed since “Cathy Come Home”.’ (Paul Woolf)

Britain as a whole (looking at mortality, health, per capita income, ‘happiness’, ‘fulfilment’, ‘spirituality’, ‘quality of life’, treatment of its most vulnerable members, the arts, civil liberty, etc. etc.). (a sort of national balance sheet). (discrepancy twixt rich and poor / women, animals, children.)

The same but on a less broad canvas. Issues to do with homes and homelessness. Children still taken into care for reasons of homelessness, how treated ‘in care’, how many evictions, how many live in fear of eviction, number of empty properties, number of homeless squatting, putting the two together. Hundreds of thousands illegally housed in tents, boats, caravans, barns, horse-boxes. How many realising the state can not house its citizens decently have taken the law into their own hands. Endless fear of eviction and a life of terror follows.

In both of these people are talking about and we are showing their life experiences.

Fronted by Jeremy Sandford in voice over and pieces to camera.

Jeremy available to consult and make available his archives, but probably would not do a great deal of the research himself.

In each case the ‘jumping off point’ is Cathy’s children being taken from her.

(2) The Dispossessed

We start with Cathy’s children being snatched from her. She at that point is being dispossessed by the state which, claiming to be doing its best, is nonetheless acting with violence.

It is dispossessing Cathy of her children, her identity as a person, and probably her chance of future happiness or any sense of fulfilment in her life. Her partner has already been frozen out. Her children, much more than was then realised, were being deprived of a happy future by being put into ‘care’ where they would be deprived and, often, abused.

The argument of this film is that though things have got better in some ways, in others they have got worse.

The state, in the name of progress, still dispossesses and disempowers too many. Too many people who could be of great value to us as a nation spend their time and energy in fighting for their very identities and their right to do what they want with their own lives.

Such people are disempowered for two reasons:

The state, while abrogating to itself the power to regulate and provide, then fails to provide (e.g. in housing).

In one of other of the ways they choose to live their lives they fall foul of the regulations of a nanny state, e.g.

those whose chosen recreational drugs are declared illegal while those of other areas of society are still legal.
those who choose to take their destiny in their own hands and house themselves rather than leaving it to the state.

Hugs forces are brought in to disempower and victimise both groups at vast expense to the taxpayer / the state and creating a class of millions who are actually ‘at war’ with the state.

Jeremy would play a more active part in the making of this film.

(3) Cannabis Culture

(Hippy Culture)

This uses many of the ideas in the foregoing but from a more positive angle.

It argues that those million or so people whom the state disempowers by labelling them or stereotyping them as ‘hippies’, attempting in an extreme form to, as Margaret Thatcher puts it, make life as difficult as possible for them (or whatever it was she said) may actually constitute a source of lifeblood for the nation, showing a sturdy individuality which is what made us as a country great and an important source of energy, experiment and creativity. From them, for example, comes much of the musical vitality in many idioms, perhaps all musical idioms except classical. Music festivals. Fashion. Experiments in improved or more ecologically sound lifestyles such as cooperatives and communities, reed bed sewage systems, low impact dwellings, new ways of (often neo Pagan) spirituality, new forms of recreational activity, return to the land.

These people, marginalised and disempowered by the state may in fact constitute a far larger part of the life blood of the state than we had realised. Especially life blood of the youth culture. We ignore them at our peril.

(I once wrote a book about pop festivals which I called ‘Tomorrow’s People’.)

(Relevant is the Minister for ? leisure recently accepting that the ‘Dole Culture’ was the fertile soil from which so many great British bands came.)

(4) Back to the Land

Using many of the ideas above this programme argues that the continuing exodus of people from the country into the city must be reversed. In view of achieving a sustainable ecology. In view of the fulfilment of the population.

Return to the land is available to the rich but for the poor it is something they can only dream of (or attempt to do illegally).

Relevant to all this is the unfair distribution of land and the unfair distribution of the nation’s housing stock.

(5) Gypsies

Fronted by: David Essex, or me, or Charlie Smith.

Romany Gypsies, though numerically small and outcast in our culture, are in fact a crucial ingredient in today’s multi cultural Britain. If they were not there it would be necessary to invent them. We ignore them and persecute them at our peril.

(6) Radical Solutions to the Housing Problem

[I’ve got some notes for this somewhere]

(7) What is a Home?

Monastery v Prison.

Warm bender v freezing stately home.

(8) Create your own Home (Build Your Own Home)

Thousands of people are now taking their destiny into their own hands and solving their own housing problem. Why do we make it so difficult for them?

Other ideas of people to front programmes:

(9) Sid Rawle (‘King of the Hippies’)

(10) Michael Eavis (The Glastonbury Festival)

(11) Why Do Films / TV Dramas based on Real Events Stray so needlessly from the Truth?

I’ve got lots of notes and ideas on this.

Again we start from the ‘truth’ of ‘Cathy Come Home’.

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