So You Think You Know It All: A compendium of extremely interesting and slightly strange true stories

BRITAIN IN A SPIN

It had next to no budget, took six weeks to shoot on cheap 16 mm film and its controversial plot destined it to a graveyard slot on Channel 4. But when the TV play My Beautiful Laundrette was shown at the 1985 Edinburgh TV festival, the reaction to it was so rapturous that it was transferred to 35 mm and shown in cinemas. Now it was a proper film, and the next thing the cast and crew knew, it had received a nomination for an Oscar – Best Original Screenplay.

Set in the early 1980s and in a rundown corner of London, Omar (played by Gordon Warnecke) is a young British Pakistani in thrall to the Thatcherite dream of making money and being judged on your merits, not your background. He persuades his wheeler-dealer uncle (Sayeed Jaffrey) to hand over the keys to a rundown launderette. Omar sees a bright future in soap suds and plans to turn the mundane task of doing a wash and spin into a Las Vegas-like experience.

But as his launderette plans get spinning, his own dirty linen is about to be publicly aired. Omar’s gay, from an ultra-conservative Muslim background and his wedding is being arranged. He’s attacked by a racist gang, the leader of whom is his former lover, Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis). It’s a little awkward, but eventually the boys resume their relationship and realise the dream of the über-laundromat together, but racism, Omar’s Muslim heritage and his impending arranged marriage all threaten to compromise their success. Will it all come out in the wash?

Written by Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Laundrette is a bittersweet and very funny observation of life in the entrepreneur economy of the 1980s. The story was partially autobiographical, Omar’s dilemma being familiar to many first-generation British born Muslims who found it difficult – and dangerous – to balance their Western aspirations with what their immigrant parents expected of them. Gordon Warnecke, who played Omar, explains,

I was fresh out of drama school and this was my first film. It tackled all the stereotypes of the time with real grit and humour, something I was really interested in doing, so this was a project I just had to be involved in. Thatcherite economics were key to Laundrette, and they were personal to me. We were part of the ‘do it yourself’ generation’, surrounded by the spirit of free enterprise. But the film asks how far you can go before you find yourself torn between two cultures.

That Omar is gay – and largely unapologetically so, in private at least – caused consternation among the Asian Muslim community worldwide, for whom the issue of homosexuality is, by and large, taboo.

Director Stephen Frears was hooked immediately by what the film had to say about Britain in the 1980s.

I read the script and just had to meet Hanif Kureishi. His mother was White British and his father was from Pakistan, so he lived and observed both cultures simultaneously. I mean, I was just white and middle class, so learning from him about that life was really eye-opening. I thought the critique of Mrs Thatcher was really the most important thing, I didn’t notice that there were gay themes that were going to echo around the world.

But My Beautiful Laundrette doesn’t preach, doesn’t try to ‘tick boxes’ and has a magic ‘common touch’, which appealed to a wide audience. And Omar is constantly faced with the dilemma of whether he can eat the cake he has.

Souad Faress played Cherry, the manipulative Uncle Salim’s wife, who questions where Omar’s true identity lies. In the film she cries, ‘I’m sick of hearing about these in-betweens, people should make up their mind about where they are!’ Looking back, Souad says:

I loved the script. Cherry’s view is, ‘Right, you have to side with us or side with them.’ There’s degrees of racism on both sides, but it made people at least look at the issues how they really are. One thing that seemed to bewilder people was that the immigrant family, the Pakistani family, were so aspirational. They were a wealthy middle class family, but people just didn’t equate immigrants with success, yet it has been proven over and over and over that in Britain’s social history immigrants are very aspirational.

Powders – the name of the Launderette in the film – was on Wilcox Road in Vauxhall, south London. Today it’s a Portuguese restaurant.

CUSHING THE BLOW – WHEN DR WHO BOMBED WITH THE FANS

In 1965, Doctor Who hit the big screen in eye-popping widescreen and retina-burning Technicolor, with Peter Cushing in the titular role. Dr. Who and the Daleks followed very closely the plot of ‘The Daleks’, the first, (black-and-white) encounter between the TV Doctor, played by William Hartnell, and the psychopathic pepperpots.

A sequel, Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150AD, landed on screen less than a year later. Cushing again starred as Dr Who in the story that was, also again, a remake of a Doctor Who TV serial originally starring Hartnell. In both films, Cushing travels through time and space with three companions: his granddaughters, played by Roberta Tovey and Jill Curzon (the 1961 Women’s Clay Pigeon shooting world champion, no less), and a companion who has stumbled on the Tardis by mistake. In the first film, this was Roy Castle; in the second, it was Bernard Cribbins, who would later play a significant role in the rebooted TV show during David Tennant’s tenure.

The films were rushed out to cash in on the craze for all things Dalek that had swept the nation since their TV debut. Amicus, the producers, bought the rights to adapt the stories and characters from the BBC for £500. (The rights were limited, which explains why the famously spooky theme from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop – composed by Delia Derbyshire – is absent from the films and replaced by a racy, but rather ordinary, orchestral score). Terry Nation, the television writer who came up with the Daleks, had held on to the rights of his creation and was free to exploit his weaponised bollards with whomsoever he wanted. This is the reason the Daleks were also spun off into comic scripts that didn’t feature Doctor Who characters.

In order to part-finance the second film, Amicus struck a £50,000 deal with Quaker Oats. In spite of being levelled by Dalek death rays, London is completely riddled with product placement: the huge billboard posters prominently displayed in the film suggest that in the far-flung future, the British eat nothing but, – surprise, surprise – Quaker’s Sugar-Puffs.

The sets in both films are impressive, especially the post-Dalek-induced apocalypse scenes set in London. The Daleks – which, who knew cancelled, come in a variety of colours denoting rank – look twice as menacing in vivid colour. It’s only a shame the proposed Dalek flame-throwers were nixed at the last minute in case they gave kids nightmares – or the wrong sort of inspiration for their homemade versions. Instead the Daleks in both films fire deadly gas (actually carbon dioxide from fire extinguishers).

The distinctive flying saucer in which the Daleks travelled to London – their evil plan to remove the Earth’s core via a huge mine in, of course, the suburb of Shepperton – was dusted down and recycled three years later for the utterly terrible British sci-fi film The Body Stealers. That film starred Neil Connery – brother of Sean – and was probably responsible for his almost total screen obscurity since.

It has to be said, the Dalek films are far from classics – even the legend Peter Cushing delivers a ropey turn – but they do have a lot of charm and they don’t even approach the awfulness of the TV Doctor Who of the mid to late 1980s. However both films drive ‘true’ Doctor Who fans to despair because – they say – Peter Cushing is an imposter. And it’s true, the films took a lot of liberties with the Doctor Who legend.

If you weren’t familiar with the TV show in the 60s – if you were American, say – you’d be flummoxed by the backstory, so the producers understandably simplified it for the widest possible audience. What was unforgivable for fans, however, is that Peter Cushing played a dotty human grandad who was an inventor not a Time Lord and whose surname was, actually, ‘Who’. The true Doctor is extraterrestrial and nobody knows his name. The suffix ‘Who’ is applied by the people he encounters, as in ‘Who are you?’ That’s the reason why you never see Peter Cushing included in the canonical lineup. You could argue that this all seems a bit churlish – after all, this is Peter Cushing we’re talking about, one of the true greats of cult British films and also a cast member of the original Star Wars (and recently reanimated by CGI for Rogue One). However, there are some things in the universe you tinker with at your peril – and chief among them is the Doctor Who backstory!

ANY SIMILARITIES TO MARY POPPINS ARE PURELY COINCIDENTAL. HONEST!

An apprentice witch, a trio of cockney urchins and a cowardly spiv search for the missing component to a magic spell useful for thwarting the Nazi invasion of Britain. Not a recently released wartime MI5 file, unfortunately, but the plot of Disney’s ballsy, brash comedy-musical Bedknobs and Broomsticks, tipped at the time to become an absolute classic of the studio’s canon.

It had all the makings of one: a stellar cast that included Angela Lansbury, David Tomlinson, Roddy McDowall and Bruce Forsyth; a cracking set of songs by the Sherman Brothers; impressive special effects and animation sequences; classic baddies (in this case, the German Army); and orphans. It’s a lovely, light-hearted fantasy worthy of Christmas classic status. So why did it fail to make back its productions costs?

Partly, perhaps, because it was so similar to Mary Poppins that the two merged in the consciousness of audiences. It featured the same star – David Tomlinson, Disney’s go-to English twit; the same London setting; the same crew; similar themes (families are weird but they’re all we’ve got); and stylistically very similar songs because they were written by the same songwriting team. Standout number ‘Substitutiary Locomotion’ is basically a rewrite of ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’, and ‘Portobello Road’ could have been in either film and few would notice the difference. In fact, another of its showstoppers – ‘The Beautiful Briny’ – had been written for Mary Poppins but was dropped at the last moment. In Bedknobs it was simply revoiced for a frantic live action animated sequence that looked like a continuation of the one in… Mary Poppins.

The film was released in 1971, a week prior to the death of Roy Disney, who had been in charge of the magic castle since his brother Walt died in 1966.

That’s not to suggest that the film’s lack of success played a part in his death – it opened strongly and was five times Oscar-nominated – but Roy’s eye not being on the ball might explain why the film reached the theatres at an overindulgent (and hardly child-friendly) three hours long. A second release was cut to a more endurable two hours and then again to 90 minutes – with all but two of its songs excised.

Bedknobs was largely studio shot in California, including, sadly, the tremendous song and dance number ‘Portobello Road’. There were, however, significant location scenes filmed at Corfe Castle and the surrounding village in Dorset. The three child stars were Roy Snart, now a software manager in Basingstoke; Ian Weighill, now a train driver; and Cindy O’Callaghan, last seen in EastEnders as Andrea Price and now a child therapist.

‘My overriding memory is how well the three of us kids got on,’ says Cindy, sitting down for a cup of tea with Ian and Roy for the first time in nearly fifty years. ‘I don’t remember any of us, however young we were, being naughty. It was a really professional engagement and Angela sort of set the tone. We upped our game because of her, she was very much an inspiration for me.’ None of the kids could sing or dance when they were cast for an all-singing, all-dancing musical and Angela Lansbury’s motherly encouragement could only go so far. ‘Oh I was terrible, I was terrible then and an appalling singer now,’ groans Roy, shaking his head. Ian concurs: ‘I was a thirteen-year-old English boy, and I had to dance throughout the “Substitutiary Locomotion” song.’

During the animated sequence, the kids had no idea what was going on at all on what, to them, was a completely empty sound stage. ‘All we could do was listen to the crew,’ remembers Roy. ‘They’d shout out, “There’s a fish right next to you. Now talk to the fish!”’ The overall experience, though, they all agree, was magic. In one instance literally. ‘We did this one scene with the brass bed knob. We were all gathered around it and it turned pink, it was amazing.’ Cindy was equally impressed, ‘I remember! I still wonder how they did that, don’t you?’ Ray thinks he knows: ‘It’s easy, it’s just Disney magic, isn’t it?’

GOOD SPORTS (#ulink_5bdbfede-7ce2-5c11-b698-38a7a7131144)

HEIL ZAT!

In Nazi Germany sport had one purpose, to strengthen the German people. But not all field games were acceptable to the Führer. Hitler thought the quintessentially British sport of cricket wasn’t butch enough for his Aryan master race.

There is, apparently, a churlish but somehow characteristically Adolf reason for this.

It’s reported that in 1923, having watched a team of British former prisoners of war play cricket and learnt from them the rules, Hitler raised a team to play against them. To his chagrin, Hitler lost. But what really incensed the would-be Führer was that he wasn’t allowed to change the rules of the game. Whatever; Hitler’s interest in cricket was short-lived. He may or may not have stormed off the pitch in a huff but he absolutely went on record to declare the sport ‘unmanly’.

So, if he despised the game so much, why did he invite the Gentlemen of Worcestershire Cricket Club to Berlin for three games? And why might they have taken more than just wickets?

Some say cricket’s complex rule book reflects the many facets of genteel British manners – which a dictator might not want to adopt.

In 1937 Hitler – now the leader of Germany – dispatched his Minister of Sport, Hans von Tschammer und Osten, to London. During his stay the minister was invited to a lunch at Lord’s, the home of cricket.

Von Tschammer und Osten reported this to Hitler, who came up with a cunning plan: challenge the British at their national game, and show the world that the Germans could beat them. The minister sent out an open invitation – worded, one suspects, more diplomatically than ‘Would you like to be crushed and humiliated by the Master Race, weather permitting?’ – and one club, the Gentleman of Worcestershire, accepted the offer to play in Berlin.

So it was that in August 1937 the Gentlemen found themselves in Berlin for the start of an unofficial Test-match series. As the team took to the field, they were asked to give a Nazi salute.

Good manners dictated that they did just that. But as the matches played out, the Worcestershire team were shocked by the lack of etiquette displayed by their Aryan opponents, who screamed ‘Aus!’ every other ball, probably in an effort to put Worcestershire off their stride. The English team also observed that the captain of the German side, Gerhard Thamer, would punch butter-fingered fielders who dropped catches off his bowling. We may all, at some point, have desired to do the same. But only a true barbarian actually would.

In spite of an intimidating backdrop of swastikas, anti-Semitic posters, the distant serenade of semi-automatic gunfire at night and being under the constant scrutiny of the Gestapo, the Gents went on to beat the Nazi cricket team in all three matches.

But in the midst of this extraordinary series, one team member may have had his eyes on more than just the ball.

Author Dan Waddell has researched the Nazi cricket series, and he discovered documents that suggest there was a British spy in their team. ‘As I delved deeper into the story and started to gather information, there was one name that stood out. And that was this chap Robin Whetherly.’ Dan says there wasn’t an actual ‘smoking gun’ document identifying Whetherly as a spy,

… but there’s an accumulation of evidence that suggests it was likely. For one, he spoke German and he joined Special Ops during the Second World War and served with them, which again adds to this air of secrecy. He seemed to have no link to the Gentlemen of Worcestershire team, he never played cricket for them before. Finally, he flew out to Germany while the rest of them went on the train and he seemed quite separate to the rest. A few of the members didn’t even know who he was.