Leslie Grantham

How do I start with talking about Leslie Grantham, and how he became an influence in my life?

Well, first of all perhaps I should tell the readers something about him, as they may not know who on Earth he is.

He's one of the stars, or should I say former stars (he'd embarrassed himself with a rather seedy webcam sex expose, and became the further subject of British tabloid ridicule, and was sacked from the job), of one of the most successful soap operas ever to make it onto British TV. Playing the part of "Dirty Den" in the BBC TV serial Eastenders, he was the archetypal villain. He was the bad guy of British television.

Now I fist met Leslie when I first got to drama school in 1978. I was 22 and he must have been about 35. Being the interested, studious actor I was at the time, anybody and everybody interested me, and Leslie was certainly no exception. I got talking to him, and asked him about his life; what he'd done and so on. He told me he'd been in the army. He'd been a corporal, he told me; I asked him about his feelings about the army, serving in Ireland, which I'd assumed he had, and so on. As the conversation continued, I felt that there was more to him, I suppose, than met the eye. Eventually he told me he'd murdered a taxi driver. He'd killed him over an argument over a fare, he said, and he'd hit the driver with a jack handle.

He asked me what I thought of him, having killed a man.

"Well", I said, "It's not as though you shot him, was it?"

As it turned out, that's exactly what he'd done...

Interestingly, being the amateur detective I was in those days (and still am) I thought I'd explore a little more about Leslie Grantham, and I went to the library to check him out. I'd been living in Chelsea at the time, sharing a house with his wife-to-be, Jane, and I lived not all that far from the King's Road library, where I knew there was a London Times microfiche which kept photocopies of all the Times newspapers going back several years. So I checked up on his story. I figured there'd be some news at the time, if only a paragraph or two, about a British soldier being tried for the murder of a German taxi driver, and sure enough, there was. He'd shot the driver during a robbery, ran away, then was finally caught and sent to prison.

This news still kept me interested in Leslie, however, and I didn't let him know that I knew his real story. And, in all my innocence as a 22 year old, I figured that a man who'd so brutally and cowardly murdered a man in such a way would be so full of remorse, so mixed up and confused, and his history would be so much to deal with, that nobody would want to employ him. So, in my naivete, I felt sorry for Leslie Grantham.

But on the other hand, I still had a peculiar admiration for him.

I'm not sure what it is when you're a young man, but it seems so common for us to want to identify with criminals. Is it that there's some kind of kudos that's attached to them? I grew up in a pretty rough neighbourhood, although not as rough as some parts of London, I have to say, and it seemed to me that so many people - right across the social spectrum - thought that the likes of the Kray twins and similar gangsters were heroes.

Why is that? Why do kids want to have fantasies about villains? Why on Earth do we want to watch films about them? Films like Pulp Fiction, and the current Sin City? What's that all about?

I mean, what is a gangster? Someone who runs around with a gun, having no consideration for others, shooting people? A person who fights and kills and steals, and lives a life of barbarity? How is that romantic? Yet we so commonly get drawn into that image, or the ideal of that kind of lifestyle. And Leslie Grantham, I suppose, was some kind of hero in that way to me. He'd been in prison: that, in some people's eyes, and certainly mine at that age, was already a token of real kudos that deserved respect.

I mean, was it that he'd defied the law? That he'd been a free spirited rebel who'd been captured by the terrible authorities and imprisoned like a caged bird? Of course it wasn't. But I think that's an image that many people like to attach to certain types of violent criminal.

No,Leslie Grantham was just some 17 year old hoodlum with a gun who killed a taxi driver in cold blood. So why on Earth should we look up at these people? I mean, it's a difficult thing to go through prison, sure. Spending time must be character building in some way, for sure. But it seems to me that some of us in society seem to want to attach significance to a prisoner's ordeal, as if in some way he's suffered more than his victim.

Living in America as I now do, I'm often surprised by the hero status afforded to the likes of Jesse James or Billy the Kid. Are they really folk heroes? But didn't they just go around shooting people? Where's the heroism in it?

And I guess that's how I felt about Leslie Grantham. I could only imagine that he would be feeling some terrible remorse about the murder, deep down. I could never understand why he didn't actually show it, though. All he ever did was joke: about other people, about himself. About everything and anything. He could never be serious. It always struck me, watching him on TV and listening to him being interviewed on chat shows and such, why didn't he talk frankly about the murder? I can't help thinking it would have served him so much more as an actor and a person to do so.

One time, we were in the school theatre, watching a student production of "sergeant Musgrave's dance". There was a scene where a man is hung, and I noticed that Leslie, who was sitting next to me, couldn't watch. He covered his eyes with his hand. He'd told me at one point that that he thought he was going to be hung for the murder at one time. I can only imagine that he felt reminded of his own fears of hanging. Assuming, of course, that what he'd told me was truthful. Leslie's constant need to joke, I realise now, covered his secret shame, perhaps. I don't know. I can only speculate.

Interestingly, another of my namesakes, John Lee, was known as "the man they couldn't hang". He was sentenced to death - this was hundreds of years ago, I think - but the gallows failed to open three times which was considered and act of God, and he was released. Jethro Tull wrote a song about him, as I recall: "John Babbacombe Lee".

Anyway...

Leslie rather impressed me, I guess. Perhaps it was that he was a strong male role model. And I, being the lost and impressionable thing I was at the time, was awestruck by it all. He was so unlike me, after all, and we're naturally drawn to that which is different, aren't we? And, like many psychopaths, from what I've read, Leslie has, or at least had, a great deal of charm. He was funny, in a kind of cruel, self deprecating and humiliating way. He was, one could say, a real expert at the art of schadenfreude. Perhaps it was from living in a German prison for so long, I don't know. I remember that it was from Leslie's lips that I first heard the phrase Jungle Bunnies, meaning black people. It's the kind of humour that has an element of dark charm in it, one has to admit, whilst at the same time reducing an entire section of society into something less than human. It's the kind of racist humour that can be attractive to someone with a vivid imagination and an unformed value system.

But I was naive then, as I said; and for all I know, Leslie Grantham is now a very different person, too. I mean, we all grow up, don't we? Our experiences build our characters, no matter what those experiences are, and whatever direction our character takes. We can see the light at any age, can't we? One hears stories all the time of evil men becoming good, just as we hear of good men becoming evil. Sometimes I think that it's only the grace of God that makes us one or the other. Perhaps, given the wrong circumstances, any one of us can be a serial killer or rapist. Perhaps that's why that old adage judge not lest ye be judged comes from.

What got me feeling really bitter and confused, though, was when, a few years later, I started to reflect on my own life rather differently, as I began to compare it to Leslie's.

It was when I saw his face on the cover of The Radio Times, the BBC TV programme guide, dressed as a highwayman, that I felt really offended. To me, the fact that Leslie had become a successful and famous actor despite his being a murderer was one thing. Good luck to him, I thought, if he could be a person who felt remorse, had done his time, and wanted to really explore his art, his own soul, and to share it with the rest of us. I'd read that one of his own role models, James Cagney, had advised him to "stick to the truth" when playing any part. That was why Leslie's becoming successful because he was a murderer was outraged me. Was my society so corrupt in its morals, I could only ask myself. Is that what we'd become? Were we that sick a society that we endorsed such barbarity: that we make fun of such a true crime, and glorify violent criminals rather than dutifully explore the reality of the phenomenon?

Seeing that picture, with Leslie dressed as Dick Turpin, I imagined the family of the murdered taxi driver, and what they might be feeling, seeing the man who'd murdered their father or husband becoming a celebrity and comic villain because of it. How could anyone be that insensitive? I felt appalled and disappointed, and quite depressed. I'd been in a relationship with a girlfriend at the time who'd been raped, and I knew what it was like to be the victim of a violent crime, and to be someone close who cared about such a person. It appalled and sickened me to see such vileness being joked about so casually.

And so I became even more bitter, angry and confused, and isolated in a society that cared more about the romance of criminality than it did the actual bleakness and terror of victimhood and defencelessness.

I felt that I was more deserving of the success that Leslie Grantham had found. I felt my girlfriend deserved more. I felt that all the people who'd known what it was to have been stabbed or shot or had their loved ones murdered or raped deserved more. I'd been a decent person. I'd cared about people: I'd even cared about Leslie Grantham, whom I'd seen as someone who needed a chance in society again. I felt that the family of the murdered taxi driver deserved more than to see his murder being turned into some publicity stunt in order to sell a magazine, and to promote a TV soap opera.

So I hated Leslie Grantham, and I hated the society that I lived in, that condoned what he'd done, and the society that remained impartial, neutral; ignorant of what life was like on the dark and lonely side of the illusion that is society.

And from that, I grew to hate the judicial system that put away my girlfriend's rapist for just four years, then released him after 18 months. I hated the tabloid newspapers who twisted the truth, said any jingoistic claptrap they wanted to, and who'd helped create confusion and ignorance, bigotry and fear in our society. I grew to hate my country: to resent the authorities that governed me and yet had no time to hear my story, nor give me the chance to work my life out, to resolve my internal conflicts, and get my life back together again.

So these were some of the reasons why I eventually left Britain. I just had to get away from the place, and from the reminders of everything that it stood for that kept me in the frame of mind I was stuck in: anger.

But Lesie Grantham was an important lesson for me, certainly on a "soul developing" level. I learned a great deal from my having crossed paths with him, and maybe I'll write more about him in future entries.

I'll be looking at how I managed to see my own bitterness, the reasons it came about, and how negativity ties up the creative process; also the destructiveness of competition in the creative process, and other related phenomena.

It's actually all rather fascinating.

It was Oscar Wilde who said that the only thing worse than being talked about was not being talked about. There's a lot of truth in that. What's really unfortunate, though, is that the people who do the talking are so often such minor souls. I mean, gossip is such an ugly, petty little thing to do, isn't it? It smacks of bitterness and a snidey, grubby little life of backstabbing, false smiles, and shadows.

And it was Oscar who said as well that a true friend "stabs you in the front".

I do hope I can be more than than a mere gossip, although I confess I have had my moments of being less that "on the path". Much of my obsession with Leslie Grantham was from myself being tied to much lower values.

Values which, I hope, I've transcended.

Fame is a peculiar thing. I craved it terribly, from an early age. I think it was because my self esteem was so low, that I was determined to be seen as something more than I felt I was. Acting, and becoming a famous actor, was to be my way of saying to everyone "Look at me. I am someone!".

Yet fame, it's been said, is the exchange of the love of the few for the adoration of the many.

Another Zen paradox...