BUSHELL ON THE BLOG
Jan 28. The Telegraph broke the story of the wrongful 13-year persecution of Sgt Richie Catterall last night, telling how Keir Starmer unleashed a witch hunt against British veterans.
Starmer and his odious buddy Hermer opened the door for hundreds of ex-servicemen to be hounded by hustlers like Phil Shiner, now a convicted criminal. I can’t work out if Starmer uses his apparent ineptitude as a mask for the calculated betrayal of the things we hold dear, or whether he is genuinely gormless as well as treacherous. I was brought up in a Labour household and was a member of the party for years, and I have never felt more ashamed of a Labour PM. Pretty sure my late relatives who served in the second world war would feel the same. Let’s hope the good people of Gorton and Denton are watching.
Chris Packham’s new radio series A People’s History of Punk covers a lot of ground at a nifty pace and features decent interviewees. Punk was life-changing for thousands of people. It was uplifting, exciting, inspirational, rewarding, sometimes dangerous, even life-threatening, and it opened doors. For a brief time, power passed from the record industry executives to us plebs on the streets. It certainly made me realise I could make my own luck. I should point out though that although I did indeed negotiate a then-hefty EMI deal for the Cockney Rejects, along with Jimmy Pursey, in 1979. I didn’t take a penny of it. I managed the Rejects unpaid because I believed in them and bowed out after we got them signed. Not for nothing did Joe Strummer call them “the real deal”.
Jan 27. RIP Sly Dunbar, the brilliant drummer who worked with everyone from Bob Marley to Ian Dury and played on reggae classics like Junior Murvin’s Police & Thieves and Dave & Ansell Collins’s magnificent chart-topper, Double Barrel (I still have my copy in the loft.) Sly, real name Lowell Fillmore Dunbar, grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, loving US soul music and made his first drum kit when he was 15. He’s probably best known for his production work with the late Robbie Shakespeare (as Sly & Robbie aka the Riddum Twins). The duo worked with everyone from Bob Dylan to Herbie Hancock via Mick Jagger and Grace Jones. Sly was 73. He was one of the greats.
Jan 25. My Traitors reaction on TikTok, filmed yesterday.
Jan 24. Here’s my instant reaction to the nail-biting finale of The Traitors.
Andy Burnham? Are you sure? Burnham has wanted to lead the Labour Party for most of his career. He stood in two leadership elections and failed both times. He was a Blairite when it suited him under Blair and Brown and then served in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. Whatever way the wind is blowing, you’ll find a careerist. I wouldn’t trust two-time loser Burnham any more than I’d trust Elim Garak from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
Jan 23. Trump reckons NATO allies “weren’t on the front line” with the USA in Afghanistan. Tell that to the families of the 457 British soldiers who died there; we lost another 139 men and women in Iraq. Soldiers from Canada, France, Germany, Denmark, Australia and other NATO members also perished in these largely ill-judged, kneejerk campaigns, instigated by the USA, which left the Middle East and Afghanistan in far worse places than they were beforehand and fuelled the mass immigration problem, legal and illegal, causing chaos across the Western world. The President’s words are not only factually incorrect but shamefully dumb. He needs to apologise quickly.
In fairness, Trump belittles our veterans, but at least he isn’t trying to lock them up like our useless government.
Jan 22. I fell off the wagon today. But in fairness I was only drinking to forget I’d said I wouldn’t drink in January.
Jan 15. The weirdest thing about Erich von Daniken obituaries is they’re describing him as a ‘non-fiction author’. The Telegraph ran their obit in the Science section. I think Erich was right and that aliens still walk among us. I mean, look at Ed Miliband. Come on!
Erich von Daniken. Dead. Or abducted by aliens? The truth is out there… There are gay aliens of course. The truth is they’re out… Erich asked was God an alien. He’ll know now.
Jan 13. I’ve been thinking a lot about my old friend Derek Martin, who died a couple of days ago at the grand old age of 92. Here’s a piece expanding on my earlier tweet. Born Derek William Rapp, in Bow, East London, docker’s son Derek was best known for playing long-suffering cabbie Charlie on EastEnders, but his greatest TV role was as bent detective inspector Fred Pyall in G.F. Newman’s caustic 1978 BBC2 drama Law & Order alongside Peter Dean, another future Walfordian, who played Kentish Town blagger Jack Lynn. After that, Derek cornered the market in corrupt cops, appearing in shows like The Sweeney, Minder, Dempsey And Makepeace, The Saint, Hart To Hart and Taggart. We first met when he was playing Ronald King, a disgraced detective turned debt collector in ITV comedy drama King And Castle in the 1980s, which is when he told me about his earlier brushes with crime. Derek had started working as a meat porter at Smithfield Market in 1959, but he and a couple of co-workers decided they could make a nice few bob on the side by stealing beef. The former amateur boxer was caught red-handed stealing £10,000 worth of meat (worth £190,000 in today’s money) after he allowed his mates to escape. Derek was found not guilty after a three-day trial at the Old Bailey in 1961 but he told me in 1988, “I was bang to rights guilty and looking at a two-year stretch, but I turned on the charm and flirted with a redhead on the jury. I pretended to be a bit Dolly Dimple and convinced them I was innocent.” John Humphyrs raised the subject in 2011 on BBC1’s Celebrity Mastermind and asked if he felt guilty about the theft. Derek replied, “No, I was just choked I never got the meat.”
One evening his friend Charlie Kray, the elder brother of the Kray Twins, phoned and asked Derek to meet him in the toilet of a London casino owned by the Krays. “Charlie handed me two guns and said, ‘Stick these in your pocket, wait 15 minutes and then go straight home. I’ll come and collect them tomorrow’. I tucked each gun into my trousers, and carried out his instructions.” Charlie collected the weaponsthe next day saying, “Any time you need me, I’ll do the same for you’.” Derek, who supported the free Reggie Kray campaign in the 80s, was never a villain. “Most of my crimes consisted of buying and selling stuff that had fallen off the back of a lorry, wheeling and dealing like Arthur Daley,” he said.
He credited the redhead on his jury for changing his life. When Derek bumped into her outside the Old Bailey, she congratulated him on his performance in the dock and told him, “I gave you the benefit of the doubt. You’re a born actor! Now go and be a good boy.” He said, “I took that to heart and decided to turn my life around and get into acting.” He changed his name, taking the Martin from Dean Martin, and within days was working as an extra on BBC1’s Z Cars. He became a stuntman after chatting to the stunt co-ordinator on Softly Softly and spent many happy years doing stunts for films and TV, including Doctor Who “crashing cars, jumping off buildings, falling down stairs, acting out fights, fencing, running through a brick wall. But it left me with two titanium knees and a metal hip – my boys call me the Bionic Man,” he joked. “I told them when I go, they should have me cremated and then nip round the back and rake through the ashes because I must be worth a fortune in scrap metal now.”
Derek fell off a horse and broke his collarbone while filming Elizabeth R in1971. “They just put my arm in a sling and sent me home,” he recalled.
His real love life was Walford worthy. His first marriage to Gloria in 1960 collapsed within months through her cheating. His second to actress Christine fell apart when he found her kissing another man in a car. They divorced and shared custody of their adopted twin sons, David and Jonathan. Derek wasn’t a drinker but after Christine cheated, he downed 12 shots of Southern Comfort. An element of revenge ensued.
Derek had auditioned for the role of Dirty Den in EastEnders, and later Frank Butcher. He made it into soaps on BBC1’s ill-fated Eldorado where he played gangster Alex Morris and finally made DeadEnders in 1990, as widower Charlie Slater, devoted father of Kat, Lynne, Little Mo and Belinda. One of his biggest EastEnders scenes was ruined by drink. “Charlie had just found out that his brother Harry, played by Michael Elphick, had got Kat pregnant and I had to spit in his face. We went to the studio canteen for lunch and Michael drank Guinness and triple whiskies. When we got back, he couldn’t do the scene. They cleared the set and he came out crying. I told him to go home and sleep it off. 9am the next morning, we did it in two takes.” Charlie Slater died on screen in January 2016, but even in his 80s Derek kept swimming and working out in a gym near his Hatfield home a week. He kept his brain active too, watching TV quiz shows. Sport was his specialist subject on Celebrity Eggheads – he’d supported Chelsea since 1955. His last mainstream TV appearance was in Jeff Pope’s 2019 ITV miniseries, A Confession. But the role he enjoyed most was as King Rat in the Grand Order of Water Rats. Their 2024 ball was the last time we spoke face-to-face but we often swapped bad-taste jokes on WhatsApp. The last one he sent me was on Christmas Eve. It was an un-PC cartoon of Santa if he’d converted to Islamism. It was typical of his irreverent sense of humour.
My favourite memory of Derek was when he roughed me up, Fred Pyall style, on my 1996 Bushell On The Box ITV show. He also prosecuted me for crimes against TV at the end of second series. Sleep well my friend.
*Captain Scarlet? He’s on the spectrum…
Jan 12. Reform have recruited former Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi. Whoopee! I thought their plan was to replace the jaded establishment, not resurrect it. Who next? Matt Hancock? Harvey Proctor? The ghost of Ted Heath? If Reform become Trans-Reformers – Tories In Disguise, they will alienate millions of voters. They say the party needs experienced people. I understand that, but should it extend to signing up lockdown zealots and sour losers? Maybe tomorrow we’ll get the headline: May Day! Farage Welcomes Theresa. “We had our disagreements but she knows the security code for the Number 10 drinks cabinet.”
This is the odd thing about British politics. You wouldn’t let a first-aider perform heart surgery on your loved ones and you wouldn’t put a lollipop man in charge of the army, so why do we periodically elect unqualified people to run our governments? It’s not just Rachel From Complaints wrecking growth, none of Starmer’s clueless Cabinet have any experience of running a business and the extent of their military savvy amounts to watching half an episode of Sharpe’s Rifles and going on a few anti-war/anti-America demos in their uni days.
Meanwhile as the tyrannical Iran regime gleefully guns down protesters who want freedom and rights for women, voices on the far-Left are calling their victims “agents of Mossad and the CIA”. In the name of ‘Marxism’ they’re siding with clerical fascists over brave young radicals. It’s as shameful as it is shameless.
Erich von Daniken. Dead? Or abducted by aliens? We may never know.
Jan 11. STOP PRESS: I’m sad to hear we’ve lost Derek Martin. Derek, who was 92, made his first big TV impact as a bent DI Fred Pyall in G.F. Newman’s Law & Order in the 70s, played debt collector Ronald King in ITV’s King & Castle in the 80s, and reached the pinnacle of his career in the 90s playing the prosecutor at my trial for “crimes against television” on ITV’s Bushell On The Box series finale (Ken ‘Reg Holdsworth’ Morley was the judge). Some also remember him as Charlie Slater in DeadEnders… Sleep well, my friend.
The return of The Night Manager got me thinking about all the great and varied spies we’ve seen on TV over the years. Here’s my list of the all-time best. Feel free to disagree.
Jan 10. Atomic Rooster famously warned us Death Walks Behind You. They didn’t think to mention that it starts jogging when you turn 70.
Jan 9. Here are some thoughts on last night’s The Traitors.
Jan 8. Just seen the shocking footage of a US ICE agent gunning down Renee Good in Minneapolis. He shot her three times at point blank range. Claims that mum-of-three Renee, 37, was using her vehicle as a weapon are clearly false. She wasn’t a threat and Republicans should not callously pretend otherwise. Truth isn’t the only casualty of America’s increasingly polarised society. Their politicians’ sense of right and wrong is on life support.
Jan 7. The more I watch the news, the more I identify with St. Paul of Thebes who lived on his tod in a mountain cave for decades.
If someone doesn’t cook up a brash TV action-hero detective called Storm Goretti we’ll be missing a trick.
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