Spreading the Happiness

For some reason last Saturday I had the song Spread a Little Happiness going round and around inside my head. It was featured in the early 1980s film-version of a 1970s TV-play called Brimstone and Treacle, in which it was performed (over the credits at the end) by Sting. (He's the one singing it in the video above: he also starred in the film, but the film is not a musical and this video is not part of it.) Another song featured in the film though was Up the Junction by the Squeeze, whose title was inspired by a cutting-edge '60s novel and kitchen-sink drama of the same name set in Battersea - the eponymous "Junction" of course being Clapham Junction. Interestingly though, whereas the original Up the Junction was pro-abortion, depicting a morally degenerate Clapham and Battersea working class for whom illicit sexual encounters and unplanned pregnancies were mere facts of life, the song is (at least by inference) anti-abortion. The original television version of Brimstone and Treacle was eventually broadcast in 1979 - the year I was born and brought home to grow up in the area - but only after having been kept back for a long time – since before my parents moved into the area, in fact - due to concerns at the BBC about taste and decency.

Sting himself was brought up a Catholic. As a boy he was taught to serve as an altar-boy and could recite the responses for the Latin Mass off by heart. He is also a fairly committed family man. On the writing of Brimstone and Treacle, Dennis Potter said in 1978

I had written Brimstone and Treacle in difficult personal circumstances. Years of acute psoriatic arthropathy—unpleasantly affecting skin and joints—had not only taken their toll in physical damage but had also, and perhaps inevitably, mediated my view of the world and the people in it. I recall writing (and the words now make me shudder) that the only meaningful sacrament left to human beings was for them to gather in the streets in order to be sick together, splashing vomit on the paving stones as the final and most eloquent plea to an apparently deaf, dumb and blind God. [...] I was engaged in an extremely severe struggle not so much against the dull grind of a painful and debilitating illness but with unresolved, almost unacknowledged, 'spiritual' questions.

One of the characters in the play spends most of the time in a coma after surviving a car accident. She recovers only after she has been sexually abused by a mysterious visitor (the Sting character in the film). Mixing fantasy and reality was a trademark of Potter’s writing, and it is suggested in the play’s title that the visitor is the Devil. Potter himself had had similar experiences when, as a 10-year-old boy in 1945, between VE Day and VJ Day, his uncle used to come into his bedroom at night and give him blowjobs.

The director of the film-version of the play was Peter Collison, whose of directorial credits included The Italian Job and a politically corrected film-version of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Niggers that starred two former Bond villains and Oliver Reed (who, it is said, once dated one of my aunts – which sometimes makes me vaguely wonder about my own Christian name, which I also share with one of my cousins). Collinson's last film, which he directed whilst he was dying of cancer, was The Earthling, and was about a man dying of cancer. It co-starred a very young Ricky Schroder, whose career had been launched by Franco Zefirelli with his re-make of The Champ – which is possibly the greatest tear-jerker of all time.

Schroder himself, finally, is something of a remarkable figure, having been the ultimate TV sitcom moppet in Silver Spoons in the 1980s and then gone on to be not just a serious actor but also one of Hollywood’s token right-wingers, converting to Mormonism, raising a large family, and publicly addressing Republican rallies in support of President George W Bush. He was last seen on TV in the popular right-wing political thriller serial 24, appearing opposite Kiefer Sutherland - who, let's not forget, despite 24's supposed endorsement of socking it to the goddamn terrorists (and even supposedly endorsing torture at that) just happens to be Hollywood A-List liberal Donald Sutherland's son.

It takes all sorts, I suppose.