Father, Forgive Them. They Know Not What They Do
Doctor Terror investigates widespread cultural butchery...
This is not an easy article to write, particularly as it is a sort of companion piece to my report on Elstree Studios. It is not a happy piece, though: it is the tart salt in the sweet caramel or, as Jake Thackeray once put it, the grit in life's Vaseline. Tom Lehrer might have seen is as yet another wound inflicted as we all slide down the razor blade of life. So be warned: it describes acts of cinematic sacrilege which deserve to be punished by a lengthy period of imprisonment or (my preferred option) the electric chair.
"You Made Me Miss!"
Ah, film locations! Who can walk past Big Ben without thinking of the last remake of The Thirty Nine Steps, the BT Tower making you remember that Doctor Who adventure, The War Machines or visit The Flying Horse, as it now is once more, without remembering when it used to be The Tottenham, as it reminds you how important a hub it is in the Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling) murder mysteries with Strike and Robin. But something rotten is in the state of the British film locations world...
1. The Oakley Court Hotel
There is simply no better spot for a lover of great British film locations. For starters, every major horror star has shot a film here, sometimes more than one: Boris Karloff (Die, Monster, Die), Lon Chaney Jr (Witchcraft), Christopher Lee (The Curse of Frankenstein), Peter Cushing (Brides of Dracula), Vincent Price (Theatre of Blood, the scene in which Arthur Lowe literally loses his head) and Frankie Howerd (The House in Nightmare Park). Only Bela Lugosi spoiled things by making his British films at Nettlefold Studios in Walton-on-Thames, just around the corner.
It was Frank N Furter's castle in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (inside and out), the school in The Wildcats of St Trinian's, the old, dark house in Hammer/William Castle's Old Dark House, Tommy Steel's stomping ground in Half a Sixpence, the bits of Cambridge they wouldn't let them film in when Eddie Redmayne portrayed Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything and tons of others (The Reptile, The Plague of the Zombies, The Man in Black, Mumsie, Nanny, Sonny and Girly, the Peter Cook & Dudley Moore Hound of the Baskervilles...need I go on?)
I had my 49th birthday there, with a treasure hunt, a trivia quiz and a meal in the exact room where they ate Eddie. Meat Loaf, anyone? But dark clouds were forming. It was bought by the execrable Soho House. Now there is a wall around it (with machine gun emplacements, I shouldn't wonder). Try popping in for a drink on a summer's day and see how far you get. May the Lord have mercy on their souls.
2. The Bow Street Tavern
This Covent Garden pub was, until very recently The Globe and featured very prominently in Alfred Hitchcock's last half- good film, Frenzy, the only semi-decent one he made after The Birds. Just inside was a lovely, framed photo of Hitchcock directing away inside the pub.
That photo has now mysteriously vanished, replaced by a job lot of crappy old photos of old coppers and crims. I enquired of the barmaid what had gone wrong...
She looked at me with infinite sadness in her practically hollow eye sockets and said, pleadingly: 'You've got to understand...this is a THEME PUB now...'
3. The Black Swan (aka 'The Mucky Duck'), Ockham
You will understand that, by now, I was feeling pretty low, all the more so as I had already been here a few years ago, and been met with blank faces by the bar staff. This rough old bikers' pub was the interior of practically every pub in Inspector Morse, shot from various angles and dressed slightly differently. They would show an establishing shot of an actual Oxford pub, say, the Eagle and Child, and then it was straight back to the Mucky Duck.
More famously still, it was the interior of The Slaughtered Lamb in An American Werewolf in London. Need I say more? Pub royalty, right? Since then, the bikers have gone, replaced by multimillionaire Chelsea players whose idea of team spirit is to shag their teammates' wives and whose coaching careers fail upwards more emphatically than even the trajectory of Buggy the Clown in One Piece. It has a fucking HELIPAD now, for Christ's sake.
So my expectations were low. 'Excuse me,' I said.
'The dartboard? It's where the door to our beer garden now is. Right by the Slaughtered Lamb pub sign,' said Megan behind the bar.
Oh, happy, happy day! Thank you, thank you, Megan! You have restored my faith in humanity.
A bit.