WEBVTT
00:00:01.159 --> 00:00:02.887
There's a lot of your work
00:00:02.887 --> 00:00:07.074
that says quite a lot of interesting
things about the 20th century.
00:00:07.074 --> 00:00:12.063
Certainly the first thing that sprung
to mind was From Hell,
00:00:12.063 --> 00:00:16.834
was an idea in From Hell, which was
a big inspiration in my KLF book,
00:00:16.834 --> 00:00:21.188
but the idea was that the act of
Jack the Ripper, um,
00:00:21.188 --> 00:00:26.343
was what gave birth to the 20th century. I
was just curious where that idea came from.
00:00:26.343 --> 00:00:35.957
Well, that was my conceit
that resolved a lot of the material
00:00:35.957 --> 00:00:41.165
that had emerged during
my research into From Hell.
00:00:41.165 --> 00:00:46.259
Um ... when I was just looking
into the 1880s,
00:00:46.259 --> 00:00:50.425
I noticed all of these things
that had happened,
00:00:50.425 --> 00:00:57.394
that I think in 1882, Michelson and Morley
actually performed the experiments
00:00:57.394 --> 00:01:05.479
which were meant to iron out a couple of
last wrinkles in the theory of the aether,
00:01:05.479 --> 00:01:09.451
but ended up completely disproving
that aether existed,
00:01:10.231 --> 00:01:14.613
which was a kind of result, but not
the one that they were looking for.
00:01:14.743 --> 00:01:17.777
You'd got France going into Indochina.
00:01:18.507 --> 00:01:28.915
You had got the beginnings of the
modern art movement with Walter Sickert.
00:01:28.915 --> 00:01:35.466
You'd got some of the first kind of
modern realist writings
00:01:35.466 --> 00:01:38.059
with people like Emile Zola.
00:01:38.059 --> 00:01:46.883
You'd got a surprising amount of focusing
upon prostitutes in literature and the arts.
00:01:48.533 --> 00:01:57.452
And all of these things, which had gone on
to really colour and shape the 20th century,
00:01:57.452 --> 00:02:03.691
and then in 1888,
these senseless, violent murders.
00:02:05.141 --> 00:02:11.723
It just seemed to me that
symbolically, I could kind of
00:02:12.613 --> 00:02:20.254
position the Jack the Ripper murders
as the birth throes of the 20th century,
00:02:20.254 --> 00:02:23.472
with Jack the Ripper as a kind of
really ghastly midwife.
00:02:23.472 --> 00:02:27.747
[chuckles] Yeah, and there's the whole
tabloid sort of thing growing up around it
00:02:27.747 --> 00:02:30.181
and that sort of violent sort of stew,
so it sort of ...
00:02:30.181 --> 00:02:34.336
What struck me about reading Providence,
00:02:34.336 --> 00:02:38.236
even though it's not so overtly
about the 20th century,
00:02:38.236 --> 00:02:45.876
is the Lovecraftian world view
probably sums up that time
00:02:45.876 --> 00:02:51.470
better even than my book or anything
deliberately about the 20th century.
00:02:51.470 --> 00:02:53.345
Do you see it as a ... ?
00:02:53.345 --> 00:03:00.377
Well, yeah, I mean, I see ... Researching
Providence was quite an eye-opener,
00:03:00.377 --> 00:03:07.261
and it changed my opinion of Lovecraft.
Not of his stature as a writer --
00:03:07.261 --> 00:03:11.219
in fact, I think that only continues
to increase the more I think about it --
00:03:12.679 --> 00:03:17.464
but more of an understanding of him
in relation to his times.
00:03:18.184 --> 00:03:23.436
The thing is, Lovecraft is generally
positioned as an outsider,
00:03:23.436 --> 00:03:26.956
probably because that was the name
of one of his most famous stories,
00:03:26.956 --> 00:03:31.247
so it's not much of a reach.
But you actually look at Lovecraft,
00:03:31.247 --> 00:03:41.593
he was homophobic. This at a time
when gay men, principally gay men,
00:03:41.593 --> 00:03:44.539
some gay women as well,
but that was different,
00:03:44.539 --> 00:03:52.821
were starting to emerge quite vocally and
very visibly onto the streets of New York.
00:03:53.541 --> 00:04:00.445
There was a huge gay subculture in the
early 20th-century New York.
00:04:00.445 --> 00:04:03.951
It wasn't just something that started
after the Second World War.
00:04:04.841 --> 00:04:07.799
And these were becoming more visible.
00:04:07.799 --> 00:04:12.621
You'd got women; I mean, Lovecraft
was certainly not a misogynist, but ...
00:04:13.231 --> 00:04:20.746
he was perhaps somewhat awkward or
conflicted in his relationships with women.
00:04:20.746 --> 00:04:24.813
This was at a time when women
were just about to get the vote.
00:04:25.883 --> 00:04:33.828
There had been 20 years of the biggest influx
of immigrants that America had ever seen,
00:04:33.828 --> 00:04:41.952
up until 1910, 1920, um,
and that had led to conservative fears
00:04:41.952 --> 00:04:48.514
that American identity was going to be lost
beneath a tidal wave of miscegenation,
00:04:48.514 --> 00:04:59.983
inbreeding, sort of. All of these fears
were exactly those of the white,
00:04:59.983 --> 00:05:06.901
middle-class common man. I mean, the
Russian revolution had just happened in 1917,
00:05:06.901 --> 00:05:13.898
and in America there were all of these
strikes, which at the time
00:05:13.898 --> 00:05:17.627
looked like, oh, it's going to
happen over here.
00:05:17.627 --> 00:05:20.701
In fact, most people, when you
talk about the Red Scare,
00:05:20.701 --> 00:05:23.972
they think, oh, that's the 1950s,
that's McCarthyism.
00:05:23.972 --> 00:05:31.504
The Red Scare was 1919, and in some ways
Lovecraft became a perfect barometer
00:05:31.504 --> 00:05:35.201
because he was so sensitive,
so unbearably sensitive,
00:05:35.201 --> 00:05:38.492
that all of the fears
of the early 20th century,
00:05:38.492 --> 00:05:46.911
including the fears of ... uhhh ...
man's relegation in importance,
00:05:46.911 --> 00:05:51.012
given what we were starting to
understand about the cosmos.
00:05:51.012 --> 00:05:57.074
Lovecraft was unlike other people of his
day. He actually understood that stuff.
00:05:57.554 --> 00:06:00.199
He was very quick.
00:06:00.199 --> 00:06:05.949
He didn't like Einstein, but he was very
quick to assimilate Einstein's ideas.
00:06:05.949 --> 00:06:11.521
He didn't like quantum theory,
but he almost understood it.
00:06:13.071 --> 00:06:18.998
Yeah, this was it. He, in some ways his
stories represented the kind of landscape
00:06:18.998 --> 00:06:30.021
of fear, the territory of fear,
for the 20th century as a whole.
00:06:30.021 --> 00:06:33.343
So he didn't like the modernists at all,
in terms of writing and things like that.
00:06:33.343 --> 00:06:39.312
But he was a closet modernist himself.
I mean, yeah, he hated Gertrude Stein,
00:06:39.312 --> 00:06:44.313
T.S. Eliot, James Joyce.
He wrote a brilliantly funny,
00:06:44.313 --> 00:06:48.813
and actually very well-written
parody of The Wasteland,
00:06:48.813 --> 00:06:51.240
called Waste Paper.
00:06:52.000 --> 00:06:54.938
But, you actually look at
Lovecraft's writing,
00:06:54.938 --> 00:06:58.487
and much as he's decrying
all of the modernists,
00:06:58.487 --> 00:07:03.541
and much as he's bigging up
his favourite 18th-century authors,
00:07:03.541 --> 00:07:07.697
people like Pope, um,
actually Lovecraft is a modernist.
00:07:07.697 --> 00:07:10.864
He's using stream of consciousness
techniques,
00:07:10.864 --> 00:07:18.561
he is using glossolalia more impenetrable
than anything in Finnegan's Wake,
00:07:19.311 --> 00:07:29.425
he is using techniques of deliberately
alienating the reader or confusing the reader.
00:07:29.927 --> 00:07:34.894
His descriptions tend to be
along the lines of,
00:07:34.894 --> 00:07:39.674
"Here's three things that
Cthulhu doesn't look like."
00:07:40.154 --> 00:07:45.174
Or he would describe the colour out of
space as only a colour by analogy,
00:07:45.174 --> 00:07:50.799
so what, is it a sound, is it a rough
texture, or a smell? What?
00:07:51.581 --> 00:07:56.581
These are deliberate kind of techniques.
They're not flaws.
00:07:56.581 --> 00:08:00.841
They are techniques of
alienating the reader,
00:08:00.841 --> 00:08:03.903
of putting the reader into
an uncanny space,
00:08:03.903 --> 00:08:09.903
where language is no longer capable
of describing the experience.
00:08:09.903 --> 00:08:12.905
Yeah, and that sort of -- for horror,
it was, it was ...
00:08:12.905 --> 00:08:16.965
all the Gothic horror had sort of gone
and it was just the sort of modern horror.
00:08:16.965 --> 00:08:22.861
Yeah, well that's important because all
horror, or most horror up 'til Lovecraft,
00:08:22.861 --> 00:08:27.287
had all been predicated upon
the Gothic tradition,
00:08:27.287 --> 00:08:34.857
which is a tradition where you have an
enormous vertical weight in time
00:08:35.414 --> 00:08:40.265
that is bearing down upon
a fragile present.
00:08:40.966 --> 00:08:45.587
A history of dark things in the past
that are leading up to
00:08:45.587 --> 00:08:48.661
some terrifying denouement
in the present day.
00:08:49.591 --> 00:08:55.348
With Lovecraft, yes, there is an awful lot
of talking about Rimmer,
00:08:55.348 --> 00:08:57.545
antiquity and the past.
00:08:57.545 --> 00:09:02.003
But with Lovecraft I think that it's
a much more present horror of the future.
00:09:02.323 --> 00:09:09.128
He's talking about that time when man will
be able to organise all of his knowledge
00:09:09.128 --> 00:09:13.887
and when that time comes,
the only question is
00:09:13.887 --> 00:09:18.981
whether we will embrace this new
illuminating light,
00:09:18.981 --> 00:09:24.698
or whether we will flee from it into the
reassuring shadows of a new Dark Age,
00:09:24.698 --> 00:09:32.043
which is very prescient, given, say,
current fundamentalism,
00:09:32.703 --> 00:09:40.241
which is a direct -- a response to
too much knowledge, too much information.
00:09:40.241 --> 00:09:43.574
Let's take it all back to something
that we're sure of,
00:09:43.574 --> 00:09:46.922
that God created the world in six days.
00:09:48.336 --> 00:09:51.627
Yeah. In that way Lovecraft was sort of ...
00:09:53.208 --> 00:09:58.498
yeah, he was really exploring all of the
-- he was a very --
00:09:59.627 --> 00:10:02.321
he is still a very contemporary writer.
00:10:02.749 --> 00:10:11.236
I think that if you wanted to do as
Michael Moorcock did, in the '60s,
00:10:11.236 --> 00:10:15.176
Michael Moorcock was mainly
interested in modernism.
00:10:17.136 --> 00:10:23.121
He noticed that the science fiction genre
was laying around with its wheels up,
00:10:23.121 --> 00:10:27.485
and that nobody was doing much with it
apart from kind of cowboys in space,
00:10:27.485 --> 00:10:29.975
so he thought,
"Why don't we hijack this,
00:10:29.975 --> 00:10:34.203
"and make science fiction
a vehicle for modernism?"
00:10:34.203 --> 00:10:38.327
And then, yeah, J. G. Ballard,
all the rest.
00:10:39.235 --> 00:10:43.964
I think you could do the same thing with
Lovecraft, alone amongst horror writers.
00:10:44.432 --> 00:10:49.592
I think that Lovecraft's preoccupations
were so forward-looking that --
00:10:49.592 --> 00:10:55.661
and his writing techniques were so unusual
-- that yeah, you could use Lovecraft
00:10:55.661 --> 00:11:01.576
as the starting point for a new kind of
modernist horror, if you will.
00:11:01.921 --> 00:11:07.756
That sense of linking the 20th century
to this sort of impending horror, um,
00:11:07.756 --> 00:11:13.047
reminds me a bit of Century, or
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, vol. 3,
00:11:13.047 --> 00:11:19.254
the Century one, which for my mind is
probably the bleakest of all the Leagues
00:11:19.254 --> 00:11:26.127
sort of thing. It's got that sense that
the creative imagination withers away
00:11:26.127 --> 00:11:29.566
during the 20th century.
Is that what you were aiming for?
00:11:29.566 --> 00:11:33.797
Yes, it was. I got quite a bit
of criticism for that.
00:11:33.797 --> 00:11:39.732
I know that people were saying, after
reading the third book, they said
00:11:39.732 --> 00:11:45.116
that it was my equivalent of saying,
"It were all fields 'round here once."
00:11:45.926 --> 00:11:48.461
Which it wasn't.
That wasn't what I was saying.
00:11:48.461 --> 00:11:56.554
But what I was saying was that
I don't think it was unfair to choose
00:11:56.554 --> 00:12:06.104
The Beggar's Opera as representing
a big, important cultural event of 1910.
00:12:07.301 --> 00:12:12.425
I don't think it was unfair choosing
Donald Cammell's Performance
00:12:12.896 --> 00:12:18.780
as representing a big, important
cultural event in 1969.
00:12:19.901 --> 00:12:24.932
And I don't think it was unfair choosing
J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter
00:12:24.932 --> 00:12:31.682
as representing a big cultural event
from the early 21st century.
00:12:33.862 --> 00:12:37.500
I would say that if you were to plot
those things on a graph,
00:12:37.964 --> 00:12:41.401
the line isn't going up.
[JH, laughing] Yes.
00:12:42.106 --> 00:12:44.421
I think that it's a fair comment
00:12:44.805 --> 00:12:47.222
that our approach to culture
00:12:49.204 --> 00:12:54.348
in the mainstream has degenerated.
00:12:55.380 --> 00:12:59.378
That the values that people used to
put into a work of art,
00:12:59.378 --> 00:13:02.181
those have been eroded.
00:13:04.441 --> 00:13:12.972
And, yeah. I was trying to express that in
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
00:13:12.972 --> 00:13:16.679
because the whole of
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,
00:13:16.679 --> 00:13:25.128
it's about this massive planet of fiction
that has been a kind of a counterpart
00:13:25.128 --> 00:13:29.545
to our own world
for as long as we've had fiction.
00:13:30.697 --> 00:13:36.072
That we've made up this world that,
it's the world we want,
00:13:37.252 --> 00:13:42.446
the exciting world where exciting things
happen and meaningful things happen,
00:13:43.396 --> 00:13:49.509
and if you look at those two worlds,
there's interesting points of comparison,
00:13:49.509 --> 00:13:52.965
that they have similar events
that shaped them,
00:13:53.385 --> 00:13:57.764
but slightly different, and they
worked out slightly differently.
00:13:58.258 --> 00:14:04.121
So in Century it was using The League
to look at the 20th century
00:14:04.121 --> 00:14:09.214
from the point of view of
20th-century culture,
00:14:09.912 --> 00:14:16.475
and to draw what conclusions
seemed accurate.
00:14:18.683 --> 00:14:24.276
I wasn't saying that all culture in the
late 20th century was rubbish.
00:14:24.689 --> 00:14:26.601
I wasn't saying that culture was doomed.
00:14:27.235 --> 00:14:32.703
I was saying that mainstream culture
was becoming repetitive,
00:14:33.475 --> 00:14:36.006
was not having original ideas,
00:14:36.768 --> 00:14:41.087
would no longer be capable of
coming up with a Performance,
00:14:41.307 --> 00:14:44.996
let alone a Threepenny Opera.
00:14:45.244 --> 00:14:48.638
Yeah, it's, I mean, what struck me
when I was doing my 20th-century book
00:14:48.638 --> 00:14:52.274
was especially all the guys who took us
into space, took us to the moon --
00:14:52.274 --> 00:14:58.034
Sergei Korolev, Wernher von Braun --
the importance of Jules Verne to them.
00:14:58.034 --> 00:15:03.336
And then that culture of Buck Rogers
and Flash Gordon and things like that.
00:15:03.336 --> 00:15:06.868
And I was thinking about that when I was
watching -- d'you know, have you seen, um,
00:15:06.868 --> 00:15:08.701
Prometheus, the, uh ...
[AM] I haven't.
00:15:08.701 --> 00:15:14.752
It's really grim. Basically they
realize humanity's been, uh,
00:15:14.752 --> 00:15:17.421
built by aliens, so they go off
to find these aliens,
00:15:17.421 --> 00:15:22.148
and they finally find the aliens to say,
"Oh, godlike thing, why did you create us?"
00:15:22.148 --> 00:15:26.896
And the alien goes, "Oh, are these things,
these beings still around?"
00:15:26.896 --> 00:15:29.458
and just starts like punching them
in the face to sort of kill them.
00:15:29.458 --> 00:15:32.292
And it's about as bleak an idea
as you can imagine,
00:15:32.292 --> 00:15:36.201
and I just kind of wonder if
Wernher von Braun and those guys
00:15:36.201 --> 00:15:38.635
were growing up with that level
of science fiction,
00:15:38.635 --> 00:15:42.792
whether they'd have been quite so keen
to go for the moon and push us forward.
00:15:42.792 --> 00:15:49.229
Well, I mean, I think that science fiction
-- it's interesting what --
00:15:49.814 --> 00:15:53.477
the way that science fiction
was handled in the 20th century.
00:15:54.093 --> 00:15:57.977
I mean, science fiction, all right,
there's a lot of precursors for it,
00:15:59.017 --> 00:16:04.425
but a non-controversial starting point would
probably be Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
00:16:04.425 --> 00:16:05.581
[JH] Yeah.
00:16:05.881 --> 00:16:10.134
And then you'd move on to people
like Wells and Verne,
00:16:11.314 --> 00:16:13.376
about a century later.
00:16:14.996 --> 00:16:27.412
Now, all of those are actually kind of grim
warning visions of the potential future.
00:16:28.943 --> 00:16:38.331
They are potentially alarmist about the
nature of technology and what it will mean.
00:16:39.265 --> 00:16:42.790
With Mary Shelley, she was reacting
to the Industrial Revolution,
00:16:42.790 --> 00:16:48.379
which was actually starting up around her
while she was writing Frankenstein
00:16:48.379 --> 00:16:51.318
in 1814 or whatever it was.
00:16:52.305 --> 00:17:01.565
Wells, he is, all of his science fiction
books are for the most part dystopias.
00:17:02.865 --> 00:17:09.597
Time Machine, with its view of the class
system of Wells' day,
00:17:09.973 --> 00:17:15.201
even more stratified, literally, so that
you've got working-class cannibals
00:17:15.201 --> 00:17:22.178
living underground and feeding upon
these dopey, drippy middle-class
00:17:22.178 --> 00:17:28.261
sort of food animals, basically.
[JH] It's the austerity story.
00:17:28.261 --> 00:17:33.523
[AM] Yes, exactly. And Jules Verne.
Now, obviously Jules Verne
00:17:33.523 --> 00:17:39.294
is getting much more of a kick out of his
big machines, but he always says,
00:17:39.294 --> 00:17:43.303
"And imagine if these machines were to
fall into the hands of a madman!
00:17:43.303 --> 00:17:50.303
"Like Captain Nemo, who I secretly admire."
But at least it is a warning.
00:17:51.001 --> 00:17:57.533
1910, 1915, America discovers science
fiction in the form of Tom Swift.
00:17:59.501 --> 00:18:03.158
And it is a different thing altogether.
00:18:03.565 --> 00:18:06.241
It is not about giving
dire warnings for the future.
00:18:06.241 --> 00:18:11.095
It is about saying, "Look how great
America's going to be in the future."
00:18:11.533 --> 00:18:17.501
It's almost, I suspect ...
The tendency, in older nations,
00:18:17.501 --> 00:18:21.304
when we want to big ourselves up,
is to reach back to the past,
00:18:21.304 --> 00:18:25.773
to something imaginary in the past,
like King Arthur or something like that.
00:18:25.773 --> 00:18:30.189
America hasn't got that amount
of history to deal with,
00:18:30.189 --> 00:18:35.067
so in some ways what America needs
is science fiction.
00:18:35.247 --> 00:18:38.980
When we're trying to say,
"Look at what we were,"
00:18:38.980 --> 00:18:44.127
then America more or less has to say,
"Look at what we will be."
00:18:44.710 --> 00:18:50.343
And so their science fiction from the 1920s,
with the boom of the pulp magazines,
00:18:50.343 --> 00:18:57.103
it was all of this bright, optimistic
new frontier stuff,
00:18:57.634 --> 00:19:00.312
where it was going to be
Cowboys and Indians all over again,
00:19:00.312 --> 00:19:04.041
only it was going to be
Earthmen and Neptunians.
00:19:04.041 --> 00:19:09.700
But you could just go through the whole
of the tropes of the Western genre
00:19:09.700 --> 00:19:16.864
and pioneer fiction, but in space.
And it became this ... in my opinion,
00:19:16.864 --> 00:19:20.864
that was probably one of the worst things
to ever happen to science fiction.
00:19:21.258 --> 00:19:26.215
It took until the late 1940s,
after Hiroshima,
00:19:26.801 --> 00:19:32.165
for these new voices that had got
a radical sense of doubt
00:19:32.894 --> 00:19:38.333
to start to creep back into science
fiction, and that gave a brilliant era,
00:19:38.333 --> 00:19:48.626
probably the best era, of science fiction.
From, say, late '40s to the mid-'70s,
00:19:48.626 --> 00:19:52.561
when George Lucas brought out Star Wars,
00:19:52.976 --> 00:19:56.644
a piece of fundamentalist science fiction
if ever there was one,
00:19:56.644 --> 00:20:03.613
and turned the clocks back to the
science fiction ideas of 50 years before.
00:20:03.613 --> 00:20:07.714
Now we're in the position -- that whole idea
between science fiction and the real world
00:20:07.714 --> 00:20:12.465
interacting with each other -- now we get
things like Black Mirror, with the pig,
00:20:12.465 --> 00:20:17.289
and then, on Monday, that's no longer
science fiction, it's the, uh ...
00:20:18.419 --> 00:20:26.360
whether this is the sort of level of
leeway between fiction and nonfiction
00:20:26.360 --> 00:20:28.445
that we wanted at the end of this period.
00:20:28.445 --> 00:20:34.141
Well, I mean, I have said in the past
that I believe that the membrane
00:20:34.141 --> 00:20:39.360
between fiction and fact is porous
and semi-permeable,
00:20:39.360 --> 00:20:44.590
and I have become used to
my most ridiculous ideas,
00:20:45.920 --> 00:20:49.995
whether that be coming up with
V for Vendetta
00:20:49.995 --> 00:20:53.736
and then suddenly seeing a load of
Guy Fawkes-masked anarchists
00:20:53.736 --> 00:20:57.622
invading the world stage
-- which is a good thing --
00:20:57.622 --> 00:21:04.704
or having come up with the idea related to
my film project, Jimmy's End,
00:21:04.704 --> 00:21:10.706
of having a sinister clown manifesting in
various locations around Northampton,
00:21:10.706 --> 00:21:15.119
and returning from holiday and finding
that a sinister clown had manifested
00:21:15.119 --> 00:21:21.223
in Northampton, at the end of my street,
about a hundred yards from my front door.
00:21:21.223 --> 00:21:28.526
You start to get the impression that, yes,
sometimes things can percolate through
00:21:28.526 --> 00:21:31.728
from the realm of ideas
into the realm of actuality.
00:21:31.728 --> 00:21:36.901
I would say to Charlie Brooker
that it's his own fault.
00:21:36.901 --> 00:21:40.759
That, sort of, he shouldn't have written
about British prime ministers
00:21:40.759 --> 00:21:45.014
in an unholy relationship with a pig
if he didn't want this to happen.
00:21:45.514 --> 00:21:47.869
Y'know? So ... happy now?
00:21:48.275 --> 00:21:51.127
This is assuming, of course,
that it's not true,
00:21:51.127 --> 00:21:54.827
which -- I like to think it probably
isn't true, and that Lord Ashcroft
00:21:54.827 --> 00:21:58.462
is enough of a shit to have done that,
00:21:58.462 --> 00:22:04.023
but part of me just sort of,
it fits a bit too well,
00:22:04.023 --> 00:22:08.894
it just feels a bit too much like
a real occult initiation sort of ceremony.
00:22:08.894 --> 00:22:11.860
I remember somebody saying --
00:22:11.860 --> 00:22:16.757
this might have been someone like
Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo --
00:22:16.757 --> 00:22:26.693
saying about the idea of
Donny and Marie Osmond being married,
00:22:27.853 --> 00:22:33.442
and he was saying, "Yeah, I know that
that's not really true,
00:22:33.442 --> 00:22:38.928
"but in my heart it's true."
And I think that that is the way I feel
00:22:38.928 --> 00:22:47.638
about the revelations about David Cameron,
that, we all know that in his secret soul,
00:22:47.638 --> 00:22:52.344
David Cameron is exactly the man who
would do something like that.
00:22:52.344 --> 00:22:58.541
If he has not done it literally,
he has certainly done it metaphorically.
00:22:59.312 --> 00:23:04.405
So, yeah. I say,
without a shred of evidence,
00:23:04.405 --> 00:23:08.530
that I am going to believe that
for the rest of my life.
00:23:08.530 --> 00:23:10.666
Lovely, thanks very much, Alan.
[AM] You're very welcome.
00:23:10.666 --> 00:23:12.698
We'll go forward to the 21st century
00:23:12.698 --> 00:23:16.801
with that as the start of our
[unclear] of imagination. Thank you.