The Daily Mail – Saturday 6th August, 2005

Richard E Grant’s debut as a director is a brave journey into his African childhood, exploring his parents’ alcoholism and adultery. He tells Moira Petty why he had to relive a past in which is father tried to kill him.

A young boy wakes up on the back seat of a car and witnesses a scene that will haunt him forever. His mother reaches over and caresses the driver, his father’s best friend. The 11 year-old knows this is taboo and shuts his eyes when his mother turns to check on him. Thinking he is still asleep, the couple begin a passionate bout of lovemaking while the boy looks on in horror. This extraordinary scene opens Wah-Wah, a powerful film about African colonial life in Swaziland, in the late 1960’s, written and directed by Richard E Grant.

The 48 year-old film star, who was brought up in Swaziland, has talked often of his unhappiness following his mother’s affair and her subsequent divorce from his father. Most observers assumed that Richard had merely drawn on his experiences to create an autobiographical film, which premieres at the Edinburgh International Film Festival later this month.

But, in fact, as Richard now reveals, Wah-Wah is a precise, poignant facsimile of his traumatic childhood, details of which he has not previously divulged. “When I sat down to write it, I had to forget who it might affect. I just wrote as truthfully as I could,” he says.

Despite his leading position in Swazi society, and a second marriage, Richard’s father never recovered from the faithlessness of his first wife. He sank into alcoholism, causing the father-son relationship with Richard to reverse. At one point, when Richard was 15, his father even fired a pistol at his son in a drunken bid to kill him.

There is only one major deviation from the truth in the script. The film portrays the young boy as an only child, but Richard has a brother, Stuart, two and a half years his junior, now an accountant in South Africa. Richard says the omission is because he did not want the focus to waver from his own young self, but he admits there has also always been animosity between the brothers, who have not met since their father’s funeral in 1981.

Shot with a delicate cinematography showing the beauty of the African landscape, the film stars Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson as Richard’s parents; Emily Watson as his stepmother and Julie Walters as a family friend who tries to seduce the abandoned husband. There is also a cameo from Richard’s 16 year-old daughter, Olivia, who was born prematurely after Richard and his wife, voice coach Joan Washington, had suffered three miscarriages and the death of a baby girl soon after birth.

Richard, who does not appear in Wah-Wah himself, achieved stardom in 1987 with his depiction of a drunken bohemian in the cult film Withnail & I. It was his freeway to Hollywood and roles in films including How To Get Ahead in Advertising, Dracula, The Player and The Portrait of a Lady. Despite success and the celebrity circles in which he moves (US comedy actor Steve Martin is one of his closest friends), he has maintained an ironic aloofness about Hollywood that he used to waspish effect in his film diaries, With Nails. He also appears in the Argos TV commercials opposite Julia Sawalha, playing an effete and demanding employer. His substantial fee from the ads (he says 15 days pays the equivalent of three months on a film) allowed him the time off to write Wah-Wah, his firm film script, in 1999.

It took him five more years to find investors for a film by a first-time director, to cast it and to achieve the necessary permission from the King of Swaziland to film there. “He is an absolute monarch ad the Swazis prostrate themselves before him. As a white Swazi, I wasn’t required to do that. We met at the palace where he received diplomats. He pointed to the throne next to his, and asked me to sit there and tell him about the film. All the doors opened to us after that.”

The film is set in 1969, just as Swaziland achieved independence from Britain. Richard’s father was so popular that he was asked to stay on in his job as Swaziland’s Director of Education. The film exposes the hypocrisy for the expats who tolerated adultery but not divorce. It also details how Richard became involved in a production of the musical Camelot, to be staged before Princess Margaret at the independence celebrations.

Acting was Richard’s escape route from his troubled childhood, and ultimately provided him with a new life beyond Africa.

Working on Wah-Wah has been cathartic. “People I’d grown up with were concerned that rewriting my past in such an exposing way could turn me into a basket case. They asked, “Are you going to cope?” Although it was painful, it was a profound experience. My intention was never to be vengeful about my past but, through writing about it, to understand it.”

We are in a hotel near his home in Richmond, Surrey. Richard has flown straight in from Canada, where he is making a World War II film. He hair has been cropped for the role and he is deeply tanned, with an African bead necklace at his throat and a watch on each wrist, one set to UK time and one to whichever country he is working in. Previous interviewers have found him mercurial and liable to complain afterwards about the encounter. Today, though, he speaks with candour.

“The key to my story was that moment in the car, when I knew I was seeing something I shouldn’t have seen. I was shocked about the sex, which I heard as much as I saw. I was so innocent and it forced me into carrying a secret that made me feel terrible. It also instigated my face-twisting, an involuntary movement that lasted for a year and which the boy in the film does. Even now, if I get really shocked, I can feel the ghost of the impulse to do that again. Here, I’ll show you”. His face becomes a gargoyle, mouth wide and snarling, features distorted in a rictus of horror.

While Richard remained living with his father, Henrik Abraham Esterhuysen, a third-generation white Swazi, his mother, Leonie Hogan, a South African, ran off with her mining engineer lover and rarely saw her sons again. When her lover signed a contract wow or in Peru, she attempted a reconciliation with Henrik, but Richard, his father’s protector, told him the real reason for her return and she was shown the door. He father died of lung cancer aged 51, when Richard was 24.

Richard’s relationship with his mother remained fraught until six years ago, when he plucked up the courage to demand answers from her and effected a rapprochement that led directly to the making of Wah-Wah. “My daughter was then about the age I was when my mother left home, and seeing how vulnerable Olivia was prompted me to try to deal with my mother in an adult way. I asked my mother if she could bear to write me a letter to explain things from her point of view. I didn’t think she would, but a couple of months later an 18-page letter arrived. In it, I heard the voice of a woman who, at 21, married a colonial civil servant and then had to follow the strict pecking order of this tin pot country. She also revealed her frustration at not being allowed to work.

“It was revelatory for me and a great unburdening for her. It allowed me to tell her, year by year, my version of what had happened. I told her I had seen her with her lover. She was devastated. As in the film, my mother really did send a wreath to my father’s funeral with a card that read, “As ye sow, so shall ye reap”. I hadn’t previously taken on the full impact of it. Once you understand people, you can’t demonise them and I could write the script without being venomous.” Leonie is now 77 and has been married for 27 years to her second husband – not the man for whom she left Richard’s father. “She was very handsome, the Lauren Bacall of Swaziland,” says Richard. His mother is fully supportive of the film, but was aghast to hear of the incident in which Richard was almost killed by his father.

He kept his revolver on a shelf behind his shirts. He had decided to kill my stepmother, who had tried to leave him, but then he found me in the pantry emptying his crate of Scotch bottles down the sink. He was very drunk and said, “I’m going to blow your brains out”, and chased me round the garden. I felt utterly helpless but I goaded him, saying, “Go on, get it over with.” I thought I was going to die. The gun went off and the bullet whistled past my head and then he was full of self-pity and remorse. The next day he couldn’t remember a thing. I knew he was in pain and had never recovered from my mother’s departure.”

Leonie had come to Richard’s bedroom at 6 am on the day she left to break the news that she was going, and was leaving her sons behind. “By that night, my father was slumped, passed out in his chair. He was one man by day and another by night, when the demon drink took over. I began parenting him, which is the wrong way round, but that has helped make me who I am.” In the film, Richard’s father dies of lung cancer which Richard is 15. “My father took nine months to die, but in the film it is truncated to six weeks.”

His father’s real deathbed scene included a moment that has lodged itself in Richard’s memory. “He could hardly speak, but when my stepmother left the room, he tried to tell me something. He took ages to get the words out, which were, “I never stopped loving her.” I asked him if he meant my stepmother but he said, no, my mother. That was the bomb that went off. That was when I understood how and what he was and the reason for his descent into alcoholism.”

Grieving for his father, Richard left South Africa for London in 1982. With only his experience as co-founder of a radical theatre troupe behind him, he launched himself as an actor. Much later, when he became famous, his brother, Stuart, sold his story to a Sunday newspaper. “I was amazed, but we had never got on. My mother said we were like chalk and cheese.” Stuart complained that Richard had turned up at their father’s funeral with orange hair. “I had dyed my hair blond for a role and he thought that was disrespectful. He called ma a pansy in the article because I didn’t play rugby and drink five pints a night. As a boy, I had a string puppet theatre and was involved in a theatre club, which was deemed sexually questionable. The derision stiffened my resolve to be an actor. And I didn’t ever question my sexuality. I knew who I was.”

Richard’s childhood has naturally affected his attitude towards relationships. “I’m a very loyal person and I put a higher value n monogamy because I witnessed the emotional cost of my father’s cuckolding. In the pre-AIDS Seventies, at drama school in Cape Town, everyone was fiercely bonking everyone else, but all the relationships I’ve had have been long-term. Joan and I have been together since 1983 and married since 1986. I was lucky enough to meet someone I am completely compatible with.”

Joan is eight years older than Richard. “I don’t think about the age difference. She’s not an insecure person and I have to listen to her telling me how gorgeous Orlando Bloom, is, after she’s voice-coached him. When I come back from location, there’s a bit of readjustment but we know each other so well: we know which buttons not to press.”

After a string of miscarriages, Joan gave birth in 1986 to a girl, whom they named Tiffany, who was two months premature. Tragically, she died half an hour later. “Dealing with the death of a child is as testing an experience as you can go through. You see your partner as raw and vulnerable as they can be. It would have been hard for us if we hadn’t had Olivia. It’s a cliche, but being a father is the best thing ever.”

He cast Olivia as the first love of his leading character. “I knew she could act because I had seen her in school plays. Directing her was just a continuation of the conversations we have at home. I met my real first love, an expat’s daughter, in the theatre club. It was an immature love and my hormones were going haywire. I just wanted to kiss someone.”

Richard’s wife was also in Swaziland last year for the shoot and was the voice coach for Emily Watson, who plays Richard’s stepmother as an American (she was really South African). She is the figure who gives the film its name, complaining about all this “Wah-Wah”. Richard says, “it’s what they called the coded way in which colonials spoke.”

Richard is played as a young boy by newcomer, Zac Fox and, as a teenager, by Nicholas Hoult, the star of About A Boy. “In the seven months between casting Nicholas and beginning filming, he grew from 5ft 10in to 6ft 3in. Gabriel Byrne was worried it would look odd, but he hadn’t broadened out and had the gawkiness I had as a teenager.”

Richard, a lanky 6ft 2in. says, “I wasn’t a lady-killer. I was so skinny you could count every rib, and I had acne. I still have the scars.”

Richard is used to dealing with divas. While making Gosford Park, he attended a dinner at which he was seated next to Madonna, who barked that she didn’t like the film’s director, Robert Altman. “I said, “Let’s discuss your film career, shall we?” She gave me the eyeball and then quit having a go. She tried to wrong-foot you to see if you will stand up to her and if you do, you pass the litmus test, but if you fall apart that’s the end.”

Richard’s next film project is to adapt his futuristic novel By Design for the screen, but, for now, he and the cast of Wah-Wah are promoting the film at festivals in Edinburgh and Toronto. Wah-Wah may have been built on unhappiness but, he says with a pearly white smile, watching his formative years being brought to life has, paradoxically, been the happiest experience of his professional life.

Wah-Wah premieres at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on August 17. For tickets tel: 0131 623 8030 or visit www.edfilmfest.org.uk

The Guardian – 6th August 2005

He’s known as a raconteur, famously indiscreet. Now Richard E Grant has made a film about his boyhood in colonial Swaziland: a bold move for an actor who, so he tells Sally Vincent, can’t bear to watch his own movies.

“I have kept a diary,” he said, “since I witnessed my mother’s adultery at the age of nine.” As he spoke, an elderly woman was slowly trundling her luggage trolley so close to our knees we had to draw our legs out of her path. Richard E Grant was unfazed, as though his narrative focus was so fine he had not noticed her at all. He is a disconcerting fellow. This morning, at the crack of dawn, he came off the red-eye from Newfoundland and, if he was a normal human being, he’d be crashed out in his pit, sleeping off his jet lag, not spring-heeling around this rowdy hotel. I can never trust manic energy, let alone a man with eyes the colour of turquoise. It’s not natural.

However, I like to think the elderly woman took the bit about seeing his mamma in flagrante to her room to mull over. I was stuck on the 40 years of diary addiction. Diarists make me very uneasy. There’s something disempowering and control-freakish about them, as if they’re going to snatch the pen from my hand and stab me with it. He is not, he said (not for the first or last time), a shrink. He can only tell me he began his habit of diarising at a time when he was beset by guilt and loss. He knew something terrible and he couldn’t tell anyone about it, so he wrote down his understanding of the aforementioned debacle as a way of off-loading the pressure of what he knew. And went on doing it because it became his way of dealing with the world.

“It means you are simultaneously inside and outside your own life all the time,” he said, “watching yourself experiencing what is happening to you, then having a written conversation with yourself about it. It’s a kind of control mechanism; an exploration and a way of keeping a record.”

It can be quite ruthless, apparently. He wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, though he has been told he has got rather good at it. Richard E never comes out with a straightforward boast. It’s always something some kind person has told him that has given him the courage or the confidence to do the things he has done. Otherwise, he gives the impression, he’d have sweltered his life away in a paralysing miasma of self-disgust, watching himself making a complete tit of himself, knowing he would shortly be recalling and describing every microscopic detail of his tit-ship.

So excruciating is his self-consciousness, he has only once watched himself on the screen and that was nearly 20 years ago when he sat through the entirety of Bruce Robinson’s glorious Withnail And I in such an agony of disillusion that by the end he was practically welded to his seat and had drawn blood from his wife’s comforting hand. Thereafter, he was lionised up hill and down dale, but deep down he has always known he buggered up, let everybody down, missed the boat, exposed himself as a total no-hoper who would never work again. He also knows, and will say with perfect equanimity, that Withnail was his first big break, without which he would never have worked with Altman, Coppola and Scorsese, never been the movie star who, in the mid-90s published a memoir of his years in Hollywood that, yes, does credit to his addiction to diary-writing despite its catchpenny title With Nails, which doesn’t mean anything except a lack of confidence in the undoubted charm and cleverness of its content. He shrugs that one off. What could he do? The publisher had to know best, after all – they thought he was worth publishing.

After 60 films, things haven’t got any better. “You finish a movie and you think, there, you’ve done it, really well, or best you can. But if you watch it, you see it was just bollocks. You have to look at the discrepancy between what you hoped and imagined and the reality of yourself and all your shortcomings. You only see your own failure. I’d rather,” he said, “stick with the first idea – just have the experience of working – and leave it at that. You’ve got to protect the old bravado.”

It is also sort of true that Withnail has been a double-edged sword throughout his subsequent career. The identification was perhaps too indelible. Withnail was iconic. And he was Withnail. He was once telephoned by a casting director’s secretary who, passing him on to the big man, was heard to say, “It’s Withnail.” I can see Withnail in him now and I can feel it’s not fair. The eternally out of work wannabe actor, swilling alcohol, chain smoking, a sociopathic ratbag who’d pimp his best friend for a square meal and a bottle of plonk. I wanted to know what happened to him. You know, after the end of the film, where he stood all alone in the pissing rain watching the tragic, limp wolf in its zoo enclosure and you couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. And Richard E, who is allergic to alcohol, doesn’t smoke and is a thoroughly good egg, was pleased to tell me that Withnail never acted, contracted throat cancer and died of alcoholic poisoning at the age of 48, the list of disasters tripping off his tongue with all the emotion of a man reciting a laundry list. I wish I hadn’t asked. No redemption then? No redemption.

Richard E has now lived for exactly as many years as Withnail. He intends, he says, to live for ever. It has been 10 years since he first thought of writing and directing his own story, and nine since he cocked the snook at Hollywood with With Nails, an acerbic account of his days in LA, for which he knew he would surely be punished. He does not expect to be invited back. “What is there now?” he said. “Famous people running away from explosions. That’s it. They call it production values. Audiences will queue round the block to see an unimaginably highly-paid film star running away from a fantastically expensive explosion. They think it’s their money’s worth. I despair that’s what people have to do.”

It does, however, explain why so many “thesps”, as Richard E insists on calling his fellow actors, move away from the obscenely big-bucks industry and into television and small production companies – “to enact being human beings instead of cartoon characters leaping from imploding buildings”.

He once sat down with the actor Matthew Modine (Birdy, Full Metal Jacket) and discussed the Hollywood star system. What you have to do, they concluded, to make the transition from film actor to film star, is to be in movies where you are seen to be morally justified in killing people, while retaining your sex appeal. Literally getting away with murder while being perceived as a highly desirable fellow. Failing that, you have to take the other option; play a psychopath, a deaf-mute, an amputee or a blind man. This being so, Richard E somehow lost any ambition he might have had to climb the Hollywood ladder to the topmost wrung.

“Hollywood,” he said, “is on what they call a shit-tide, meaning a tide where stuff comes in and goes out very quickly. People come in, get a part in something, get in a magazine, then they go away and you never hear of them again. The sun shines, the level of paranoia is bottomless and everybody you meet has an agenda. And that’s it. Showbusiness, 24 hours a day. If you’re doing well, you’re a target, nobody’s interested in you except how you can be of use to them. And you can’t engage with anyone, you can only engage with their agenda. It is all,” he ended enigmatically, “very anti-sex.”

In the early years of his visibility as a British actor, Richard E Grant seems to have magnetised an abiding scepticism from the press. It has been as though showbusiness hacks were somehow thrown by the combination of low-key openness and casual irony that they took to be some kind of pretentiousness. The E was particularly bothersome to them. “What’s the E for?” they’d go. And he’d tell them there was already a Richard Grant on the scene when he was applying for his Equity card, and his agent didn’t think using his real surname, Esterhuysen, was going to be a thrill a minute on film credits, so the E was a sort of convenient compromise. By the time the first Richard Grant retired, the die, as it were, had been cast. Only they didn’t believe him. He explained he was from Swaziland, where his father was a minister of education, and they took that as so much more old flannel, as though Hugh Grant (no relation) had claimed to be Chinese.

Somewhere back in Richard E’s paternal ancestry, there were men who were Dutch or Hungarian and certainly Afrikaner. Yet he feels his father was an Englishman, working for the British government, and he, himself, is a Swazi who happens also to be English. Now living in Surrey, a brisk walk from where we sit, he will always classify himself as an immigrant. He used to wear two watches, one telling Greenwich Mean Time, the other the time of day in Swaziland. Swaziland was his home. Where he was born. Where he grew up and where his heart is. When called upon to sing at auditions, he would stand solemnly and belt out the Swazi national anthem. He didn’t mean to be funny.

He patently enjoys talking about his homeland. The singular beauty of its landscape, what he refers to as the serenity of the indigenous population, the nefarious eccentricities of the European ruling class. “Swaziland is a small part of south-east Africa, the last country in the continent to gain its independence,” he said, sounding rather as one of his father’s kindly schoolmasters must have sounded as he stood by a British government-issue blackboard in front of a crowd of happy Swazi schoolkids. “The curious thing about Swaziland is that it is a one-tribe, single-language country, so, unlike almost everywhere else in Africa, they never had any intertribal warfare. It was a protectorate, which meant the colonials who lived there had been invited and regarded themselves as necessary and welcome by common consent. It was a very hermetically-sealed society,” he went on, then dropped the schoolmasterly dirge, “It was a sort of equatorial Ealing. A most peculiar little enclave.”

Nowadays, Swaziland could hardly be described in such rose-tinted terms if, indeed, it ever could. Its peculiarities include a notoriously profligate monarch who bats off any attempt at democracy, one of the world’s highest HIV infection rates and subsistence on less than a dollar a day for the majority of the population.

The enclave of his memory has become a lifelong preoccupation for Richard E. The black/white social divide, the suburban White Mischief promiscuity of the colonial ladies and gentlemen, the contradictions between private and public lives, the pomposities and snobberies and hierarchies are all ludicrous in hindsight. But as children, we don’t have that perspective. “When you’re in the madhouse,” he said, succinct as ever, “you don’t know everyone’s mad because it’s your norm. You don’t know anything else.” He subscribes to the notion, “Give me a boy till he’s seven and I will give you the man”, and has had a good many years to brood from an adult perspective. And his affection for Swaziland is undiminished. Class barriers, hypocrisy, snobbery, highnesses and lownesses; these are the sources of our national comedy, he says. It was all so 1950s, so uniquely and typically English.

These are the things that shaped him, boy and man, like it or not. When, in the late 90s a producer asked him to write a screenplay for his own film, he felt he was already halfway there. Wah-Wah was in his head. All he had to do was write it down, which he did, in two and a half months flat. Then the fun started. His producer withdrew to take up social work in the West Indies and Richard E was left holding the script. From 1999 to 2004, he flogged what he refused to believe was a dead horse. Every producer, every finance company he went to, said no. “It’s a chicken and egg situation,” he said, “you’ve got to get name actors in order to get the finance, and in order to get the name actors you’ve got to bullshit that you’ve got the finance, while all the time you feel the whole thing could just unravel, the wheels come off the pram, everything conspires to make you sink into a pit of self-pity and despair.” The idea of help from friendly thesps was fairly abhorrent to him. “When an actor asks you to read his script, your heart sinks. The number of scripts I’ve been given by actors that are so unbelievably terrible! It’s well known that actors are lousy writers.”

Still, he gritted his teeth and showed his dream script to Gabriel Byrne. And he liked it. So Richard E had found his father. And so it went on, one step forward, two steps back. Permission to film in his country granted by the King of Swaziland, more rewrites and castings and suddenly it’s June 7 2004 and he has £4m, a star cast (Gabriel Byrne, Julie Walters, Miranda Richardson, Emily Watson, Celia Imrie) and seven weeks to make his movie.

“It was all a bit kick-bollocks-scramble-and-squeak,” he said eloquently. “A bit like organising a fantastically huge wedding, and then just popping the little bride and groom figurine on top of the cake.” He’d worried his guts out over his directorial debut, thinking he didn’t have the technical know-how, but, when the crunch came, he hit the ground running. “I loved every nanosecond of it,” he said. “I felt like the boy with the biggest train set, more Meccano gear than anyone else. I loved being asked 2,000 questions a day, storyboarding every move, knowing as though by instinct exactly where the camera had to be, because it was my story.”

It was, he agreed, a kind of exorcism for him, but also “a fantastic treat” to go back into his past with actors to recreate the reality of his boyhood. It was as though the five years of boyhood encapsulated on film came – with the help of his friends and two lads, one 10, one 15, whom he calls his doppelgangers – to represent the whole cycle of his life, from the small boy who made a shoebox theatre with figures stuck on lollipop sticks, to the glove puppets, to marionettes on strings, to school plays, to amateur dramatics and drama school and film acting and then back again to Swaziland, watching his takes on a playback monitor a similar size to his original shoebox.

If Wah-Wah was a self-indulgence in its making, the finished product is a prime example of a genre rarely, if ever, attempted by British or American film-makers: a child’s experience, impeccably observed through the narrow lens of the child’s perspective. In the mid-20th century, there were French, Italian, Spanish, even Swedish examples of this, but Anglo-American influences gradually either sentimentalised or forgot the starkly one-dimensional reality of childhood, the solipsism of the child observing adult behaviour without the defence of detachment.

Wah-Wah opens with a small boy pretending to sleep in the back of a car while a man and woman copulate on the front seat, broadens to the edgy domesticity of the boy’s home life, hones in on his facial tic, a mouth-gaping silent scream, then lingers on his private hobby as he holds two lollipop stick puppets, one in each hand, and has them shout Shuddup-Shuddup-Shuddup at each other. And so, with much Proustian detail, we go on. The boy and Swaziland get their independence in the end, or whatever it is we take for independence, and you can make what you will of the moral of the piece. Richard E says it’s a love story, or it tells you how you pay for the choices you make in life. I think it’s more a case of you don’t always get what you want, but, like the Rolling Stones tell us, if you try sometimes, you get what you need. He quite liked that idea. He said he still felt the urge to do the silent scream, big as he is.

We chatted on about the film for a while: how he called it Wah-Wah because that was how his dad’s second wife described the conversational tone of colonialists at their leisure; the country club’s choice of Camelot for the am-dram treat for Princess Margaret’s official visit to mark Independence Day; and how, driven by lack of white talent to include a black man in their production, they scrupulously whited-up his face with plimsoll cleaner so Margaret wouldn’t notice. Even so, she made her excuses and left in the interval. Said she wasn’t feeling well, apparently. It gradually emerged, to my astonishment, that give or take the odd tinkering with the timescale, Wah-Wah is not just true, but literally true, frame by frame. Richard E was surprised I was surprised.

Wah-Wah opens the Edinburgh International Film Festival on August 17. Tickets can be ordered on 0131-623 8030 (or at edfilmfest.org.uk).

Richard E Grant will appear in Simon Gray’s Otherwise Engaged at the Criterion Theatre, London, from October 25, following a five-week regional tour.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

Thanks to Stargazer (via The Times). Still yet to be confirmed by REG.

Reality bites as celebrities are served to the sharks.
By Adam Sherwin, Media Reporter

Reality television has sunk to new depths by dangling celebrities in front of the world’s most fearsome predator, marine campaigners say.

Ruby Wax and Richard E. Grant will be among the celebrities lowered in a cage into the waters of Shark Alley, off the coast of South Africa, while a noxious mix of blood and fish is used to lure the residents.

But environmental groups have condemned ITV1’s Celebrity Shark Bait, arguing that the booming tourist trade in “cage diving” has humiliated dangerous animals and was responsible for an increase in shark attacks.

Each year thousands of British thrill-seekers flock to Shark Alley, a stretch of ocean 60 miles south of Cape Town, where they pay £100 for an encounter with a great white.

Divers are lowered in metal cages while tour operators entice the creatures with “chum”, a soup of blood, mashed pilchards and sardines.

Safety fears increased last year after an 18ft (5.5m) great white bit into the bars of the half-submerged cage containing Mark Currie, of Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria. The boat’s captain pulled Mr Currie out of the water before the shark could inflict further damage.

“Chumming” is conditioning sharks to come closer to the beach, contributing to an increase in attacks, campaigners say. Henri Murray, a 22-year-old medical student spear- fishing off the Cape Town coast, was killed by a 16ft great white in June.

Craig Bovim, of the Shark Concern Group, said: “It is not a good idea for humans to taunt an apex predator by throwing food and blood into the water. It is no surprise that human interaction is leading to more attacks.” Mr Bovim, who survived an attack three years ago while crayfishing, is calling for a moratorium on cage diving. He criticised ITV, asking: “Where is the respect for a protected species?”

Ali Hood, director of Britain’s Shark Trust, said that cage diving could serve to educate the public, but be both educational while allowing eco-tourists to see a great white up close. But he condemned ITV for “exploiting white sharks in a battle for ratings”.

ITV said that it had taken stringent measures to protect the wellbeing of both people and animals. It used a local operator that adhered strictly to the Marine and Coastal Management code designed to protect great white sharks.

It added: “Shark Alley is a natural, existing feeding ground for the sharks. The cages used are carefully designed to ensure the sharks are not harmed.”

The one-hour special will be broadcast this month on the 30th anniversary of the film Jaws.

REAL-LIFE JAWS

There are 454 species of shark

100 million are caught each year, while fewer than 10 human beings are killed by sharks

The great white can grow to 22ft, weigh more than 4,500lb and swim at up to 43 mph

The great white, bull and tiger sharks are responsible for most attacks

Global attacks are increasing, with 109 reported last year

The great white is protected in South Africa, Australia and California”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1716683,00.html

If we hear more at The Temple then we’ll let you know.

Thanks to Pat for a colour version of the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Programme. I’ll get Pat to scan the inside and I’ll put that up on the site as well.

Pat’s latest calendar page is also up on the site. You can download it by clicking the image on the side bar on the home page.

Thanks Pat.

News from REG on Edinburgh:

Hi Cam,

Will email the article from the Edinburgh Festival programme that they scanned and sent me today. The film is opening the festival on the 17th August – three screenings at 6.00pm, 6.15pm, and 6.30pm. Then three more at 9.00pm, 9.15pm and 9.30 pm. Tickets on line at festival website and at box office. The REEL LIFE interview is at 5.00pm on Thursday the 18th August. Toronto festival screening is on Monday night the 12th September.
In haste
Cheers
richard

I’ll try and organise the scanned programme by tomorrow. The quality of thew scan REG sent me isn’t that great though, but I’ll see what I can do.

Site re-work continuing slowly but surely.