ROBBIE WILLIAMS used to be a huge pop star. A former member of the boy band Take That, he broke free to go solo with songs such as “Angels”. Mr Williams has now turned his gaze to the stars in the sky, and wonders whether there are super-intelligent beings out there who are capable of making sense of it all.
We met the new, bearded Mr Williams in the wonderfully eccentric Robbie Williams and Jon Ronson Journey to the Other Side (Radio 4, Tuesday of last week).
A media that delights in celebrity downfalls has been relishing the stories of this new-found obsession. Headlines such as “I Helped Robbie Contact his Dead Nan” have been appearing in tabloids and broadsheets alike; and there is no doubt that Mr Williams is obsessed. When the journalist and author Jon Ronson — himself a noted expert in conspiracy theories — met him, he was surrounded by alien-encounter DVDs, and had the patois of the paranormal down to a T. This documentary was about their journey together to a conference in Nevada on UFOs.
When people claim to possess phials of alien lizard blood, or to have taken photos of aliens, the temptation to sneer is almost irresistible. But one got the sense that Mr Ronson and Mr Williams would have loved to believe what they were being told.
Most touching was the case of Ann Andrews, who believes that her son Jason is an “indigo child” — a highly-evolved being who has experienced many incarnations on many different planets. She has written a book, Jason My Indigo Child: Raising a multi-dimensional star child in a changing world, about a milieu in which you cannot raise your 15,000-year-old alien boy without him getting teased at school. And Jason certainly gets teased.
It was this that drew Mr Williams to the Andrews’s story: not the paranormal aspect, but the very normal story of a boy getting ribbed in the playground. As a victim himself at school, Mr Williams could understand why the unlikeliest diagnosis was more comfortable than the most obvious.
“All hairdressers are in the employment of the Government. Hairs are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos and transmit them to your brain.” One might have expected someone at the Nevada Conference to have come up with this. But, unless you have been imprisoned by aliens for the past 20 years, you might remember that this is a line from the iconic British film Withnail and I.
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of this angst-ridden comedy classic, the British Film Institute hosted a special edition of The Reunion (Radio 4, Sunday of last week, repeated Friday) that included interviews with the actors and the director.
Sue MacGregor, the host, précised the story, but I imagine that most of the audience could have enacted the screenplay verbatim. They were roused to rapturous applause by any quotation reproduced by their idols.
Yet this enthusiasm can be indulged. This was the movie that taught a generation of students that you could drink anti-freeze; and that you could stave off cold by dousing yourself with Deep Heat. These are invaluable lessons for today’s undergraduates.
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