Ashes to ashes

Well, the only news in town (or, more accurately, on the island) today is that I’ve finally, two months after it was broadcast in the UK the week after I left, seen the last of Gene Hunt. (I did try, with typically Luddite failure, to download the final episode of Ashes to Ashes and I did get my friend Becky to send me a review copy which, when it arrived, turned out to be episode seven, not eight – gah.) Now I have closure. Fanfuckingtastic.

One of the many highlights of my time as acting director of Free Tibet Campaign was recruiting the Gene Genie (aka Phil Glenister) for the T for Tibet campaign.



When we launched T for Tibet, I had an e-mail from Ali Reynolds, the former director and a woman whom I very much admired, congratulating me on the campaign and asking if I’d actually met Phil. I emailed back with proof that I had:

© Clive Arrowsmith

I also admitted, in strictest confidence, that I wasn’t entirely sure what had been more exciting: meeting Phil or meeting the Dalai Lama. Some vindication when she quickly replied: “No kidding.”

It was a source of considerable annoyance to me and remains an ongoing annoyance to the staff that one if the first things my successor as director did was kill T for Tibet, considering it too frivolous and losing the organisation the goodwill of a number of famous people*. (Although the website was buried without trace, evidence of its existence can still be found on Facebook.)

And what, you ask, does any of this have to do with the Gabriola garden project? Well, not much, although there are shallow graves involved in both, so I guess that will have to be the tenuous link.

* One of my favourite T photos submitted by well known people was this one from Ralph Steadman.

© Andy Williams

It came with the following message.

“I have been trying to save the world, never mind Tibet for nigh on 50 years and I never thought it was a funny place to save. Anyway, I haven't saved it and I am sorry to say that neither will you save Tibet if we continue, outrageously, to have anything whatsoever to do with the Beijing Olympics just to satisfy the egos of an army of breathless goddamn athletes who want to break meaningless records for Gold. I loathe athletes and I loathe athletics - and I am not too fond of Lord Coe either...

“Anyway, trying to show willing, I got my dear son-in-law, Andy Williams, a superbly able Theatre Stage Manager, to take a shot of me, back and front simultaneously, in my nifty studio mirror, and he has done me proud! Please credit him for his work. Thanks. In the name of an extraordinary Culture and a beautiful people we MUST save Tibet. And of course your efforts are much appreciated. It is an outside shot where you can see outside in the reflection showing a kind of T in the door frame to an outside Orchard in Kent. Also you can see a photo on the wall above my head of two of my heroes, Paul Eluard, the Surrealist Poet, and Picasso, whose GUERNICA painting of 1937 should surely have put paid to tyranny once and for all- but, I fear, didn't- but I am so glad that he did it- because it was personal. Also on the wall is a broken Banjo and a picture of my own son, Theo, singing his heart out for a broken world too. And the last item, one of those family name histories that anyone can find.....that's it!

“OK. Good luck with your heroic work.”

Ralph STEADman