Cultural Fly-Tipping
Paul Ess. | Holywell, N.Wales,UK. | 09/23/2008
(1 out of 5 stars)
"David Essex has spent the last 30 years trying to convince anyone who'll listen, that gypsies are not really scroungers, burglars, drunks and old nag traders.
That when they come-a-visiting your town, it's only your imagination that the Police sirens are wailing long into the night and all the shop windows are smashed and boarded up the following morning.
Where they've been camping isn't really an empty Calor-Gas, infested-mouldy-mattress health-hazard, and the staff at your local KFC or MacDonalds haven't been sickeningly abused and had food thrown at them.
No, they're all harmless travelling folk with rosy cheeks, wandering the country in jolly painted caravans, telling your fortune and helping rabbits escape from traps.
In neckerchief and waist-coat, and all dewy-eyed, they sit on farmers gates whistling at the wild-life, not a care in the world. Not a penny hidden under the bed, everything accounted for; all taxes and insurance fully paid up to date.
So what we really need - just in case we haven't got the message - is Essex doing a gipsy musical - this time set on a fairground (wow, will the surprises never end!?). Of course, no-one on said fairground has ever glued a coconut down or bent the barrel of an air-rifle - they're all hard-working, hard-done-to cherubs.
All supremely sympathetic, forever being accused of things they've NEVER done, and being generally persecuted by the nasty ole police.
Essex is called 'Levi'(can that be more embarrassing!?), his wife's dead, and his lad's a bit of a nuisance - crassly wailing for traveller's rights, and worrying some-one's going to steal his lucky heather-selling patch at the airport (!)
It's the uplifting and heart-warming story of how dead/alive/bore David copes with it all, and still finds time for romance.
'ATFOTF's blurb says it's full of dizzying stunts and 'hilariously crafty cons'. Yeah, that'll be marching a terrified pensioner down to his local Post Office to get out a huge wedge of cash to pay for a tarmac botch-job on his drive that he didn't want doing in the first place.
Ho ho, They're such loveable Jack-the Lads aren't they? Wouldn't really harm a fly, and David has made a musical about them, warts and all. No cover job this, not even a whiff of glossing over.
That's a REAL collectors item you're getting for your tenner.
The hypocrisy is over-whelming, the gall is staggering.
Only in a PC horror-world can such a brazen whitewash be supported, and David, all low eyelids and that cheeky grin, gazes into his financial crystal ball with glee.
If we had that other travelling travesty Joe Longthorne doing his Shirley Bassey impression, alongside Essex's wretched regurgitations, we'd all be in Pikie Paradise.
'Hold Me Close' is here and is criminal, so too the charmless sub-Bright Eyes stomach-emptier 'A Winter's Tale' as well as a whole lot of shifty, condescending music designed to console you after you've had your childs bicycle stolen from outside your house.
So, a stage-full of luvvies pretending to be charming tinkers and singing derisory and frightful songs in Romany accents...on a cd. Sound like your kind of thing?
As much 'fun' as a penectomy without anaesthetic.
I wonder if Tony Martin's buying one?"
