17. Bad Men

... being a look at male wickedness, with the aim of persuading myself that I am a decent fellow.

My grandma used to like watching bad men on Sunday afternoons. Usually in black and white films. They were mainly bank robbers from the days of the Wild West, or wealthy Victorian land owners who would think nothing of seducing an innocent maiden before tying her to a railway line and closing down the orphanage where she worked, leaving all the children to starve on the street. My Grandma would seethe with indignance - “Oooooh you bad bugger” she would shout at the television.

My mother used to react similarly to the wrestlers on World of Sport on a Saturday dinnertime. The wicked Mick McManus and his equally villainous arch enemy Jackie Pallo used to really get her dander up, with their foul and cruel moves, all done behind the back of the unsuspecting referee. One time she got into such a flap that she actually threw her knitting at the screen.

It has ever been so. The people who packed into the globe theatre to watch Gloucester get his eyeballs popped out in King Lear or someone getting an unsuspecting rival to eat a slice of pie which had been made from the flesh of their recently murdered infant sons, more than likely thoroughly enjoyed screaming the Elizabethan equivalent of “Oooooh - the bad bugger!” at the stage.

But for the most part, actors and comedy sportsmen are not really bad. They are there for entertainment purposes only. They make their money from winding up mothers and grandmothers and then probably go back home from the studio or the wrestling ring and lead decent normal lives, in loving relationships with their wives and children. They are probably pillars of their local communities, and the essence of kindness itself.

But mothers and grandmothers and plenty others beside are also drawn to obsess over real bad people. Totally wicked people who, if they have loving families and live in communities who hold them in high regard, use these advantages as cover for their heartless acts of depravity.

Real life villainy has always been the subject of fascination. One of my favourite sources of stories of the wicked are copies of the Illustrated Police News which ran from the mid 19th century almost up to World War Two. It was full of wonderful line drawings of of hideous crimes and criminals, public hangings and other executions and a whole range of other assorted terrible occurrences. Those pictures are still enough to give anyone nightmares, but they are also totally delightful if you like that sort of thing, and I suspect that most people do, deep down.

I suppose that the Illustrated Police News was a forerunner to the News Of The World which entertained my mother and grandma, with its lurid court reports, tales of sexual misconduct by the great and the good, and general reportage of wickedness in all its gory details. I also remember the mother of one of my friends being fascinated by Murder Casebook, which came out in 1989 - a weekly partwork magazine which could be collected and placed into handsome binders (which you had to send for separately). If you subscribed to the whole shebang, by 1992 you would have ended up with a handsome library of crime that would have cost you well over five hundred pounds, even at those days prices. You would also know all there was to know about Peter Sutcliffe, Ted Bundy, John Haigh and many many more - including those only really remembered by their nicknames, The Barbaric Buccaneer, the Plainfield Butcher, the Night Stalker - the list goes on and on. “If you are passing the paper shop” my mate’s mother would say “Pick up 20 Benson and Hedges Soveriegn and my copy of the Murder Casebook”. She smoked herself to a grisly death whilst avariciously reading about grisly deaths.

Today there are true crime is a massive industry, not only are there books and magazines, but there are also podcasts, TV documentaries and websites all pandering to our darker appetites.

Even the History Channel on TV, which one might think was a genuine programme with the aim of educating us about the past, shows so many documentaries on Nazi war crimes and atrocities, that some say that its trademark letter H logo suggests its real name - The Hitler Channel.

It is claimed that women are particularly attracted to Bad Men, and that particularly well known serial killers have hundreds of flirtatious messages from woman delivered to their prison cells. Perhaps this is partly a legend created by chaps who consider themselves decent fellows yet who can never manage to be successful in love,. Maybe so, but there are documented cases of woman eventually marrying their pen pals and the authorities having to arrange conjugal visits.

It is not only women who are attracted to killers though. At one point Rose West, widow and ex partner in crime of Fred, was on the point of marrying the bass guitarist from Slade (No - not Jim Lea - someone who had replaced him in a latter day incarnation of Slade in around the year 2000.) Apparently she had her choice of suitors all after the dubious pleasure of her hand in marriage.

The question of my own morality is one that I sometimes consider very carefully. I touched upon it last week in the article on Renee Magritte and his fils de l’homme, and the week before when I thought about my feelings towards other poets. Perhaps all of us worry sometimes about things we have done or said, or things that we might consider doing or saying. I would think that most of us consider ourselves to be decent people, and when we do look at ourselves objectively and consider that we might not be quite as good as we think we are, we probably make up stories and excuses which show that our crimes were understandable, minimal and forgivable. “I only stole that cake because I was hungry.” “I only downloaded that film because Netflix is so expensive” “I only punched that guy in the face because he was a fucking idiot” I could go further, and imagine excusing even more heinous crimes, and how one might rationalise them. But If I did, I would be at risk of revealing my true proclivities, so I’ll leave it there.

One good way of minimising one’s own failings is to consider that there are people worse than yourself. When I carelessly slammed my car into the back of another one on the York bypass all those years ago, I calmed myself by imagining all the drivers much more reckless than me who had caused more terrible accidents. I remember particularly thinking “what if I had hit a horse, or a pedestrian, a child? After that ripple of fear had subsided I began feeling superior to anyone who might have done that. Such thoughts didn’t mean that I wasn’t a bad driver, they just helped me to live with myself.

This poem Bad Men serves the same purpose. How can I be a bad man in a world which threw up Adolf Hitler or Harold Shipman. I enjoy performing the the poem, I am quite fond of it, but I still have doubts about it. Does it treat the subject too flippantly? Probably, but thats not my main problem. My main problem came when I imagined Boris Johnson, who I considered to be both a bad prime minister and a bad man, using the same argument to excuse himself.

I just had a terrible thought.

Am I a bad poet?

Bad Men

Hitler was a bad man.
Rotten to the core
Bad tempered, evil minded
Starting genocide and war
Not a decent man at all
Not like me and you
What a nasty piece of work
Wicked through and through
 
Christie was a bad man
At 10 Rillington Place
A filthy little pervert
A monster, a disgrace
Murdering young women
To have his wicked way
He got his neighbour hung for it
Immoral! Wrong! foul play!
 
Shipman was a bad man
Killing off the old
And pinching all their money
Heartless, mean and cold
A foul and murderous GP
A shocking evil villain
Prescribing stuff like arsenic
Instead of penicillin 
 
Compared to them I’m not so bad
I’m not so bad at all
I’m not saying I’m perfect
Just that my crimes are small
I might tell fibs occasionally
And be impure in thought
But compared to those mentioned above
I’m quite a decent sort.