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APOCALYPSE TV APOCALYPSE TV Philosophical Dialogues Jonathan Bowden First Edition Published October 2007 Printed in Great Britain Copyright © Jonathan Bowden All Rights Reserved Cover design and layout by Daniel Smalley ISBN 978-0-9557402-0-6 The Spinning Top Club BM Refine London WC1N 3XX www.jonathanbowden.co.uk Fortunato Depero’s Skyscrapers & Tunnel (1930): Do they make the most of a tubular scene-scape designed without cost and collapsing into date crepe rape spate fate constant ingrate? Dedicated to Dorothy Bowden (1931-1978) Above: a pencil sketch of the author by Michael Woodbridge Apocalypse TV – Jonathan Bowden APOCALYPSE TV Contents 1. Sex, Death, Fred and Rose 2. Hitler was a Federalist! 3. Room 101, Downing Street 4. Alien Nation 5. Art Attack 6. Speak Now or Forever Hold your PC 0 Apocalypse TV – Jonathan Bowden Chapter 1 SEX, DEATH, FRED AND ROSE Location: a house in South London 1 Apocalypse TV – Jonathan Bowden Samuel: What’s this Sounes book you’ve been reading, then? Jonathan: It’s this book on the West case, called Fred and Rose West . Why do you ask? S: Well, I didn’t follow the case too carefully, but what I did learn I found baffling. What was it all about? How can a person - or rather two people - be led to such maniacal killing? I mean, they look so - normal . I think many people were shocked by that. I mean, the typical photos of Brady and Hindley make them look like the fiends they were. But Fred and Rose - even the names are normal. And in photos they look like just another couple you would see anywhere. J: One never knows. Behind the facade of many people lies hatred, bitterness, a desire to take revenge on society, to indulge in the tormenting of others. For all I know, my dear Thomas, I may be staring at a serial killer right now. S: I know I’m many things, my dear Frederick - but serial killer I am not. So you can drink your tea in peace. J: Ah, I can relax. S: But seriously...isn’t it possible Fred just, well, slipped into murder to begin with, perhaps by killing someone by accident? And then he proceeded to fulfil his role as a murderer, and then pulled his wife into it? J: Not a very convincing scenario, I have to tell you. 2 Apocalypse TV – Jonathan Bowden S: Something was said about his first wife having been one of his victims. J: It’s pretty likely. He killed before he met Rose. My view is that he was a killer pure and simple. He was a sexual pervert, in a sense an exponential sexual pervert. A lot of sexual perversion is connected with impotence. S: Was there any evidence in the book that he had sexual perversions and all that? J: Oh, yes. They were both obsessed with pornography; she was obsessed with going with as many men as possible; she worked as a prostitute by choice, not because she was forced into it. He was also sexually obsessive, but probably, so evidence in the book suggests, not exactly impotent, but not exactly priapically gifted either. In other words, a lot of his violence was sexual fixation, the imprisonment of the body, his inability to get beyond the body, but also, sexually speaking, he wasn’t that much of a performer anyway. There’s a famous incident in the book where he has sex with Rose and another woman - they used to have kinky sex parties and so on - and the other woman said to Rose, “He’s not very big, is he?” And instead of throttling her, since he’d been humiliated, he did nothing; he went away and got some tea for both of them! S: But isn’t this a man who is supposed to have killed about sixteen people? J: But what they used to do, there was a sort of initiation into this type of perversity. They would begin with mild stuff, just endless carrying on between the two of them, as they were fascinated with each other when they were young. She married him when she was extremely young, she went to live with him in a caravan, against the advice of her parents, but they got beyond that, 3 Apocalypse TV – Jonathan Bowden and wanted to involve other people. She was interested in women’s bodies and there’s evidence she was bisexual to some extent. But she was basically polymorphous, just like Sade. Sade’s sexuality begins heterosexually, then he becomes obsessed with anality, then he goes in for multi-orifice experience, then he goes in for cruelty, then sexual pantheism. It’s ultimately about an unfolding of energy; it’s not about sexuality at all. S: Maybe, but there’s such a gap between all of that and killing sixteen people! Were all the murders sex murders? J: Basically. Rose had a ‘dungeon’, a secret room, where she would have sex with her clients, which contained sexual paraphernalia. But most of those victims were women, and Fred and Rose would go out on the prowl in Gloucester and beyond, looking for young, vulnerable women, strays, runaways, and so on. S: Did they actually go out looking for women? The impression I got - I haven’t read the book, this is just from the media reports - is that they would just take in lodgers. J: They did that as well, but it didn’t matter how they got them in; it’s what they did when they got there. Often they’d just have sex with the kids, and then they left the next day. Police are still tracing several women who passed through Cromwell Street. There’s little evidence they were murdered; they probably just passed through and left. However, some would stay, and get more sucked into the games Fred and Rose wanted to play, and it would begin to go beyond the bounds of kinkiness with their clients. S: Were most of the victims killed in the course of sexual activity, say strangulation and so on? 4 Apocalypse TV – Jonathan Bowden J: Some were choked, throttled, beaten to death in sexual transports, but others were killed afterwards, following various sexual acts which they didn’t consent to, in order to shut them up. Certain women were released after they were abused. One woman, who was crucial to the trial, came back with a can of petrol and either threw some near the door or stopped herself doing so and went away; but certainly she thought about torching the whole house. S: But what’s the explanation of it all? I find it very hard to explain. Was Fred involved in the occult, did he have any occult interests? J: There’s no evidence of that. He was educationally sub-normal; she was probably more intelligent than he was. S: Educationally sub-normal or low IQ? He must have been pretty sharp; for a start he was a good decorator, and built very solid extensions to the house. J: According to psychiatric examinations, he was a pretty low-level intellectual specimen: he couldn’t read, he couldn’t write... S: What about his childhood. Is there evidence he was abused as a child? J: Yes, there is considerable evidence in his case, and even some in Rose’s case. Some would say his father was bordering on insane. I think the dynamic of these things is quite understandable, like drug addiction. Certain types of sexual perversion have an energy of their own. It’s like certain people who begin with soft core pornography - most men are satisfied with Pamela 5 Apocalypse TV – Jonathan Bowden Anderson calendars, and they don’t want to go beyond that. But there’s a proportion of people who are fixated, semi-mystically, upon the body. Nakedness isn’t enough - they want to see people doing something; then they want to see people doing something slightly more direct, slightly more invasive and intrusive. And it goes on and on, and in the examples of those very, very, few men - and it’s nearly always men - who engage in this type of activity, there is a progression and an extremism in their hunt for pornography. S: As I understand it the Wests filmed their victims, and the police destroyed all the evidence, the video tapes and so on. There was a very early trial, years ago. One woman came forward and pressed charges against Fred and Rose for rape - she’d escaped. J: They were found guilty of indecency, but not imprisoned. There was nothing in Fred’s background to suggest he’d been involved in outright criminality before. But the police found a lot of kinky material, which they ordered destroyed. Later, they videoed certain acts, which was used in evidence at the trial; but it was the earlier material they’d bought which was destroyed. S: Do you remember that London student who was acquitted of sexual harassment a while ago? I remember thinking at the time that there is this ‘magic line’ which society and the law sets up. Anything which is done before that line is crossed is OK - buying porn in the shop, watching porn movies, frequenting the most disgusting places, indulging in whatever practices you like - all this is very well, but when it trips over the line into something non-consensual, you’re jumped on. So, basically, you can be exposed to any temptation, no matter how grave - you can be exposed to all occasion of wrongdoing, and then you’re OK until you cross this boundary marked by consent.