Every month or so there is a new scandal - mass snooping by the NSA, allegations of price-fixing by giant energy companies, major banks corruptly rigging interest rates, giant modern bureaucracies like Serco and G4S ripping off the taxpayer, children's entertainers from the past charged with sexual abuse.

But these stories never seem to add up to a bigger picture. They are isolated events . And our reaction is always the same - shock and horror, and then it all subsides and we are ready to be shocked and horrified when the next scandal comes along.

It's like a ritualised dance - or the surprised kitty.


There is a lurking sense that there is a kind of seedy corruption underlying a lot of public life today. But while journalism does a very good job of describing that corruption, it is failing to bring it into a bigger focus. To explain what it is all about.

But sometimes you find an oblique angle that offers a bit more perspective.

Tamara Mellon is best known for creating the Jimmy Choo brand - and empire. She started it back in 1996, and by 2000 it had become an incredible success. It was an entrepreneurial story of our time.
chooshoes

But then Tamara Mellon wanted to expand - especially in America - and so she got involved with the system of Private Equity. A company called Phoenix Equity Partners poured in millions of dollars for a majority stake in Jimmy Choo.

They promised a wonderful vision of the future - but Tamara Mellon found herself trapped, she says, in a corrupted system that ripped the heart out of her company. Private Equity wasn't the noble force for good it pretended to be. And it ended when, what she calls, the ruthless financial sociopaths she had let in forced her out.

Tamara Mellon got angry and wrote an autobiography. It was full of lots of celebrity friends and catastrophic drug-taking - but it was also a full on blistering attack on the system of Private Equity.

Here she is being interviewed about it on Newsnight.I suspect the interviewer wanted to get as soon as possible to talking about shoes - but Tamara is going to say what she wants about the corrupt financial world that destroyed her.


But there is more to Tamara Mellon than just that. She's in the public eye because she's telling one kind of story - about Private Equity. But actually her own life story opens all sorts of other, unexpected doors that in a strange way help pull today's random scandals and corruptions into focus.

In particular one of those doors leads you back over a hundred years to a time in America that was rather like our own. There was a realisation back then that the power of money and vast corporate wealth was overwhelming politics and corrupting public life. But journalism was struggling to make sense of the full dimensions of it - and grab the public's imagination.

Then a small group of journalists took an imaginative leap that enabled them to, not only explain, but harness the scandalous events in such a way that created a powerful reaction among the public. A reaction that led to genuine social change.

The very thing we might be waiting for now.

Tamara Mellon had a fantastic father. He was called Tommy Yeardye (she was born Tamara Yeardye). Back in the 1950s Tommy Yeardye was a central figure in the louche nightclub-showbiz scene in London. He was 6ft 4" but also very handsome. One newspaper described him as having "fists like bricks and eyes like emeralds."

He wanted to be an actor - but spent his time being a stunt double for Rock Hudson and Victor Mature. The turning point for Tommy came when his back was used as a stand-in for Victor Mature's back in a love scene with Diana Dors. She decided she liked his front and they began a passionate affair. The Daily Mail described it like this:

"A splendid male, he satisfied Diana's sexual appetite and did his best to meet her constant need for attention and reassurance."



Diana Dors was Britain's "sex symbol". Her real name was Diana Fluck - but her mother said she should change it because there was always the chance that her name would be up in lights outside a cinema - and one of the letters might fall off.

She was a good actress and one of her films, called Yield To the Night is really powerful. But most of the time in the 1950s she played roles that were pantomime visions of sex. One film critic wrote that in an age where sexuality was naughty, repressed and fit to burst - "Diana Dors was a joke about sex".



Previous
Home
Next

WHAT THE FLUCK!

Thursday 5 December 2013, 15:37

Adam Curtis Adam Curtis
5.8K

Share
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Comments (45)
frontwithtextfinal

Every month or so there is a new scandal - mass snooping by the NSA, allegations of price-fixing by giant energy companies, major banks corruptly rigging interest rates, giant modern bureaucracies like Serco and G4S ripping off the taxpayer, children's entertainers from the past charged with sexual abuse.

But these stories never seem to add up to a bigger picture. They are isolated events . And our reaction is always the same - shock and horror, and then it all subsides and we are ready to be shocked and horrified when the next scandal comes along.

It's like a ritualised dance - or the surprised kitty.


There is a lurking sense that there is a kind of seedy corruption underlying a lot of public life today. But while journalism does a very good job of describing that corruption, it is failing to bring it into a bigger focus. To explain what it is all about.

But sometimes you find an oblique angle that offers a bit more perspective.

Tamara Mellon is best known for creating the Jimmy Choo brand - and empire. She started it back in 1996, and by 2000 it had become an incredible success. It was an entrepreneurial story of our time.
chooshoes

But then Tamara Mellon wanted to expand - especially in America - and so she got involved with the system of Private Equity. A company called Phoenix Equity Partners poured in millions of dollars for a majority stake in Jimmy Choo.

They promised a wonderful vision of the future - but Tamara Mellon found herself trapped, she says, in a corrupted system that ripped the heart out of her company. Private Equity wasn't the noble force for good it pretended to be. And it ended when, what she calls, the ruthless financial sociopaths she had let in forced her out.

Tamara Mellon got angry and wrote an autobiography. It was full of lots of celebrity friends and catastrophic drug-taking - but it was also a full on blistering attack on the system of Private Equity.

Here she is being interviewed about it on Newsnight.I suspect the interviewer wanted to get as soon as possible to talking about shoes - but Tamara is going to say what she wants about the corrupt financial world that destroyed her.


But there is more to Tamara Mellon than just that. She's in the public eye because she's telling one kind of story - about Private Equity. But actually her own life story opens all sorts of other, unexpected doors that in a strange way help pull today's random scandals and corruptions into focus.

In particular one of those doors leads you back over a hundred years to a time in America that was rather like our own. There was a realisation back then that the power of money and vast corporate wealth was overwhelming politics and corrupting public life. But journalism was struggling to make sense of the full dimensions of it - and grab the public's imagination.

Then a small group of journalists took an imaginative leap that enabled them to, not only explain, but harness the scandalous events in such a way that created a powerful reaction among the public. A reaction that led to genuine social change.

The very thing we might be waiting for now.
flatshoe


Tamara Mellon had a fantastic father. He was called Tommy Yeardye (she was born Tamara Yeardye). Back in the 1950s Tommy Yeardye was a central figure in the louche nightclub-showbiz scene in London. He was 6ft 4" but also very handsome. One newspaper described him as having "fists like bricks and eyes like emeralds."

He wanted to be an actor - but spent his time being a stunt double for Rock Hudson and Victor Mature. The turning point for Tommy came when his back was used as a stand-in for Victor Mature's back in a love scene with Diana Dors. She decided she liked his front and they began a passionate affair. The Daily Mail described it like this:

"A splendid male, he satisfied Diana's sexual appetite and did his best to meet her constant need for attention and reassurance."
ddandyeardye PA photos


Diana Dors was Britain's "sex symbol". Her real name was Diana Fluck - but her mother said she should change it because there was always the chance that her name would be up in lights outside a cinema - and one of the letters might fall off.

She was a good actress and one of her films, called Yield To the Night is really powerful. But most of the time in the 1950s she played roles that were pantomime visions of sex. One film critic wrote that in an age where sexuality was naughty, repressed and fit to burst - "Diana Dors was a joke about sex".

Here is a montage of Diana Dors at that time.


Tommy Yeardye began his affair with Diana Dors in 1957. What then resulted was an extraordinary drama that was played out in the popular press and gripped the nation. But it happened at a time when popular journalism was coming under new pressures - and the drama would end with an event that transformed British journalism.

An event that also set popular journalism on a course that would end with the phone-tapping scandals of today.

Diana Dors was married to a failed actor called Dennis Hamilton. One of her biographers described him as "an out and out louse, a thug, gigolo and serial philanderer". Hamilton was also paranoid about Diana Dors and he kept her under secret surveillance. He installed a two-way mirror in their flat and hid small recording devices to listen to her conversations.

From one of these tapes Hamilton discovered the affair with Yeardye - and he proceeded to smash up the flat. This culminated in a dramatic scene where Yeardye burst in to rescue a hysterical Diana Dors from Hamilton who was pointing a loaded shotgun at her.

This was reported in the press - who also described how Yeardye drove Diana Dors to safety in a green cadillac owned by a bubblegum tycoon called John Hoey. Yeardye was the hero - "I'm no marriage breaker" he said "I am a good samaritan, I have done only what any man worth his salt would do."

The progress of their relationship - and the disintegrating marriage to the paranoid husband - was charted in the press in the late 1950s. Apparently the person behind much of this was Yeardye himself - and he was, in a way, ahead of his time. With his connivance journalists constructed a roller-coaster story of celebrity chaos and drama.

He even arranged a seance so Diana Dors could try and contact her dead mother.



But Yeardye didn't last. By the end of the 50s Diana Dors had thrown him out - claiming publicly that he had been trying to steal thousand of pounds of her money. But then an event happened in Fleet Street that was to take Diana Dors further down this road of celebrity sexual drama.

The News of the World was in trouble - it's circulation was falling. Part of the problem was television, but also its tradition of titillating court reports - randy vicars caught with their trousers down - was feeling tired and out of date. So early in 1960 Sir William Emsley Carr, the alcoholic proprietor of the News of the World appointed a new editor called Stafford Somerfield.

On his first day as editor, Somerfield called his staff together and - as he described it - "pushed the boat out".

"What the hell are we going to do about the circulation? It's going down the drain. We want a series of articles that will make their hair curl."

In a brilliant book about the British Press, the writer Roy Greenslade describes what Somerfield introduced - "two new forms of provocative content: kiss-and-tell memoirs and saucy investigations"

And right away he found the perfect combination of these in Diana Dors.

Somerfield persuaded her to tell the intimate secrets of her life in a series of articles for the News of the World. He had been fascinated by the Yeardye - Hamilton guns and sex drama and was convinced there was far more to be mined from her life. To get the story he paid Diana Dors £35,000 which was an extraordinary amount for that time.

But he got what he wanted. He sat Dors down with a journalist who recorded everything - and then, as Dors later plaintively complained, took "all the mucky bits" and wrote the story of a scandalous, violent and seedy life.

In the articles Dors described how Hamilton and her had sex parties, how Hamilton used the two way mirror to watch couples having sex - taped them and then played the tape back to the entire household over breakfast the next day. She also described the violence in their marriage, and Hamilton's financial scams.

It was a complete humiliation for Diana Dors, and it shocked the nation. The Archbishop of Canterbury described her as "a wanton hussey". And Tommy Yeardye then joined in - offering other newspapers his stories too.





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Home
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WHAT THE FLUCK!

Thursday 5 December 2013, 15:37

Adam Curtis Adam Curtis
5.8K

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Comments (45)
frontwithtextfinal

Every month or so there is a new scandal - mass snooping by the NSA, allegations of price-fixing by giant energy companies, major banks corruptly rigging interest rates, giant modern bureaucracies like Serco and G4S ripping off the taxpayer, children's entertainers from the past charged with sexual abuse.

But these stories never seem to add up to a bigger picture. They are isolated events . And our reaction is always the same - shock and horror, and then it all subsides and we are ready to be shocked and horrified when the next scandal comes along.

It's like a ritualised dance - or the surprised kitty.


There is a lurking sense that there is a kind of seedy corruption underlying a lot of public life today. But while journalism does a very good job of describing that corruption, it is failing to bring it into a bigger focus. To explain what it is all about.

But sometimes you find an oblique angle that offers a bit more perspective.

Tamara Mellon is best known for creating the Jimmy Choo brand - and empire. She started it back in 1996, and by 2000 it had become an incredible success. It was an entrepreneurial story of our time.
chooshoes

But then Tamara Mellon wanted to expand - especially in America - and so she got involved with the system of Private Equity. A company called Phoenix Equity Partners poured in millions of dollars for a majority stake in Jimmy Choo.

They promised a wonderful vision of the future - but Tamara Mellon found herself trapped, she says, in a corrupted system that ripped the heart out of her company. Private Equity wasn't the noble force for good it pretended to be. And it ended when, what she calls, the ruthless financial sociopaths she had let in forced her out.

Tamara Mellon got angry and wrote an autobiography. It was full of lots of celebrity friends and catastrophic drug-taking - but it was also a full on blistering attack on the system of Private Equity.

Here she is being interviewed about it on Newsnight.I suspect the interviewer wanted to get as soon as possible to talking about shoes - but Tamara is going to say what she wants about the corrupt financial world that destroyed her.


But there is more to Tamara Mellon than just that. She's in the public eye because she's telling one kind of story - about Private Equity. But actually her own life story opens all sorts of other, unexpected doors that in a strange way help pull today's random scandals and corruptions into focus.

In particular one of those doors leads you back over a hundred years to a time in America that was rather like our own. There was a realisation back then that the power of money and vast corporate wealth was overwhelming politics and corrupting public life. But journalism was struggling to make sense of the full dimensions of it - and grab the public's imagination.

Then a small group of journalists took an imaginative leap that enabled them to, not only explain, but harness the scandalous events in such a way that created a powerful reaction among the public. A reaction that led to genuine social change.

The very thing we might be waiting for now.
flatshoe


Tamara Mellon had a fantastic father. He was called Tommy Yeardye (she was born Tamara Yeardye). Back in the 1950s Tommy Yeardye was a central figure in the louche nightclub-showbiz scene in London. He was 6ft 4" but also very handsome. One newspaper described him as having "fists like bricks and eyes like emeralds."

He wanted to be an actor - but spent his time being a stunt double for Rock Hudson and Victor Mature. The turning point for Tommy came when his back was used as a stand-in for Victor Mature's back in a love scene with Diana Dors. She decided she liked his front and they began a passionate affair. The Daily Mail described it like this:

"A splendid male, he satisfied Diana's sexual appetite and did his best to meet her constant need for attention and reassurance."
ddandyeardye PA photos


Diana Dors was Britain's "sex symbol". Her real name was Diana Fluck - but her mother said she should change it because there was always the chance that her name would be up in lights outside a cinema - and one of the letters might fall off.

She was a good actress and one of her films, called Yield To the Night is really powerful. But most of the time in the 1950s she played roles that were pantomime visions of sex. One film critic wrote that in an age where sexuality was naughty, repressed and fit to burst - "Diana Dors was a joke about sex".

Here is a montage of Diana Dors at that time.


Tommy Yeardye began his affair with Diana Dors in 1957. What then resulted was an extraordinary drama that was played out in the popular press and gripped the nation. But it happened at a time when popular journalism was coming under new pressures - and the drama would end with an event that transformed British journalism.

An event that also set popular journalism on a course that would end with the phone-tapping scandals of today.

Diana Dors was married to a failed actor called Dennis Hamilton. One of her biographers described him as "an out and out louse, a thug, gigolo and serial philanderer". Hamilton was also paranoid about Diana Dors and he kept her under secret surveillance. He installed a two-way mirror in their flat and hid small recording devices to listen to her conversations.

From one of these tapes Hamilton discovered the affair with Yeardye - and he proceeded to smash up the flat. This culminated in a dramatic scene where Yeardye burst in to rescue a hysterical Diana Dors from Hamilton who was pointing a loaded shotgun at her.

This was reported in the press - who also described how Yeardye drove Diana Dors to safety in a green cadillac owned by a bubblegum tycoon called John Hoey. Yeardye was the hero - "I'm no marriage breaker" he said "I am a good samaritan, I have done only what any man worth his salt would do."

The progress of their relationship - and the disintegrating marriage to the paranoid husband - was charted in the press in the late 1950s. Apparently the person behind much of this was Yeardye himself - and he was, in a way, ahead of his time. With his connivance journalists constructed a roller-coaster story of celebrity chaos and drama.

He even arranged a seance so Diana Dors could try and contact her dead mother.
thatparty


But Yeardye didn't last. By the end of the 50s Diana Dors had thrown him out - claiming publicly that he had been trying to steal thousand of pounds of her money. But then an event happened in Fleet Street that was to take Diana Dors further down this road of celebrity sexual drama.

The News of the World was in trouble - it's circulation was falling. Part of the problem was television, but also its tradition of titillating court reports - randy vicars caught with their trousers down - was feeling tired and out of date. So early in 1960 Sir William Emsley Carr, the alcoholic proprietor of the News of the World appointed a new editor called Stafford Somerfield.
staffords

On his first day as editor, Somerfield called his staff together and - as he described it - "pushed the boat out".

"What the hell are we going to do about the circulation? It's going down the drain. We want a series of articles that will make their hair curl."

In a brilliant book about the British Press, the writer Roy Greenslade describes what Somerfield introduced - "two new forms of provocative content: kiss-and-tell memoirs and saucy investigations"

And right away he found the perfect combination of these in Diana Dors.

Somerfield persuaded her to tell the intimate secrets of her life in a series of articles for the News of the World. He had been fascinated by the Yeardye - Hamilton guns and sex drama and was convinced there was far more to be mined from her life. To get the story he paid Diana Dors £35,000 which was an extraordinary amount for that time.

But he got what he wanted. He sat Dors down with a journalist who recorded everything - and then, as Dors later plaintively complained, took "all the mucky bits" and wrote the story of a scandalous, violent and seedy life.

In the articles Dors described how Hamilton and her had sex parties, how Hamilton used the two way mirror to watch couples having sex - taped them and then played the tape back to the entire household over breakfast the next day. She also described the violence in their marriage, and Hamilton's financial scams.

It was a complete humiliation for Diana Dors, and it shocked the nation. The Archbishop of Canterbury described her as "a wanton hussey". And Tommy Yeardye then joined in - offering other newspapers his stories too.
ddnowstory

It worked brilliantly though - the circulation of the News of the World soared. But Greenslade argues that by bringing this provocative new content into journalism, Somerfield had also introduced a new "nastiness" into the popular press.

Journalists have always been cynical and "hard-boiled" in their view of the world - but Greenslade says that underneath the froth of silly headlines there was now in the News of the World.

"an underlying nastiness, and a willingness to traffic in human misery"

And he wasn't the only one to think this. In 1969 Rupert Murdoch bought the News of the World. By now Stafford Somerfield had made the paper an enormous success and Murdoch kept him on. But a year later he sacked him. Murdoch later explained why:

"I sacked the best editor of the News of the World. He was too nasty even for me."

The BBC managed to film inside the News of the World just after Murdoch took over. Here he is at an editorial conference with Stafford Somerfield.

They were about to publish the sex revelations of Christine Keeler. It led to even more public outrage - and Murdoch is interviewed defending their publication. I've also included a rather wonderful interview with Somerfield filmed just after Murdoch sacked him. He has a great last line.



Previous
Home
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WHAT THE FLUCK!

Thursday 5 December 2013, 15:37

Adam Curtis Adam Curtis
5.8K

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Comments (45)
frontwithtextfinal

Every month or so there is a new scandal - mass snooping by the NSA, allegations of price-fixing by giant energy companies, major banks corruptly rigging interest rates, giant modern bureaucracies like Serco and G4S ripping off the taxpayer, children's entertainers from the past charged with sexual abuse.

But these stories never seem to add up to a bigger picture. They are isolated events . And our reaction is always the same - shock and horror, and then it all subsides and we are ready to be shocked and horrified when the next scandal comes along.

It's like a ritualised dance - or the surprised kitty.


There is a lurking sense that there is a kind of seedy corruption underlying a lot of public life today. But while journalism does a very good job of describing that corruption, it is failing to bring it into a bigger focus. To explain what it is all about.

But sometimes you find an oblique angle that offers a bit more perspective.

Tamara Mellon is best known for creating the Jimmy Choo brand - and empire. She started it back in 1996, and by 2000 it had become an incredible success. It was an entrepreneurial story of our time.
chooshoes

But then Tamara Mellon wanted to expand - especially in America - and so she got involved with the system of Private Equity. A company called Phoenix Equity Partners poured in millions of dollars for a majority stake in Jimmy Choo.

They promised a wonderful vision of the future - but Tamara Mellon found herself trapped, she says, in a corrupted system that ripped the heart out of her company. Private Equity wasn't the noble force for good it pretended to be. And it ended when, what she calls, the ruthless financial sociopaths she had let in forced her out.

Tamara Mellon got angry and wrote an autobiography. It was full of lots of celebrity friends and catastrophic drug-taking - but it was also a full on blistering attack on the system of Private Equity.

Here she is being interviewed about it on Newsnight.I suspect the interviewer wanted to get as soon as possible to talking about shoes - but Tamara is going to say what she wants about the corrupt financial world that destroyed her.


But there is more to Tamara Mellon than just that. She's in the public eye because she's telling one kind of story - about Private Equity. But actually her own life story opens all sorts of other, unexpected doors that in a strange way help pull today's random scandals and corruptions into focus.

In particular one of those doors leads you back over a hundred years to a time in America that was rather like our own. There was a realisation back then that the power of money and vast corporate wealth was overwhelming politics and corrupting public life. But journalism was struggling to make sense of the full dimensions of it - and grab the public's imagination.

Then a small group of journalists took an imaginative leap that enabled them to, not only explain, but harness the scandalous events in such a way that created a powerful reaction among the public. A reaction that led to genuine social change.

The very thing we might be waiting for now.
flatshoe


Tamara Mellon had a fantastic father. He was called Tommy Yeardye (she was born Tamara Yeardye). Back in the 1950s Tommy Yeardye was a central figure in the louche nightclub-showbiz scene in London. He was 6ft 4" but also very handsome. One newspaper described him as having "fists like bricks and eyes like emeralds."

He wanted to be an actor - but spent his time being a stunt double for Rock Hudson and Victor Mature. The turning point for Tommy came when his back was used as a stand-in for Victor Mature's back in a love scene with Diana Dors. She decided she liked his front and they began a passionate affair. The Daily Mail described it like this:

"A splendid male, he satisfied Diana's sexual appetite and did his best to meet her constant need for attention and reassurance."
ddandyeardye PA photos


Diana Dors was Britain's "sex symbol". Her real name was Diana Fluck - but her mother said she should change it because there was always the chance that her name would be up in lights outside a cinema - and one of the letters might fall off.

She was a good actress and one of her films, called Yield To the Night is really powerful. But most of the time in the 1950s she played roles that were pantomime visions of sex. One film critic wrote that in an age where sexuality was naughty, repressed and fit to burst - "Diana Dors was a joke about sex".

Here is a montage of Diana Dors at that time.


Tommy Yeardye began his affair with Diana Dors in 1957. What then resulted was an extraordinary drama that was played out in the popular press and gripped the nation. But it happened at a time when popular journalism was coming under new pressures - and the drama would end with an event that transformed British journalism.

An event that also set popular journalism on a course that would end with the phone-tapping scandals of today.

Diana Dors was married to a failed actor called Dennis Hamilton. One of her biographers described him as "an out and out louse, a thug, gigolo and serial philanderer". Hamilton was also paranoid about Diana Dors and he kept her under secret surveillance. He installed a two-way mirror in their flat and hid small recording devices to listen to her conversations.

From one of these tapes Hamilton discovered the affair with Yeardye - and he proceeded to smash up the flat. This culminated in a dramatic scene where Yeardye burst in to rescue a hysterical Diana Dors from Hamilton who was pointing a loaded shotgun at her.

This was reported in the press - who also described how Yeardye drove Diana Dors to safety in a green cadillac owned by a bubblegum tycoon called John Hoey. Yeardye was the hero - "I'm no marriage breaker" he said "I am a good samaritan, I have done only what any man worth his salt would do."

The progress of their relationship - and the disintegrating marriage to the paranoid husband - was charted in the press in the late 1950s. Apparently the person behind much of this was Yeardye himself - and he was, in a way, ahead of his time. With his connivance journalists constructed a roller-coaster story of celebrity chaos and drama.

He even arranged a seance so Diana Dors could try and contact her dead mother.
thatparty


But Yeardye didn't last. By the end of the 50s Diana Dors had thrown him out - claiming publicly that he had been trying to steal thousand of pounds of her money. But then an event happened in Fleet Street that was to take Diana Dors further down this road of celebrity sexual drama.

The News of the World was in trouble - it's circulation was falling. Part of the problem was television, but also its tradition of titillating court reports - randy vicars caught with their trousers down - was feeling tired and out of date. So early in 1960 Sir William Emsley Carr, the alcoholic proprietor of the News of the World appointed a new editor called Stafford Somerfield.
staffords

On his first day as editor, Somerfield called his staff together and - as he described it - "pushed the boat out".

"What the hell are we going to do about the circulation? It's going down the drain. We want a series of articles that will make their hair curl."

In a brilliant book about the British Press, the writer Roy Greenslade describes what Somerfield introduced - "two new forms of provocative content: kiss-and-tell memoirs and saucy investigations"

And right away he found the perfect combination of these in Diana Dors.

Somerfield persuaded her to tell the intimate secrets of her life in a series of articles for the News of the World. He had been fascinated by the Yeardye - Hamilton guns and sex drama and was convinced there was far more to be mined from her life. To get the story he paid Diana Dors £35,000 which was an extraordinary amount for that time.

But he got what he wanted. He sat Dors down with a journalist who recorded everything - and then, as Dors later plaintively complained, took "all the mucky bits" and wrote the story of a scandalous, violent and seedy life.

In the articles Dors described how Hamilton and her had sex parties, how Hamilton used the two way mirror to watch couples having sex - taped them and then played the tape back to the entire household over breakfast the next day. She also described the violence in their marriage, and Hamilton's financial scams.

It was a complete humiliation for Diana Dors, and it shocked the nation. The Archbishop of Canterbury described her as "a wanton hussey". And Tommy Yeardye then joined in - offering other newspapers his stories too.
ddnowstory

It worked brilliantly though - the circulation of the News of the World soared. But Greenslade argues that by bringing this provocative new content into journalism, Somerfield had also introduced a new "nastiness" into the popular press.

Journalists have always been cynical and "hard-boiled" in their view of the world - but Greenslade says that underneath the froth of silly headlines there was now in the News of the World.

"an underlying nastiness, and a willingness to traffic in human misery"

And he wasn't the only one to think this. In 1969 Rupert Murdoch bought the News of the World. By now Stafford Somerfield had made the paper an enormous success and Murdoch kept him on. But a year later he sacked him. Murdoch later explained why:

"I sacked the best editor of the News of the World. He was too nasty even for me."

The BBC managed to film inside the News of the World just after Murdoch took over. Here he is at an editorial conference with Stafford Somerfield.

They were about to publish the sex revelations of Christine Keeler. It led to even more public outrage - and Murdoch is interviewed defending their publication. I've also included a rather wonderful interview with Somerfield filmed just after Murdoch sacked him. He has a great last line.

But sacking Somerfield didn't get rid of the virus he had brought into tabloid journalism. Nearly 20 years later - in 1988 - one of the great tabloid pioneers, Hugh Cudlipp summed up how that nastiness had spread and possessed newspapers.

Cudlipp was no pompous moralist - he was a hard-boiled newsman who understood how tabloids worked. But now they had mutated into something narrower - giving way, he said, to an

"intrusive journalism for the prurient where nothing, however personal, is any longer secret or sacred and the basic human right to privacy has been banished in the interest of public profit."





Previous
Home
Next

WHAT THE FLUCK!

Thursday 5 December 2013, 15:37

Adam Curtis Adam Curtis
5.8K

Share
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Comments (45)
frontwithtextfinal

Every month or so there is a new scandal - mass snooping by the NSA, allegations of price-fixing by giant energy companies, major banks corruptly rigging interest rates, giant modern bureaucracies like Serco and G4S ripping off the taxpayer, children's entertainers from the past charged with sexual abuse.

But these stories never seem to add up to a bigger picture. They are isolated events . And our reaction is always the same - shock and horror, and then it all subsides and we are ready to be shocked and horrified when the next scandal comes along.

It's like a ritualised dance - or the surprised kitty.


There is a lurking sense that there is a kind of seedy corruption underlying a lot of public life today. But while journalism does a very good job of describing that corruption, it is failing to bring it into a bigger focus. To explain what it is all about.

But sometimes you find an oblique angle that offers a bit more perspective.

Tamara Mellon is best known for creating the Jimmy Choo brand - and empire. She started it back in 1996, and by 2000 it had become an incredible success. It was an entrepreneurial story of our time.
chooshoes

But then Tamara Mellon wanted to expand - especially in America - and so she got involved with the system of Private Equity. A company called Phoenix Equity Partners poured in millions of dollars for a majority stake in Jimmy Choo.

They promised a wonderful vision of the future - but Tamara Mellon found herself trapped, she says, in a corrupted system that ripped the heart out of her company. Private Equity wasn't the noble force for good it pretended to be. And it ended when, what she calls, the ruthless financial sociopaths she had let in forced her out.

Tamara Mellon got angry and wrote an autobiography. It was full of lots of celebrity friends and catastrophic drug-taking - but it was also a full on blistering attack on the system of Private Equity.

Here she is being interviewed about it on Newsnight.I suspect the interviewer wanted to get as soon as possible to talking about shoes - but Tamara is going to say what she wants about the corrupt financial world that destroyed her.


But there is more to Tamara Mellon than just that. She's in the public eye because she's telling one kind of story - about Private Equity. But actually her own life story opens all sorts of other, unexpected doors that in a strange way help pull today's random scandals and corruptions into focus.

In particular one of those doors leads you back over a hundred years to a time in America that was rather like our own. There was a realisation back then that the power of money and vast corporate wealth was overwhelming politics and corrupting public life. But journalism was struggling to make sense of the full dimensions of it - and grab the public's imagination.

Then a small group of journalists took an imaginative leap that enabled them to, not only explain, but harness the scandalous events in such a way that created a powerful reaction among the public. A reaction that led to genuine social change.

The very thing we might be waiting for now.
flatshoe


Tamara Mellon had a fantastic father. He was called Tommy Yeardye (she was born Tamara Yeardye). Back in the 1950s Tommy Yeardye was a central figure in the louche nightclub-showbiz scene in London. He was 6ft 4" but also very handsome. One newspaper described him as having "fists like bricks and eyes like emeralds."

He wanted to be an actor - but spent his time being a stunt double for Rock Hudson and Victor Mature. The turning point for Tommy came when his back was used as a stand-in for Victor Mature's back in a love scene with Diana Dors. She decided she liked his front and they began a passionate affair. The Daily Mail described it like this:

"A splendid male, he satisfied Diana's sexual appetite and did his best to meet her constant need for attention and reassurance."
ddandyeardye PA photos


Diana Dors was Britain's "sex symbol". Her real name was Diana Fluck - but her mother said she should change it because there was always the chance that her name would be up in lights outside a cinema - and one of the letters might fall off.

She was a good actress and one of her films, called Yield To the Night is really powerful. But most of the time in the 1950s she played roles that were pantomime visions of sex. One film critic wrote that in an age where sexuality was naughty, repressed and fit to burst - "Diana Dors was a joke about sex".

Here is a montage of Diana Dors at that time.


Tommy Yeardye began his affair with Diana Dors in 1957. What then resulted was an extraordinary drama that was played out in the popular press and gripped the nation. But it happened at a time when popular journalism was coming under new pressures - and the drama would end with an event that transformed British journalism.

An event that also set popular journalism on a course that would end with the phone-tapping scandals of today.

Diana Dors was married to a failed actor called Dennis Hamilton. One of her biographers described him as "an out and out louse, a thug, gigolo and serial philanderer". Hamilton was also paranoid about Diana Dors and he kept her under secret surveillance. He installed a two-way mirror in their flat and hid small recording devices to listen to her conversations.

From one of these tapes Hamilton discovered the affair with Yeardye - and he proceeded to smash up the flat. This culminated in a dramatic scene where Yeardye burst in to rescue a hysterical Diana Dors from Hamilton who was pointing a loaded shotgun at her.

This was reported in the press - who also described how Yeardye drove Diana Dors to safety in a green cadillac owned by a bubblegum tycoon called John Hoey. Yeardye was the hero - "I'm no marriage breaker" he said "I am a good samaritan, I have done only what any man worth his salt would do."

The progress of their relationship - and the disintegrating marriage to the paranoid husband - was charted in the press in the late 1950s. Apparently the person behind much of this was Yeardye himself - and he was, in a way, ahead of his time. With his connivance journalists constructed a roller-coaster story of celebrity chaos and drama.

He even arranged a seance so Diana Dors could try and contact her dead mother.
thatparty


But Yeardye didn't last. By the end of the 50s Diana Dors had thrown him out - claiming publicly that he had been trying to steal thousand of pounds of her money. But then an event happened in Fleet Street that was to take Diana Dors further down this road of celebrity sexual drama.

The News of the World was in trouble - it's circulation was falling. Part of the problem was television, but also its tradition of titillating court reports - randy vicars caught with their trousers down - was feeling tired and out of date. So early in 1960 Sir William Emsley Carr, the alcoholic proprietor of the News of the World appointed a new editor called Stafford Somerfield.
staffords

On his first day as editor, Somerfield called his staff together and - as he described it - "pushed the boat out".

"What the hell are we going to do about the circulation? It's going down the drain. We want a series of articles that will make their hair curl."

In a brilliant book about the British Press, the writer Roy Greenslade describes what Somerfield introduced - "two new forms of provocative content: kiss-and-tell memoirs and saucy investigations"

And right away he found the perfect combination of these in Diana Dors.

Somerfield persuaded her to tell the intimate secrets of her life in a series of articles for the News of the World. He had been fascinated by the Yeardye - Hamilton guns and sex drama and was convinced there was far more to be mined from her life. To get the story he paid Diana Dors £35,000 which was an extraordinary amount for that time.

But he got what he wanted. He sat Dors down with a journalist who recorded everything - and then, as Dors later plaintively complained, took "all the mucky bits" and wrote the story of a scandalous, violent and seedy life.

In the articles Dors described how Hamilton and her had sex parties, how Hamilton used the two way mirror to watch couples having sex - taped them and then played the tape back to the entire household over breakfast the next day. She also described the violence in their marriage, and Hamilton's financial scams.

It was a complete humiliation for Diana Dors, and it shocked the nation. The Archbishop of Canterbury described her as "a wanton hussey". And Tommy Yeardye then joined in - offering other newspapers his stories too.
ddnowstory

It worked brilliantly though - the circulation of the News of the World soared. But Greenslade argues that by bringing this provocative new content into journalism, Somerfield had also introduced a new "nastiness" into the popular press.

Journalists have always been cynical and "hard-boiled" in their view of the world - but Greenslade says that underneath the froth of silly headlines there was now in the News of the World.

"an underlying nastiness, and a willingness to traffic in human misery"

And he wasn't the only one to think this. In 1969 Rupert Murdoch bought the News of the World. By now Stafford Somerfield had made the paper an enormous success and Murdoch kept him on. But a year later he sacked him. Murdoch later explained why:

"I sacked the best editor of the News of the World. He was too nasty even for me."

The BBC managed to film inside the News of the World just after Murdoch took over. Here he is at an editorial conference with Stafford Somerfield.

They were about to publish the sex revelations of Christine Keeler. It led to even more public outrage - and Murdoch is interviewed defending their publication. I've also included a rather wonderful interview with Somerfield filmed just after Murdoch sacked him. He has a great last line.

But sacking Somerfield didn't get rid of the virus he had brought into tabloid journalism. Nearly 20 years later - in 1988 - one of the great tabloid pioneers, Hugh Cudlipp summed up how that nastiness had spread and possessed newspapers.

Cudlipp was no pompous moralist - he was a hard-boiled newsman who understood how tabloids worked. But now they had mutated into something narrower - giving way, he said, to an

"intrusive journalism for the prurient where nothing, however personal, is any longer secret or sacred and the basic human right to privacy has been banished in the interest of public profit."


cudlipp

I think it is a very interesting question why the tabloids became so nasty.

In the wake of the phone-hacking scandal - it's possible to look back and see how an obsession with exposing hidden lives - especially the sexual aspects - grew and grew from 1960 onwards. It happened during a period of growing openness about sex in society as a whole, but rather than reflecting that openness it manifested itself instead as a weird, vicious prurience.

It may be that we will look back and see it as the reaction of an older generation - both newspapermen and their readers - who found that when the lid was finally taken off talking about sex they didn't know how to deal properly with it. Instead they created a strange and pervy world that finally ran out of control as it became more and more desperate to pry into peoples lives.

Meanwhile in the 1970s Diana Dors became a stalwart of British TV's "Light Entertainment". It was a strange world that mixed old music hall sauciness with this new odd perviness.

Tommy Yeardye got over Diana Dors and went on to marry a beautiful model called Ann Davis. He set up a nightclub in London where patrons could draw nude models as they eat dinner.

He said it was an attempt "to bring art into the average man's life". But it didn't work.

Then he had a lucky break. He went into partnership with Vidal Sassoon - to market his haircare products. Yeardye helped turn Vidal Sassoon into a global brand, and became a multi-millionaire.

In 1967 Tamara Yeardye was born. When she was young the family moved to Beverly Hills - then she was sent back to a posh school in Britain where she met many children of the rich and famous. Like her father she spent a lot of time in nightclubs - but it was in the early days of rave in the late 1980s, wearing DMs and cycling shorts in a famous club called Shoom.

In the early 1990s she drifted into the fashion world, worked at Vogue, became heavily dependent on cocaine and ended up in rehab. But a year later she started Jimmy Choo and her career began.



Then she fell in love. She met Matthew Mellon - a funny good-looking American who was incredibly rich because he was one of the heirs to the Mellon fortune. He too had been in rehab - for overdosing on crack. He claimed that the character of Julian, the drug addicted rich boy, in Less Than Zero was based on him.

Tamara Yeardye described him:

"Matthew Mellon was utterly beautiful and utterly goofy, which was a very endearing combination. He was also damaged goods, wounded and struggling, and that, I think, is where we made the real connection. My mistake was in assuming that, because I'd overcome my addictions, he could too."



Soon after, the marriage began to fall apart. According to Tamara, Matthew Mellon took lots more cocaine and became increasingly paranoid. And as part of that paranoia, by 2004, he became increasingly suspicious about his wife.

What Matthew Mellon then did leads you to the very heart of the giant secret industry that had grown up in Britain to spy on peoples' private lives.

It was a world of private investigators and corrupt policemen that had originally been created to satisfy the ever-growing demands of tabloid journalists for scandalous details about peoples' private lives. A demand that Stafford Somerfield and the News of the World had done so much to kick-start back in 1960.

But what Matthew Mellon's case shows is that this might just be the tip of a much bigger iceberg. A further scandal yet to emerge. That the secret intrusion into peoples private lives, and the surveillance of their behaviour goes far wider than previously thought.

Matthew Mellon got in touch with a company in the City of London called Active Investigation Services - AIS. It was run by a man called Jeremy Young who said he was an ex-detective from Scotland Yard. In reality Young was still a serving Met officer who was leading a double life. He managed to do this by constantly going sick - claiming stress and anxiety, and back pain.

Over 5 years Young took 1,640 days off on sick leave. There are 1.826 days in 5 years.

Matthew Mellon's paranoia was now out of control. He was convinced that his wife was hiding millions of pounds from him in offshore accounts - and he asked AIS to find the hidden money. AIS - who offered a special service called "Hackers R Us", agreed.

They tried to send Tamara Mellon emails that when she opened them would have injected a Trojan virus into her computer. This would them to read everything on the computer.

But at the very same time the police found out that AIS was bugging phones. So the police themselves started to secretly watch and bug the private investigators. It became a gigantic effort - codenamed Operation Barbatus - that lasted 3 years and involved ten police forces and the FBI.

The police raided AIS and seized 60 computers. The detective leading the operation said that what they uncovered was a "national network of corruption" where hundreds of blue chip companies and individuals were using AIS and their network to illegally bug, spy on and hack into individuals' computers.

But then something strange happened - despite all this alleged illegal activity, none of AIS's clients were charged. Except for one - Matthew Mellon. The police burst into his flat and arrested him for authorizing the hacking of his wife's computer.

It was a great trial because Tamara Mellon came up with a brilliant defence for her husband. Quite simply she said that he was too stupid to know what the private investigators were up to. She stood up in court and told everyone that he couldn't even read a comic, let alone a book. His QC helped by producing a psychologist who said that Matthew Mellon's inability to concentrate put him in the bottom 11% of the population.

So he got off.

Ever since Mellon's failed prosecution in 2007 there have been persistent reports that the corrupt Active Investigations network was itself part of something even bigger. The Serious Organised Crime Agency is alleged to have a report with the imaginative title:

"THE ROGUE ELEMENT OF THE PRIVATE INVESTIGATION INDUSTRY AND OTHERS UNLAWFULLY TRADING IN PERSONAL DATA"

It is supposed to reveal a wave of hacking and illegal "blagging" of information over the past few years that goes far beyond the simple intrusion into celebrities lives. Every now and then you get glimpses of this - like with the Tamara Mellon case. But despite calls from MPs and others, SOCA is refusing to publish the report.



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WHAT THE FLUCK!

Thursday 5 December 2013, 15:37

Adam Curtis Adam Curtis
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Every month or so there is a new scandal - mass snooping by the NSA, allegations of price-fixing by giant energy companies, major banks corruptly rigging interest rates, giant modern bureaucracies like Serco and G4S ripping off the taxpayer, children's entertainers from the past charged with sexual abuse.

But these stories never seem to add up to a bigger picture. They are isolated events . And our reaction is always the same - shock and horror, and then it all subsides and we are ready to be shocked and horrified when the next scandal comes along.

It's like a ritualised dance - or the surprised kitty.


There is a lurking sense that there is a kind of seedy corruption underlying a lot of public life today. But while journalism does a very good job of describing that corruption, it is failing to bring it into a bigger focus. To explain what it is all about.

But sometimes you find an oblique angle that offers a bit more perspective.

Tamara Mellon is best known for creating the Jimmy Choo brand - and empire. She started it back in 1996, and by 2000 it had become an incredible success. It was an entrepreneurial story of our time.
chooshoes

But then Tamara Mellon wanted to expand - especially in America - and so she got involved with the system of Private Equity. A company called Phoenix Equity Partners poured in millions of dollars for a majority stake in Jimmy Choo.

They promised a wonderful vision of the future - but Tamara Mellon found herself trapped, she says, in a corrupted system that ripped the heart out of her company. Private Equity wasn't the noble force for good it pretended to be. And it ended when, what she calls, the ruthless financial sociopaths she had let in forced her out.

Tamara Mellon got angry and wrote an autobiography. It was full of lots of celebrity friends and catastrophic drug-taking - but it was also a full on blistering attack on the system of Private Equity.

Here she is being interviewed about it on Newsnight.I suspect the interviewer wanted to get as soon as possible to talking about shoes - but Tamara is going to say what she wants about the corrupt financial world that destroyed her.


But there is more to Tamara Mellon than just that. She's in the public eye because she's telling one kind of story - about Private Equity. But actually her own life story opens all sorts of other, unexpected doors that in a strange way help pull today's random scandals and corruptions into focus.

In particular one of those doors leads you back over a hundred years to a time in America that was rather like our own. There was a realisation back then that the power of money and vast corporate wealth was overwhelming politics and corrupting public life. But journalism was struggling to make sense of the full dimensions of it - and grab the public's imagination.

Then a small group of journalists took an imaginative leap that enabled them to, not only explain, but harness the scandalous events in such a way that created a powerful reaction among the public. A reaction that led to genuine social change.

The very thing we might be waiting for now.
flatshoe


Tamara Mellon had a fantastic father. He was called Tommy Yeardye (she was born Tamara Yeardye). Back in the 1950s Tommy Yeardye was a central figure in the louche nightclub-showbiz scene in London. He was 6ft 4" but also very handsome. One newspaper described him as having "fists like bricks and eyes like emeralds."

He wanted to be an actor - but spent his time being a stunt double for Rock Hudson and Victor Mature. The turning point for Tommy came when his back was used as a stand-in for Victor Mature's back in a love scene with Diana Dors. She decided she liked his front and they began a passionate affair. The Daily Mail described it like this:

"A splendid male, he satisfied Diana's sexual appetite and did his best to meet her constant need for attention and reassurance."
ddandyeardye PA photos


Diana Dors was Britain's "sex symbol". Her real name was Diana Fluck - but her mother said she should change it because there was always the chance that her name would be up in lights outside a cinema - and one of the letters might fall off.

She was a good actress and one of her films, called Yield To the Night is really powerful. But most of the time in the 1950s she played roles that were pantomime visions of sex. One film critic wrote that in an age where sexuality was naughty, repressed and fit to burst - "Diana Dors was a joke about sex".

Here is a montage of Diana Dors at that time.


Tommy Yeardye began his affair with Diana Dors in 1957. What then resulted was an extraordinary drama that was played out in the popular press and gripped the nation. But it happened at a time when popular journalism was coming under new pressures - and the drama would end with an event that transformed British journalism.

An event that also set popular journalism on a course that would end with the phone-tapping scandals of today.

Diana Dors was married to a failed actor called Dennis Hamilton. One of her biographers described him as "an out and out louse, a thug, gigolo and serial philanderer". Hamilton was also paranoid about Diana Dors and he kept her under secret surveillance. He installed a two-way mirror in their flat and hid small recording devices to listen to her conversations.

From one of these tapes Hamilton discovered the affair with Yeardye - and he proceeded to smash up the flat. This culminated in a dramatic scene where Yeardye burst in to rescue a hysterical Diana Dors from Hamilton who was pointing a loaded shotgun at her.

This was reported in the press - who also described how Yeardye drove Diana Dors to safety in a green cadillac owned by a bubblegum tycoon called John Hoey. Yeardye was the hero - "I'm no marriage breaker" he said "I am a good samaritan, I have done only what any man worth his salt would do."

The progress of their relationship - and the disintegrating marriage to the paranoid husband - was charted in the press in the late 1950s. Apparently the person behind much of this was Yeardye himself - and he was, in a way, ahead of his time. With his connivance journalists constructed a roller-coaster story of celebrity chaos and drama.

He even arranged a seance so Diana Dors could try and contact her dead mother.
thatparty


But Yeardye didn't last. By the end of the 50s Diana Dors had thrown him out - claiming publicly that he had been trying to steal thousand of pounds of her money. But then an event happened in Fleet Street that was to take Diana Dors further down this road of celebrity sexual drama.

The News of the World was in trouble - it's circulation was falling. Part of the problem was television, but also its tradition of titillating court reports - randy vicars caught with their trousers down - was feeling tired and out of date. So early in 1960 Sir William Emsley Carr, the alcoholic proprietor of the News of the World appointed a new editor called Stafford Somerfield.
staffords

On his first day as editor, Somerfield called his staff together and - as he described it - "pushed the boat out".

"What the hell are we going to do about the circulation? It's going down the drain. We want a series of articles that will make their hair curl."

In a brilliant book about the British Press, the writer Roy Greenslade describes what Somerfield introduced - "two new forms of provocative content: kiss-and-tell memoirs and saucy investigations"

And right away he found the perfect combination of these in Diana Dors.

Somerfield persuaded her to tell the intimate secrets of her life in a series of articles for the News of the World. He had been fascinated by the Yeardye - Hamilton guns and sex drama and was convinced there was far more to be mined from her life. To get the story he paid Diana Dors £35,000 which was an extraordinary amount for that time.

But he got what he wanted. He sat Dors down with a journalist who recorded everything - and then, as Dors later plaintively complained, took "all the mucky bits" and wrote the story of a scandalous, violent and seedy life.

In the articles Dors described how Hamilton and her had sex parties, how Hamilton used the two way mirror to watch couples having sex - taped them and then played the tape back to the entire household over breakfast the next day. She also described the violence in their marriage, and Hamilton's financial scams.

It was a complete humiliation for Diana Dors, and it shocked the nation. The Archbishop of Canterbury described her as "a wanton hussey". And Tommy Yeardye then joined in - offering other newspapers his stories too.
ddnowstory

It worked brilliantly though - the circulation of the News of the World soared. But Greenslade argues that by bringing this provocative new content into journalism, Somerfield had also introduced a new "nastiness" into the popular press.

Journalists have always been cynical and "hard-boiled" in their view of the world - but Greenslade says that underneath the froth of silly headlines there was now in the News of the World.

"an underlying nastiness, and a willingness to traffic in human misery"

And he wasn't the only one to think this. In 1969 Rupert Murdoch bought the News of the World. By now Stafford Somerfield had made the paper an enormous success and Murdoch kept him on. But a year later he sacked him. Murdoch later explained why:

"I sacked the best editor of the News of the World. He was too nasty even for me."

The BBC managed to film inside the News of the World just after Murdoch took over. Here he is at an editorial conference with Stafford Somerfield.

They were about to publish the sex revelations of Christine Keeler. It led to even more public outrage - and Murdoch is interviewed defending their publication. I've also included a rather wonderful interview with Somerfield filmed just after Murdoch sacked him. He has a great last line.

But sacking Somerfield didn't get rid of the virus he had brought into tabloid journalism. Nearly 20 years later - in 1988 - one of the great tabloid pioneers, Hugh Cudlipp summed up how that nastiness had spread and possessed newspapers.