Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be actors

I was very sad to read about the death yesterday of Diff'rent Strokes actor Gary Coleman, who was just 42. I'd had no idea what a troubled life he'd led since the show ended in 1986. But I suppose that I shouldn't have been so surprised. It's a familiar story, after all.

I remember being genuinely upset when I read about Jonathan Brandis' suicide in 2003, not just because he was the same age as me, and not even because I'd had quite the thing for him as a teenager when he'd starred in Stephen King's IT and later in SeaQuest, but because I just couldn't understand how anyone so young, so attractive, so famous could possibly want to kill themselves. Unfortunately, those successes turned out to be the pinnacle of his career which hit the skids after that, spiralling into the usual story of depression and self-loathing that abruptly ended with a young, gifted, attractive man whose best years were still ahead of him feeling as though he had no choice but to take his own life.

And there are so many others like him. A quick trawl through the tragically extensive list of former child actors proves that. Dana Plato, who played Kimberly Drummond in Diff'rent Strokes alongside Gary, died at the age of 35 after struggling with drink and drug addictions for many years. River Pheonix died of a drug overdose at the age of 23. Brad Renfro. Corey Haim. Then there are those who haven't quite reached that stage yet, but undoubtedly have suffered their fair share of problems - Edward Furlong, Lindsay Lohan, Macaulay Culkin, Drew Barrymore, Todd Bridges, the list could go on.

You could blame the Hollywood studios for putting money ahead of the welfare of these kids. You could blame the media for their supercilious chortling and zoom-lens voyeurism when careers nosedive and former child stars are "reduced" to "normal jobs". You could blame the parents for encouraging them to go down this route and then resorting to squabbling over the cash. You could blame society in general for creating the conditions which encourage kids to think that public exposure, no matter what the source, is the Golden Ticket to untold wealth and fame.

Whoever is to blame, perhaps the greatest tragedy is that this won't be the last time we'll be hearing a story like this.

A Beautiful Mind?

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about an article I've just read on the BBC's website entitled, "Creative Minds Mimic Schizophrenia". Whilst not professing to be akin to the likes of Virginia Woolf or John Nash, nonetheless I would like to consider myself a fairly creative individual, and to have something that I had always considered to be a positive trait compared to a mental illness is just a little bit...confusing. Still, I'd also consider myself a scientist, and it's rather hard to argue with the facts. That is, after all, as Thomas Huxley observed, "The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis with an ugly fact."

Psychologist Gary Fitzgibbon states in the article, "Creativity is certainly about not being constrained by rules or accepting the restrictions that society places on us. Of course, the more people break the rules, the more likely they are to be perceived as 'mentally ill'."

Mmm. So what does that say about the more creative thinkers such as Stephen King, H.P Lovecraft, Jules Verne, James Herbert, and the hundreds of other literary geniuses who have had such a huge impact and influence on society to the extent where their ideas have almost been ingrained into the social conscience? Writing is all about making things up for a living, and the wilder and wackier the ideas, the more one would be thought of as 'mentally ill', I suppose. Slightly worrying.

Writing inherently involves having an active fantasy life, after all, which may result from a tendency toward inner reflection rather than outward stimulation, but the defining difference between a writer and a schizophrenic is that the writer, hopefully, has developed a slightly more healthy approach to dealing with their "lack of D2 receptors". Surely that's not such a bad thing? Even if it is a form of escapism from reality that the writer, consciously or unconsciously, is seeking.

It's certainly something to ponder on the next time I get a creative urge. Perhaps I should get one of those plaques to put above my desk: "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps."

No So Broken Britain?

Usually, I'm not one to sit and watch party political broadcasts, preferring any number of other engaging activities from having a tooth removed to a colonoscopy, but as it was by the Labour party and presented by Eddie Izzard, I thought I'd give it a whirl. I really wish I hadn't bothered.

Britain isn't broken, Eddie? Well, I'd love to live in your little section of the world. I wonder if the skies are always blue, the fields filled with flowers and fairies, the roads clear and cone-free and the streets filled with smiling faces and encouraging words?

Perhaps he might be interested to know that I had to call the police last week to report a gang of products of New Labour's educational policy who were drinking, smoking, swearing, yelling at passers-by, dodging traffic, the usual things that they get up to when they're bored and have nothing else to do other than to piss other people off. Okay, it wasn't an emergency, so I called the dedicated line set up specifically to report anti-social behaviour. Someone would be along in a while, I was assured. My civic duty fulfilled, I sat down to watch some TV and tried to ignore the sounds of breaking glass, demented giggling and screeching tyres as the kids wandered into the traffic.

The following day, more out of curiosity than anything else, I rang the police to see what the outcome of the incident was and was told by the controller that officers had attended the scene just five minutes after our call had been placed, that they found that the crowd had dispersed, and thus the report had been closed. Erm...unless I'd slipped into a parallel dimension sometime during the night and imagined the screeching and the breaking glass, someone was being a little...creative with the truth. I requested a call back from the officer, who had supposedly attended, to discuss this little oversight. He did call back the following day, to his credit, and tried to explain that there had been a 'miscommunication' - that the attending officers had been on their way to respond when they had been called away to another more serious incident and thus had not attended the scene at all. So where exactly had this story written into the report about the children 'last being seen in the vicinity of such-and-such a street' come from?

Ah, I thought. Suddenly everything becomes clear.

I don't blame the police at all in this. It's not their fault that they have been forced to close off less-serious incidents by being more colourful in their reports than the average six year old with a pack of Crayolas, and just as truthful. They're stretched to breaking point already, and clearly some incidents are far more important than others and they have to prioritise. That, I understand. What I don't understand is the system that has resulted in them being forced to meet unrealistic targets set for them by the government who simply don't look favourably on a force whose ratio between reported crimes and closed incidents is wide enough to sail the Titanic through. How many other crimes are closed off like this, making it appear as though the police are doing such a sterling job so that the politicians can spout rhetoric about how wonderfully they are doing in their efforts to reduce crime and get more police on the streets? Don't these idiots realize that people's experiences are so far and gone from this Utopian vision of Britain in which Eddie Izzard seems to reside that they are little more than a smudge of volcanic ash on the horizon?

This country is in a far worse state now than it has ever been: Unemployment is sky-rocketing as more manufacturing is being moved abroad; businesses are being crippled by ridiculous laws being set by European politicians who are clearly so out of touch with reality that they genuinely believe Elvis lives on the moon; young people are coming out of universities with qualifications coming out of their assholes but who can't use a pipette or multiply without a calculator; illegal immigration is more out of control than ever, and now the police are being forced to make up reports for the sake of statistical performance.

I'm not sure what the answer is. I'm of the opinion that all politicians of all parties are pretty much the same - all little more than liars and manipulators out to secure their second home allowances, the funding for their duck ponds and the nepotistic appointments of their staff so that their own families, at least, remain safe from the recession that is crippling the rest of the country.

Maybe we should just all stay at home on May 6th. Perhaps that would be the clearest message any of us could send. Poor Emily Pankhurst must be spinning in her grave. If only any of those people coming out of university actually knew who she was.