harrylimetheme

(Ray Winstone circa 1979)

I have not intention of seeing it on anything other than somebody else's pirated version, and only if I have no choice, but the trailer for this weekend's action-eye-candy behemoth Mr And Mrs S***H has been loudly pumping out of every conceivable media outlet over the last 2 weeks and my ears did prick up when I distinctly heard Angelina and Brad trade verbal volleys over the crucial question of which one of them is "the Daddy".

It's Angelina who later (a split second later) concludes, perhaps after some rocket launchers have decimated some buildings, that actually, yes, she is in fact "your Daddy now".

Does anyone associated with the film, except maybe the screenwriter(s), realise that this is a direct reference to Alan Clarke's Scum, a landmark expose of juvenile prisons in the UK? Made in 1977 for the BBC, Scum was considered to be too intensely violent for the small-screen and promptly banned. Clarke had to then remake it a year later, with largely the same cast, and it was given a cinema release.

Bleak, shocking and grittily unpleasant, the film shows how Carlin, played by the young and now iconic Ray Winstone, turns the tables on his tormentors. After he's done some nasty stuff with an iron pipe he declares ferociously and perversely "I'M THE DADDY NOW!". Thus, the cycle of violence and power will continue.

Aside from co-starring in cult items, Quadrophenia and The Fabulous Stains, after Scum Ray Winstone languished into a British television "guest starring" kind of career for many years. He was a face you always recognised, but you could never remember his name. It was only after Gary Oldman cast him as the father in Nil By Mouth in 1997, that he had a full-scale career revival, and the "He's The Daddy Now" line was used to headline a hundred newspaper and magazine profiles to announce his newfound recognition.

Later he would completely sell-out Alan Clarke by sitting in a bar on a series of TV ads and ask the audience "Who's the daddy of beers?" or something like that, while sipping lager out of a bottle. The fact that you could sell a product by connecting it back to a primal scene of shockingly intense violence and dark sexual undertones, seemed to be a symptom of a culture that had no deep memories of anything.

Certainly, there was always something kind of hysterically over-the-top about the line which did make it funny when quoted out-of-context. But now, Mr And Mrs S***H turns it into just a mildly titillating bit of sexual role-play. The phrase was born in a moment of extreme cinema, and 25 years later, becomes dirty-talk for the PG-13 crowd.