Uplifting indeed. Imagine how the poor lad felt upon finding Count Binface was his intellectual superior. I suspect Jones has gone to ground to lick his wounds. ( obviously this involves lamenting his treatment on Twi##er. )
We can confidently expect a Guardian exposè revealing that Count Binface is not only a fraud, with no identifiable policies on traffic, knife crime or the many issues facing London, but worse still, is guilty of cultural appropriation from the Tin Man, who is ( should we be so foolish as to forget ) a true friend of Dorothy like the Jones boy.
Despite the sneery tone of the article, Count Binface did rather well. Amusingly and fittingly, he defeated the Women’s Equality Party. This party, which of course opposes equality for women, managed only 21,182 votes to the Count’s 24,775. The majority of the candidates were exhibitionists, only a lot less likeable than Binface.
J Bryant
3 years ago
Well written and amusing article. Thanks for that.
Perhaps the Great British Eccentric isn’t quite extinct yet. Last week, in Unherd’s first Edgelands video, Aris Roussinos interviewed John Mappin who I think can fairly be characterized as a wealthy English eccentric.
For me, Mappin represents the best of what an eccentric can achieve: highlight inconsistencies and flaws in the narrative promulgated by mainstream politicians and their enablers. And also provide a fair bit of free entertainment.
I don’t know if we have eccentrics here in the States. So many mainstream figures seem quite eccentric to me. It’s almost normal in our public life.
I agree completely – Mappin was wonderfully, confusingly eccentric. As far as I can tell there were no ulterior motives – he was just wonderfully strange.
Peter LR
3 years ago
I see Count Binface had to pay £5000 deposit to stand in the election – so he’s obviously not a binman!
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago
David Icke is definitely a Great British Eccentric, or should be thought of one till eventually his theory that lizards masquerading as powerful people ruling the earth is proved true, and then he becomes a visionary. (there was a picture of Biden where you could just make out a bit of a tail, but it has since been purged from the internet.)
Orde Wingate is my favorite Eccentric living almost during my life, he is parodied wonderfully by George MacDonald Fraser in the best combat war diary written ‘Quartered Safe Out Here’ of the Burma Campaign, WWII, and gets covered more sedately bySir Wilfred Thesiger on the Ethiopian Campaign. Just the very finest kind of soldiering eccentric. Thesiger is my second favorite.
The oddest coincidence about Orde Wingate is that he played a major role in support Zionism in the 1930s, most of the first generation of Israeli army commanders were trained by him in the 30s. His cousin,T E Lawrence, played a major role in Arab nationalism.
Wavell, who was CinC Middle East at the time, said if had known Windgate was Lawrence’s cousin he would never put him in charge for training the self defence force.
I don’t dispute that he’s as mad as a barrelfull of monkeys, but I suspect he’s earning a lot more than 200k a year now… And as an old stale and pale presenter he’d have been put out to pasture by the BBC years ago and been replaced by someone more “representative”. Its probably accidental, but I reckon seeing lizards under the bed is the best thing that could have happened to him, career-wise.
He may well be making out like a bandit, Mike, but I reckon the first 20 of the last 30 years were probably pretty lean for him. He doesn’t strike me as having the foresight to have thought that far ahead.
A similar and more typical case is David Shayler, formerly of MI5, who also believes and originates conspiracy theories and is currently living as a transvestite called Dolores.
Decades ago Malcolm Muggeridge noted the questionable sanity of many people in British intelligence. Like irregular warfare, it attracts people who think outside the box (and should probably be locked up in one). My favourite was the British operative working with the French Resistance who drove around occupied France in a car with a Union Jack on the bonnet.
I agree with those below – he’s probably further toward ill than well on the mennal elf chart but many are….He is very shrewd IMO hence the family firm structure so his son can run it after he is taken to planet zog or whatever. Whether he believes his own credo i don’t know but how different is his mythology from Boris Johnson’s Churchill hagiography? Boris either believes in the historicist notion that individuals- generally white, male and armed make history or he doesn’t but knows others like the idea so is cashing in. Either way only one of them has the potential to be dangerous to civil society.
I would class Icke as an exhibitionist. I don’t think he pushes odd theories because he believes them, I think he does because it’s made him incredibly wealthy. A true eccentric is not externally motivated – weirdness comes naturally.
You should have seen the initial stuff, on Wogan as I recall. If a guy with a rock-solid job at the BBC figured donning a shellsuit and babbling about aliens was going to be a smart career choice then either way he was crazy. Gotta remember, this was pre-internet. It was not easy or obvious to see how you monetize a belief that the elites are lizards.
He may be an exhibitionist for all I know – then again he was live on TV to an audience of millions every week. He didn’t need act mad to get attention. I honestly don’t think you can question his genuine nuttiness. David Icke is truly a nutter. It’s just a matter of where you draw the line between eccentricity and mental illness.
Perhaps that’s the thing. Almost any deviation from ‘normal’ behaviour gets medicalised these days. Our would-be eccentrics are all on their meds.
Christopher Chantrill
3 years ago
I just did a bit of checking and it was the Duke of Wellington that said railways “encourage the poor to move about.” Sibthorp called railways “the Steam Humbug.” in Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know by Karl Shaw.
Today, of course the Iron Dukes are the lefty fans of trains and light rail. That’s because today it is cars that “encourage the poor to move about.”
Yep. The ruling class likes to keep the poor in their place. No moving about allowed.
Even in 1960 when a decent wage was about £12 per week a single from Paddington to Bristol cost 33/ or one pound and thirteen shillings. If you had a decent lunch onboard that would set you back another pound, more if you hit the ‘Old Monk’ Port.
Beeching was A Chemist at ICI ..The Main reason Concrete mess of motorways,gained Ground in 1960s Was Ernest Marples(Minister of transport) brother John Had a Road construction company 7won most of the Early Contracts..
Possibly. I don’t really know enough about it. We’re probably screwed with horrible, plasticky trains and expensive tickets either way. The might be fewer strikes under a privatised service, but I don’t remember British Rail being as bad as some claim it to have been, and in the 1980s and early 90s it seemed to be reasonably priced on the whole.
Auberon Waugh also complained about people moving about on railways who really had no business to.
Tony Nunn
3 years ago
Thinking of eccentrics in politics reminds me of the late Bill Boakes who, I believe, still holds the record for the greatest number of lost deposits. He would typically stand for election in several constituencies and fail to retain his deposit (it was only £150 in those days) in any of them. The title of his “party” was long and prone to change but the central theme was road safety – as proclaimed by the billboards covering the extremely dangerous looking contraption on which he used to cycle around South London.
Matthew Steeples
3 years ago
Your article has only encouraged me further to vote for Count Binface as you plainly have failed to grasp that not only Livingstone, Johnson and Khan have failed as Mayor of London, but Shaun Bailey (who you rightly observe will not win) would too. Instead of having a pop at brilliant Binface (formerly Buckethead) – who has been standing for yonks before Theresa May wrecked our political scene – maybe embrace the fact that the mainstream parties deserve an almighty kick in their sorry arses and support a protest candidate. Next!
Lord Buckethead,Was Unfairly beaten by Thereason May in Dec 2019 in Maidenhead..
Stephen Rose
3 years ago
Sentimental attachment to eccentrics, died out in the 1980’s.I remember the late great Dave Allen, having a soft spot for an English eccentric,non aristos too.
You need a bolt hole, to be a practicing eccentric,not a platform.
I gave a lift to someone I thought was a tramp, breton cap, two Co-op carrier bags, he was drenched to the skin, walking on the road outside Polegate, East Sussex.
My first car, a worn out Hillman Avenger, the man climbed in, I recognised him as Lord Longford. He didn’t introduce himself, the carrier bags were full of Home Office correspondence. He launched into a conversation on penal reform, after 20 minutes or so, he asked me to drop him off with an invitation to come to tea, I declined, off he went.
Can’t imagine a public figure behaving like that now.
I think your analysis is spot on, the public regard Keith Lemon as an eccentric. I will still take a sneaky pleasure in Count Binface, whispering in Sadiq Khan’s ear “You are only human”
Here we have the genuine voice of the metropolitan middle class. The poor mistreated Corbyn brothers, just harmless eccentrics rather than a pair of vicious racists. Don’t mention the fact that Jeremy has repeatedly supported terrorists. As for Boris, he committed the cardinal sin of being successful by ignoring all those nice middle class people with degrees from Russell group universities. The most amusing thing of course is that fact their arrogance and disdain is a constant reminder for the rest of the electorate of why they voted for Boris. Yes Boris’s image is calculated but his greatest selling point is that he isn’t you.
Boris didn’t “become” successful, he was born successful. He may well ignore middle class people, because he’s in the ruling, upper class. At university he was in a special group of people who were born that way, and went around wearing formal dinner jackets and getting hammered all the time. I was there. I saw them. Loads of people did, there are photos.
He’s not very competent. He earned very little of his success, and what he did earn was by charm and guile, not by real work. He doesn’t care what happens to anyone else. How do you not see that?
Apart from Screaming Lord Sutch didn’t the current craze for silly candidates come from Monty Python? There does seem a rather unfunny seam of middle-class humour where a person presents as consciously eccentric-wearing half a moustache for example-who are not usually very funny.
The author mentions David Copperfield and Aunt Betsey looks after Mr D–k , after rescuing him from an asylum. His work on his memoirs keeps being interrupted by thoughts of King Charles’ head. Dickens is full of eccentrics characters & I think we muddle up fact and fiction when thinking about British people-constantly comparing people to Mr Toad for example.
Well, he was quite prepared to commit acts of terrorism, and encouraged other people to do so.
Paul N
3 years ago
Harumph! Eccentrics aren’t what they used to be. Everything is going to pot. Bah humbug.
mike otter
3 years ago
How dare you conflate his Lordship with Binface? Lord Sutch was a shock rocker before Arthur Brown, Alice Cooper or Wednesday 13 had even seen a makeup box. He was the Silly Party made real from about mid 60s onward and though eccentric his point was: Politicians are ridiculous, those in it for ideological reasons are dangerous, those in it for the corruption are actually pretty harmless, and DON’T VOTE FOR THEM IT ONLY ENCOURAGES THEM. You can still get away with being eccentric in Britain but you do need to back it up these days, which is sad for all of us except cops, lawyers and weapons dealers.
One that was called eccentric was Margaret Rutherford, but I also heard her called ‘a typical English eccentric’ (an oxymoron surely) which is a clue to what she really was (no slight intended) a cliche upper-middle class battleaxe in tweeds, rushing around doing good, and bothering officialdom. There was another similar 1950s/60s character actress, whose first name was ‘June’ I think, often seen in tweeds on a bike, or ‘rambling’ in hillside gear with a knobbly stick, with a face like a thunderstorm.
Hmmm, could that be Beryl Reid, she certainly was fabulous, very funny and very much a character off screen. Theatricality certainly was a hiding place for eccentric characters, Sir Ralph Richardson, was a legend in the eccentricity stakes.
Joe Orton, Frank Zappa,Ken Russell, Joan Littlewood, today’s celebs are a sad bunch of suck ups, compared to those guys.
Why do you think the band is called Wednesday 13 and the Frankenstein Drag Queens? I reckon there are as many women as men eccentrics but they tend not to congregate in shock rock bands or spoof political movements. Women are well represented in horror punk and goth styled bands and by the law of averages some at will be eccentrics. Susan Ballion is known to have a fair few pet cats which according to folk wisdom signifies eccentricity.
Actually, given that there are more male than female outliers in pretty well everything, whether it’s height, shoe size, IQ or anything else, there probably are more male eccentrics than female. Women are grouped more closely around the mean, so if being eccentric is exceptional, there won’t be as many of them that are.
Barbara Woodhouse would have qualified, I’d think.
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
I would say that, for instance, Sir Desomond Swayne MP is a bit of an eccentric. Crap Man**** (sic)*, on the other hand, is definitely one of the exhibitionists.
*I refer to our obnoxious and supercilious Secretary of State for Health or whatever his title is.
eugene power
3 years ago
Owen jones and dustbin.. when is collection day in Islington ?
ashtreeimages
3 years ago
If he warrants an article written about him, he must still be relevant.
“….how often is faked eccentricity a disguise for predators?”. Shrewd comment Will. Think of that loveable eccentric Sir Jimmy Savile, OBE, KCSG. Or the loveable rogue Boris with his string of discarded mistresses and £400 billion of taxpayer money poured down the COVID toilet.
Karen Jemmett
3 years ago
But I don’t wish to move around anymore!
Niobe Hunter
3 years ago
‘I am alive, I am alive etc’. Pretty much covers everyone on Twitter.
by the way, bit unfair on JS Mill. I don’t think having an unreasonably high estimation for your wife really qualifies as being eccentric.
To know that Owen Jones is reduced to interviewing a man with a dustbin on his head to make ends meet, is actually quite uplifting.
Uplifting indeed. Imagine how the poor lad felt upon finding Count Binface was his intellectual superior. I suspect Jones has gone to ground to lick his wounds. ( obviously this involves lamenting his treatment on Twi##er. )
We can confidently expect a Guardian exposè revealing that Count Binface is not only a fraud, with no identifiable policies on traffic, knife crime or the many issues facing London, but worse still, is guilty of cultural appropriation from the Tin Man, who is ( should we be so foolish as to forget ) a true friend of Dorothy like the Jones boy.
Not heard the phrase “friend of Dorothy” for a while, so thanks for that.
I’ve always been partial to “poor thrower”.
I see Andy Marsh has got the chop.
Not before time.
Ned Kelly ‘disguised ‘ himself by wearing a metal bucket on his head-which is both stupid and eccentric.
Apparently Owen Jones had his phone stolen last week. On the plus side, it was a mostly peaceful theft.
Surely his phone was liberated-all property being theft?
Despite the sneery tone of the article, Count Binface did rather well. Amusingly and fittingly, he defeated the Women’s Equality Party. This party, which of course opposes equality for women, managed only 21,182 votes to the Count’s 24,775.
The majority of the candidates were exhibitionists, only a lot less likeable than Binface.
Well written and amusing article. Thanks for that.
Perhaps the Great British Eccentric isn’t quite extinct yet. Last week, in Unherd’s first Edgelands video, Aris Roussinos interviewed John Mappin who I think can fairly be characterized as a wealthy English eccentric.
For me, Mappin represents the best of what an eccentric can achieve: highlight inconsistencies and flaws in the narrative promulgated by mainstream politicians and their enablers. And also provide a fair bit of free entertainment.
I don’t know if we have eccentrics here in the States. So many mainstream figures seem quite eccentric to me. It’s almost normal in our public life.
I agree completely – Mappin was wonderfully, confusingly eccentric. As far as I can tell there were no ulterior motives – he was just wonderfully strange.
I see Count Binface had to pay £5000 deposit to stand in the election – so he’s obviously not a binman!
David Icke is definitely a Great British Eccentric, or should be thought of one till eventually his theory that lizards masquerading as powerful people ruling the earth is proved true, and then he becomes a visionary. (there was a picture of Biden where you could just make out a bit of a tail, but it has since been purged from the internet.)
Orde Wingate is my favorite Eccentric living almost during my life, he is parodied wonderfully by George MacDonald Fraser in the best combat war diary written ‘Quartered Safe Out Here’ of the Burma Campaign, WWII, and gets covered more sedately by Sir Wilfred Thesiger on the Ethiopian Campaign. Just the very finest kind of soldiering eccentric. Thesiger is my second favorite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orde_Wingate
The oddest coincidence about Orde Wingate is that he played a major role in support Zionism in the 1930s, most of the first generation of Israeli army commanders were trained by him in the 30s. His cousin,T E Lawrence, played a major role in Arab nationalism.
Wavell, who was CinC Middle East at the time, said if had known Windgate was Lawrence’s cousin he would never put him in charge for training the self defence force.
Hard to fault a Wykehamist.
There is a biography about him by Christopher Sykes.
David Icke is surely mentally ill, rather than eccentric. He destroyed his own life with potty ramblings based on films that had excited him.
I suspect Icke may be financially better off then ever..
I don’t dispute that he’s as mad as a barrelfull of monkeys, but I suspect he’s earning a lot more than 200k a year now… And as an old stale and pale presenter he’d have been put out to pasture by the BBC years ago and been replaced by someone more “representative”. Its probably accidental, but I reckon seeing lizards under the bed is the best thing that could have happened to him, career-wise.
He may well be making out like a bandit, Mike, but I reckon the first 20 of the last 30 years were probably pretty lean for him. He doesn’t strike me as having the foresight to have thought that far ahead.
A similar and more typical case is David Shayler, formerly of MI5, who also believes and originates conspiracy theories and is currently living as a transvestite called Dolores.
Decades ago Malcolm Muggeridge noted the questionable sanity of many people in British intelligence. Like irregular warfare, it attracts people who think outside the box (and should probably be locked up in one). My favourite was the British operative working with the French Resistance who drove around occupied France in a car with a Union Jack on the bonnet.
I agree with those below – he’s probably further toward ill than well on the mennal elf chart but many are….He is very shrewd IMO hence the family firm structure so his son can run it after he is taken to planet zog or whatever. Whether he believes his own credo i don’t know but how different is his mythology from Boris Johnson’s Churchill hagiography? Boris either believes in the historicist notion that individuals- generally white, male and armed make history or he doesn’t but knows others like the idea so is cashing in. Either way only one of them has the potential to be dangerous to civil society.
D.Icke He did work for the BBC ..nuff said..
I would class Icke as an exhibitionist. I don’t think he pushes odd theories because he believes them, I think he does because it’s made him incredibly wealthy. A true eccentric is not externally motivated – weirdness comes naturally.
You should have seen the initial stuff, on Wogan as I recall. If a guy with a rock-solid job at the BBC figured donning a shellsuit and babbling about aliens was going to be a smart career choice then either way he was crazy. Gotta remember, this was pre-internet. It was not easy or obvious to see how you monetize a belief that the elites are lizards.
He may be an exhibitionist for all I know – then again he was live on TV to an audience of millions every week. He didn’t need act mad to get attention. I honestly don’t think you can question his genuine nuttiness. David Icke is truly a nutter. It’s just a matter of where you draw the line between eccentricity and mental illness.
Perhaps that’s the thing. Almost any deviation from ‘normal’ behaviour gets medicalised these days. Our would-be eccentrics are all on their meds.
I just did a bit of checking and it was the Duke of Wellington that said railways “encourage the poor to move about.” Sibthorp called railways “the Steam Humbug.” in Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know by Karl Shaw.
Today, of course the Iron Dukes are the lefty fans of trains and light rail. That’s because today it is cars that “encourage the poor to move about.”
Yep. The ruling class likes to keep the poor in their place. No moving about allowed.
Well they have solved that problem by making today’s trains unaffordable for the poor.
Even in 1960 when a decent wage was about £12 per week a single from Paddington to Bristol cost 33/ or one pound and thirteen shillings. If you had a decent lunch onboard that would set you back another pound, more if you hit the ‘Old Monk’ Port.
You’d support renationalistion then Fraser?
Yes, and bring back Beeching, all is forgiven.
Beeching was A Chemist at ICI ..The Main reason Concrete mess of motorways,gained Ground in 1960s Was Ernest Marples(Minister of transport) brother John Had a Road construction company 7won most of the Early Contracts..
Yes. agreed.
However the infamous Modernisation Plan of 1955 should have been preceded by Dr Beeching or someone similar.
As it was 1955 saw millions squandered well before Dr Beeching arrived in 1962/3, when the situation was already desperate.
The whole transition from steam to diesel/electric was an expensive fiasco that bankrupted BR*, and also vilified the very name of BR.
(* British Railways).
Possibly. I don’t really know enough about it. We’re probably screwed with horrible, plasticky trains and expensive tickets either way. The might be fewer strikes under a privatised service, but I don’t remember British Rail being as bad as some claim it to have been, and in the 1980s and early 90s it seemed to be reasonably priced on the whole.
With the cost of electric and hydrogen cars, the poor won’t be moving around in those either.
Auberon Waugh also complained about people moving about on railways who really had no business to.
Thinking of eccentrics in politics reminds me of the late Bill Boakes who, I believe, still holds the record for the greatest number of lost deposits. He would typically stand for election in several constituencies and fail to retain his deposit (it was only £150 in those days) in any of them. The title of his “party” was long and prone to change but the central theme was road safety – as proclaimed by the billboards covering the extremely dangerous looking contraption on which he used to cycle around South London.
Your article has only encouraged me further to vote for Count Binface as you plainly have failed to grasp that not only Livingstone, Johnson and Khan have failed as Mayor of London, but Shaun Bailey (who you rightly observe will not win) would too. Instead of having a pop at brilliant Binface (formerly Buckethead) – who has been standing for yonks before Theresa May wrecked our political scene – maybe embrace the fact that the mainstream parties deserve an almighty kick in their sorry arses and support a protest candidate. Next!
Lord Buckethead,Was Unfairly beaten by Thereason May in Dec 2019 in Maidenhead..
Sentimental attachment to eccentrics, died out in the 1980’s.I remember the late great Dave Allen, having a soft spot for an English eccentric,non aristos too.
You need a bolt hole, to be a practicing eccentric,not a platform.
I gave a lift to someone I thought was a tramp, breton cap, two Co-op carrier bags, he was drenched to the skin, walking on the road outside Polegate, East Sussex.
My first car, a worn out Hillman Avenger, the man climbed in, I recognised him as Lord Longford. He didn’t introduce himself, the carrier bags were full of Home Office correspondence. He launched into a conversation on penal reform, after 20 minutes or so, he asked me to drop him off with an invitation to come to tea, I declined, off he went.
Can’t imagine a public figure behaving like that now.
I think your analysis is spot on, the public regard Keith Lemon as an eccentric. I will still take a sneaky pleasure in Count Binface, whispering in Sadiq Khan’s ear “You are only human”
Keith Lemon! What a total pratt.
Here we have the genuine voice of the metropolitan middle class. The poor mistreated Corbyn brothers, just harmless eccentrics rather than a pair of vicious racists. Don’t mention the fact that Jeremy has repeatedly supported terrorists. As for Boris, he committed the cardinal sin of being successful by ignoring all those nice middle class people with degrees from Russell group universities. The most amusing thing of course is that fact their arrogance and disdain is a constant reminder for the rest of the electorate of why they voted for Boris. Yes Boris’s image is calculated but his greatest selling point is that he isn’t you.
Boris didn’t “become” successful, he was born successful. He may well ignore middle class people, because he’s in the ruling, upper class. At university he was in a special group of people who were born that way, and went around wearing formal dinner jackets and getting hammered all the time. I was there. I saw them. Loads of people did, there are photos.
He’s not very competent. He earned very little of his success, and what he did earn was by charm and guile, not by real work. He doesn’t care what happens to anyone else. How do you not see that?
How unlike the privately educated Crobyn borthers
Of course he’s unlike them. He’s very privileged indeed. All three of them seem atrocious to me, but not for the same reasons.
As Tacitus*might have said:
“Consensu omnium capax imperii nisi imperasset” =
‘Everyone agreed that he was capable of ruling until he actually got the job’.
(*Tacitus on Galba).
The awaiting approval is certainly eccentric. I said that we often mix real and fictional characters-comparing people to Mr Toad for example.
Apart from Screaming Lord Sutch didn’t the current craze for silly candidates come from Monty Python? There does seem a rather unfunny seam of middle-class humour where a person presents as consciously eccentric-wearing half a moustache for example-who are not usually very funny.
But, nevertheless, correct.
The author mentions David Copperfield and Aunt Betsey looks after Mr D–k , after rescuing him from an asylum. His work on his memoirs keeps being interrupted by thoughts of King Charles’ head. Dickens is full of eccentrics characters & I think we muddle up fact and fiction when thinking about British people-constantly comparing people to Mr Toad for example.
“Terrorist” is in the eye of the beholder? Thatcher and Reagan both accused Nelson Mandela of being one.
Well, he was quite prepared to commit acts of terrorism, and encouraged other people to do so.
Harumph! Eccentrics aren’t what they used to be. Everything is going to pot. Bah humbug.
How dare you conflate his Lordship with Binface? Lord Sutch was a shock rocker before Arthur Brown, Alice Cooper or Wednesday 13 had even seen a makeup box. He was the Silly Party made real from about mid 60s onward and though eccentric his point was: Politicians are ridiculous, those in it for ideological reasons are dangerous, those in it for the corruption are actually pretty harmless, and DON’T VOTE FOR THEM IT ONLY ENCOURAGES THEM. You can still get away with being eccentric in Britain but you do need to back it up these days, which is sad for all of us except cops, lawyers and weapons dealers.
Where are the ladies in all this? Is it because, in that deathless phrase, they know their place?
One that was called eccentric was Margaret Rutherford, but I also heard her called ‘a typical English eccentric’ (an oxymoron surely) which is a clue to what she really was (no slight intended) a cliche upper-middle class battleaxe in tweeds, rushing around doing good, and bothering officialdom. There was another similar 1950s/60s character actress, whose first name was ‘June’ I think, often seen in tweeds on a bike, or ‘rambling’ in hillside gear with a knobbly stick, with a face like a thunderstorm.
Hmmm, could that be Beryl Reid, she certainly was fabulous, very funny and very much a character off screen. Theatricality certainly was a hiding place for eccentric characters, Sir Ralph Richardson, was a legend in the eccentricity stakes.
Joe Orton, Frank Zappa,Ken Russell, Joan Littlewood, today’s celebs are a sad bunch of suck ups, compared to those guys.
Why do you think the band is called Wednesday 13 and the Frankenstein Drag Queens? I reckon there are as many women as men eccentrics but they tend not to congregate in shock rock bands or spoof political movements. Women are well represented in horror punk and goth styled bands and by the law of averages some at will be eccentrics. Susan Ballion is known to have a fair few pet cats which according to folk wisdom signifies eccentricity.
Actually, given that there are more male than female outliers in pretty well everything, whether it’s height, shoe size, IQ or anything else, there probably are more male eccentrics than female. Women are grouped more closely around the mean, so if being eccentric is exceptional, there won’t be as many of them that are.
Barbara Woodhouse would have qualified, I’d think.
I would say that, for instance, Sir Desomond Swayne MP is a bit of an eccentric. Crap Man**** (sic)*, on the other hand, is definitely one of the exhibitionists.
*I refer to our obnoxious and supercilious Secretary of State for Health or whatever his title is.
Owen jones and dustbin.. when is collection day in Islington ?
If he warrants an article written about him, he must still be relevant.
He’s got more in that bin than Bailey will ever have in his Bozo brain.
If you were talking about Andrew Bailey of he BoE I’d agree with you.
What exactly then is Fox?
A complete, utter cr**inius w**ker.
“….how often is faked eccentricity a disguise for predators?”. Shrewd comment Will. Think of that loveable eccentric Sir Jimmy Savile, OBE, KCSG. Or the loveable rogue Boris with his string of discarded mistresses and £400 billion of taxpayer money poured down the COVID toilet.
But I don’t wish to move around anymore!
‘I am alive, I am alive etc’. Pretty much covers everyone on Twitter.
by the way, bit unfair on JS Mill. I don’t think having an unreasonably high estimation for your wife really qualifies as being eccentric.