DOKTOR TRIVAGO

Hey, fellow Russians! My advice to any of you who wish to travel abroad is always simple! Consult Doktor Trivago before you go! You don’t want to pay more than you have to for a room do you? After all, your Roubles are worth absolutely nothing! So why waste all those dollars you have gathered by selling secrets to the West or your children to Syria paying $100 for a room in, for example, Salisbury, England, when you can get a bunk-bed room in a stinking part of East London for next to nothing?

Doktor Trivago has thousands of rooms on his website, and can advise you on a) How to get a false passport, b) How to avoid contamination by nerve gas and c) What type of prostitute you can bring with you on your next trip so as to avoid being called “gay” by nasty Western Europeans who do not understand why two gentlemen tourists like looking at cathedral spires.

Doktor Trivago has answers to all of your questions about your travel plans, and even about your plans when you return home and discover that Mr “Ras” Putin, the head of state, has poisoned your dogs, demoted you from your position as a Colonel of the GRU and is keeping you in chains in the basement of his presidential palace in Red Square! Even there you will discover that there are different options of rooms at different prices, depending on how many fingernails you are prepared to have pulled out!

FUN WITH LETTERS

POPULAR AMERICAN COMEDIAN BORIS JOHNSON is once again in the news, and although I had more or less decided to abandon writing on this blog there are events which have a mysterious ability to attract me to the keyboard as long as I have time.

THE LAST TIME SUCH an event took place was when equally popular American television entertainer Donald Trump cleared dandruff from bemused French president Macron's shoulder, but this time it is the kerfuffle surrounding what Boris Johnson wrote in the British newspaper The Telegraph. Even this morning, the 19th of August, people are still arguing in television debates over whether Johnson should be punished for something he wrote two weeks ago.

JOHNSON IS FAR TOO FLY to "state" rather than infer his views, and an intelligent readership should judge on what is in fact written, something which none of the commentators I have read or heard have done; as if, in fact, they have not read the column.

JOHNSON criticises Denmark for joining France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Chechnya, Belgium, Chad, Cameroon, Congo and Niger in banning burkas and niqabs. He quite correctly states that, in his opinion, women should not be told what to wear.

HERE IS WHERE I THINK many of the flea-brained leftie politicians have misunderstood the intelligence of Johnson's writing: I would perhaps be prepared to suggest that a good many young women -- one of them was interviewed yesterday on the BBC -- do not wish to wear the burka, but are forced to do so by their fathers and are often punished cruelly for not obeying the male members of the family. That is, of course, that many women who wear the burka have been told what to wear and what not to wear -- due to the obscure and unfounded religious beliefs of the men in their families.

Mr Johnson´s "joke" about letter boxes is obviously tongue-in-cheek. And he does not say that Muslim women look like letter boxes, merely that it is ridiculous for someone to "choose to look like a letter box" and that if a female student turned up for a lecture looking like a bank robber this would cause alarm. As a lecturer I must agree with him.

(My photographs show a letter box -- not a post box -- a bank robber and Boris Johnson with Donald Trump, in order to aid clarity on the issue.)

MAKING A STAND

DESPITE OUR TECHNOLOGY TODAY, it occasionally occurs to me that we have progressed very little since our more primitive days as Neanderthals. We are still both delighted and plagued by sensory memories of the days back when men and women lived in caves in fear of starvation, freezing to death and slaughter by animals. We take great pleasure in the sound of rapid running water in a nearby stream; we bizarrely feel comfort in the flames and sounds of a cracking good open fire; we take delight whenever we feel able to eat outdoors in a warm shade while the sun beats down; and some men still get a hard on and can behave aggressively whenever they see a fruity female flashing the flesh.

THUS WE STILL TODAY witness disgusting cases of harassment of women by men in high places of power and influence, as shown since the Harvey Weinstein case by dozens of accusations against top people in film, theatre, television and politics, particularly in the USA and the UK, where the media feel they have the freedom to report on these issues without fear of being clapped in irons.

IT IS THUS GOOD NEWS to see the beginning of the "Times Up" campaign, which has been set up by a group of prominent American and British actresses in order to raise awareness about how women are exploited and often harassed by producers, executives, directors, casting directors and indeed other actors.

FOR FAR TOO LONG NOW those involved in the media have seen serious actress as nothing more than flesh and -- no doubt puzzled at why some men think that women are "available" in exchange for a part in a movie or a promotion -- these brave actresses have come forward to make a stand.

FOR MY PART, I SAY hat's off to Eva Longoria,

 Emma Stone,

Natalie Portman,

Kerry Washington,

and Rashida Jones

for launching this brave initiative that will no doubt be another step on the way to seeing female actresses achieve the same respect as their male counterparts.

BUT SERIOUSLY, HAVING WORKED AS A DIRECTOR, casting director and occasional producer of both plays and films in the late eighties and early nineties, and in various capacities in the cinema since then, I propose a further move that will help to clear up this mess. Someone should form a similar association or launch a similar campaign through which honest men could denounce and expose actresses (or women in any other capacity for that matter) who offer sex or sexual acts to men in exchange for a part. I know from personal experience that this happens. Shouldn't these women be exposed?

My photographs are taken from various magazine shoots or publicity handouts that these actresses were no doubt forced to undertake.