With all the ’spoilers’ in the Sunday press about who’s going to be in the Celebrity Big Brother house I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this year. However they were wrong about several and to my great delight one of my all time heros, film director Ken Russell is in the house. Ya beauty! He’s a one-off original. I was wondering what he was up to these days as he doesn’t seem to be making episodes for the South Bank show each year like he used to. Last time I heard about him he was filming some schlocky low-budget film with a hand-held video for the internet, seemed to involve naked nuns (old habits die hard). He’s almost 80 you know. Camp as Christmas but with an eye for the ladies.
Sad that practically none of the other housemates seemed to know who he is. He’s a quite unique artist who brings the full earthiness of life and passion, flesh and blood into his films. He spent time in the sixties working for Huw Weldon on arty documentaries of composers that broke new ground and breathed new life into biographic film. And so many films with music at the core or with sumptuous soundtracks Tommy, Mahler, Aria and plenty of pop/operatic videos. So many films full-stop. Plenty of box office turkeys in latter years but for sheer bloody inventiveness always worth watching.
In the dark days of British cinema with folk whinging about lack of money he got off his bahookey and assembled a crew and shot many films around the Lake District, no matter what country they were supposed to be set in 
Yes they were cheap but you couldn’t fault the wild imagination. Glasgow, as far as I’m aware, still holds the dubious distinction of being a city that still bans his film “The Devils” from being screened in cinemas (for fear of igniting a religion-fueled backlash from Catholics) but strangely allows it sold in video/DVD. Watching “the devils” on video for the first time was amazing, if you can push past all the sensationalism about the sexual scenes and concentrate on the story there’s really a rather moving morality tale in there contrasting the true believers as flawed individuals with the outwardly pious but privately corrupt religious authorities, and with such startling production design from the late Derek Jarman – it looks absolutely stunning visually.
I really urge you to seek out a copy of Ken’s autobiography “A British Picture”, it is hilarious, especially his various colourful and hair-raising adventures with Oliver Reed.
