Tabloid

Laughing all the way to Tenerife

     

I watched this one having downloaded it from iTunes on the plane to Tenerife and had to push the pause button and take the headphones off on a couple of occasions because I was laughing too much.
I well remember the Joyce McKinney case being played out on the front pages of the Daily Mirror back in the 1970’s when we used to take the paper at home (- before I cancelled it and stopped having it delivered in the early 1990’s because I didn’t want it in our house with our kids!) but can’t say that I really understood what the case of the Mormon in Chains was really all about.
There are a couple of really interesting snippets - for example about the Mormons believing that all black people are ‘tarnished’ and ‘carry the mark of Cain’ and that at death we are all assigned a personal planet to which we can all ascend, something to think over when considering Mitt Romney, I suppose....but mainly this is good old fashioned knock-about editing.
Clearly use of the talking head gives full range to a small cast with Peter Tory and the lascivious Kent Gavin two names that I recognised from my newspaper delivery days when I managed to combine pushing newspapers through letter boxes with the task of reading all the headlines and interesting articles as I made my way round Heol Fach, Heol Maendy, Ael y Bryn and Heol Onnen each morning. But mainly it is just sit back and enjoy the fun - Joyce is completely self obsessed, self-dramatising in that American female way that is now so familiar and - to use a phrase from the documentary itself - barking mad.
More barking, of course, is that the British police and judiciary didn’t see through this nonsense immediately and even took the trouble to lock her up for 90 days in Holloway.
Brilliant film-making, really, really funny and the best start to a holiday (and great alternative to in-flight entertainment) I can remember for a long time.