TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* Britainology 14: The Krays

Episode Date: July 22, 2022

In this unlocked episode, Milo subjects Nate to the 2015 Tom Hardy film LEGEND and a wider discussion about the Krays. Why do British people still gravitate towards their story? Find out in this episode. If you like Britainology, you can get one a month on the regular TF Patreon at the $5 tier, or 2 a month at the $10 tier. Sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you’re looking for a UK strike fund to donate to, here’s one we’ve supported: https://www.rmt.org.uk/about/national-dispute-fund/ *MILO ALERT* Here are links to see Milo’s upcoming standup shows: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, and welcome to yet another edition of Britannology. I'm Milo Edwards, and I'm joined as ever by my co-host, Nate Pathay. Hello. It's a lovely day in London. It's warm-ish and sunny, unusually sunny, cycled in today. It's suspiciously sunny. I've seen some really, really strange, incredibly British things in recent times.

I don't know. I'm not going to lie. Oh, dear. The other day, I was cycling in and I saw a guy who legitimately looked like Karl Marx, except imagine kind of hench. Yeah, he's like jacked Karl Marx. He's a scape from High Gates, aren't he?

He was unloading, he was using what we'd call a dolly cart to unload a truck in front of a Sainsbury's local, but he had like fully white hair, but like the blown out kind of pyramid of hair and the big beard and everything like that. Absolutely like. Dolly full of linen coats. Exactly, just jacked Karl Marx.

Wild stuff, man. So just Karl Marx. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There were a couple other things, too. You know, invariably this time of year, you just, I've said it on numerous other shows. I've been on to the point where I can't even remember if I'm repeating myself that when people start coming out

and more people start cycling and stuff, it feels like London's AI is glitching because so much more shit is just kind of thrown at you all over the place as opposed to between lockdown and cold weather, like folks were kind of staying off the road. So. Yeah, and as we know, Britain is kind of like an RPG. There are only so many faces that it has

that you start seeing people over and over again. Exactly, they just keep repeating over and over again. Guys, we do love that. Well, it's funny you should mention something involving the same guys. The same guy, indeed. Because today we are going to talk about the Kray twins. Famous British fucking gangsters.

Dave Courtney's gay dads, the Kray twins. Yeah, exactly. They love their moms. They never hurt me, but I mean, well, they did hurt some people, but yeah, but now I didn't deserve it. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I'm glad that you're aware of the they loved their mom thing

about the Kray. They looked after their mom. Yeah, you've mentioned that to me before, and also we talked about it with Dave Courtney, with specifically on the first episode of Britnology, where the guy tried to say he never hurt anyone and then had to stop himself because he realized that is emphatically not true.

Yeah, never hurt anyone. It wasn't a wrong one. He only hurts nonsense. Exactly. So we got to watch a film featuring bisexual icon Tom Hardy, basically playing both roles of both Ronnie and Reggie Kray. Yeah, they were identical twins. Filmed in what looked like right next door

to our old studio in and around here in Whitechapel. And yeah, it was, well, I'm not going to say it was a good movie, but I do think that there was a certain degree of high-budget attention to detail in trying to recreate London of the time. And yeah, it was a film about geysers. A film about geysers, geysers, slags, cunts, mugs, all the different shades of guy that you can get.

And what's important to remember here is that this is a true story. The film might have been fictionalized, et cetera, et cetera, but it is a true story of a thing that used to exist, which is a sort of geyser mafia in London of guys running protection rackets, casinos, et cetera. Pubernostra. Yeah, and yeah, just our, you know,

the forebears of a kind of cockney legend of hard men running London, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, well, as the film is called, Legends. Legends, exactly. People do love, I mean, we'll get into like the general British public opinions about the Krays because I think the way that the British people relate to like organized crime in the East End is fascinating.

But on the subject of stressing that it's a true story, I actually, I saw this film when it came out in the cinema in Moscow. And I went with my flatmate, Yosha Hoon. He went to university in the UK. He spoke really good English. What was that then? He's like muddling through with understanding the film

despite the inscrutable accents and slang. And then at some point, we're kind of like chatting in the cinema. And it became apparent to me that he didn't realize that these were like real guys. He was like, oh, this is like a fun story. I'm like, no, this is all like real. And they were friends with like half of like

all the British celebrities of the time. So what you're doing was correct. Bolton is the based country. That's right, exactly. To be fair to your friend, I also struggled with the accents. About five minutes into the film, I turned to Milo and said, could we please turn the subtitles on?

Because much like the first time I saw Trainspotting, I was understanding what was going on, but there were a lot of let's call nuances being lost on me because it was just so fucking cockney. And also my hearing's not as good as it used to be. And so you combine that with some deeply, deeply English accents and I just, I struggle with it. He's gone a bit deaf and now Geysers

are out of his ear in range. I transmit a certain frequency. Frequency of crime. Yeah, I'm on deeply Geyser wavelength because Nate knows this, but I picked up my car this morning. And of course, this is a deeply Geyser experience dealing with car dealers.

Used car dealers. Used car dealers. Oh, absolutely. In Romford, the heart of like Geyser country these days. This is like, the people who live in Romford now are like the people who lived in the East End in the time when this was set. This is kind of like, I mean, as we know,

working in the East End, the East End has changed a lot since the days of Geysers who will have a punch up in the pub. They are still here, but in smaller numbers obviously because the demographics have changed a lot. Tower Hamlets as a borough is still majority white, but like that's because there's so much of a mix of people in the borough, but like...

Yeah, because Tower Hamlets includes like, whopping and like other places that aren't, like aren't really what you think of necessarily as the classic East End. My experience in places like Shadwell is that when you go there, you will encounter lots of really, really old cockneys. And basically it feels like

the majority of people that are Bengali. So that was in the 1960s, not the case, but then this thing called Essex happened. Yeah, absolutely. And then everyone moved out to Essex and the story of Milo begins there. In America, you had white flight and here we had Geyser flight.

That was, that's the truest, the truest form. There's more free space for crime. Yeah. It's too crowded. So just in general about, I mean, I'm not gonna pretend I know loads about the craze. I'm just on their Wikipedia now. And I noticed that the picture on their Wikipedia

is a portrait of them that was done by David Bailey, who's like a really famous British photographer. So I'm kind of, this is the kind of the thing about the craze, which I think the film gets across a bit. But like, yeah, there's the way in which there were like, everyone at sort of the top of British society or at least like kind of celebrities

were like just very happy to like hobnob with them. Like Barbara Windsor who died recently, who's like a very famous actress for that period was like huge mates with the craze. It does strike me that, and correct me if I'm off base here, that there's a sort of desire for authenticity that British people feel this kind of

when they encounter people who aren't just to use a Britishism, just tedious cons like themselves. They kind of gravitate towards that. I think that, and it manifests itself in different kinds of neuroses about authenticity in one way or the other, whether it's call it the sort of symptom

of the larger FBPE disease kind of like. Manifesting that desire of wanting to be something else or wanting to identify with something else. The craze show up in your pub to intimidate you with a load of golden retrievers. And they're like, yeah, we're having a woofer end them. We round this pub now. Yeah, exactly.

I'm just imagining FBPE Ronnie Cray, just like. Oh my God. This country is better in than out. I can't fucking do it now. I don't know what that accent was. I can't even fucking do it. I just, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's called a fucking Portuguese cast a tongue.

I don't like it as a thought. Yeah, I mean, but then at the same time too, you'll encounter this with people, you know, there is that fixation, I think, with a lot of British expats who wind up in the United States, for example, that like they're really into the stuff that gives America call it sort of scare quotes,

authenticity of music culture and that kind of a thing. And so it doesn't surprise me that people would want to gravitate towards something with, let's call it like notoriety, you know, in the sense of just sort of seeing the authentic item, if you will. Here are people who are absolutely criminals who are violent, but not in a like slasher film way.

Like they're just, they're gangsters. And I mean, I don't know if you had, I couldn't tell you if you had a similar thing, but I think you kind of did in America with like, for example, Frank Sinatra being friends with like Sam Jankana and stuff like that. And I'm reading this here. Apparently they hung out with Frank Sinatra as well.

What you have to understand is that Frank Sinatra, he was Sicilian. So like, those are all his people. Hey, whoa. Like in a huge, huge way. He may have had blue eyes, but he was Sicilian. And so as a result, there's just this, but there were similar things to me.

One of the big conspiracies around JFK was that like, he was friends with Frank Sinatra and Sam Jankana and like dated a woman that also was dating Sam Jankana and stuff like that. And Sam Jankana was a Sicilian gangster who was like a big guy in Chicago, that kind of a thing. So like you did have a similar phenomenon, but I think that because of the fact

that the UK is a smaller country and that everything is so London centric, you know, it's sort of everyone who's doing shit is here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. For better or for worse. Yeah, I mean, there was definitely like- We want to make Birmingham happen. In our hearts, we really want to make Birmingham happen.

For the time being, this country is very London centric. There was similar, I think there were similar sort of kind of geyser vibes, crime rackets up and down the country. I mean, you get a bit more of that in kind of like, Guy Ritchie is a bit more interested in that, or like Leia Cake, where there's lots of stuff about like- But actually both Guy Ritchie and that film Leia Cake are very, like they always bring in scousers for some reason.

They're always about, whenever they're getting someone down from out of London, it's always Liverpool. Yeah, fair. And definitely, actually, when I was like, when I was a teen agent and Liverpool was like really notoriously bad for getting crime, it was like people were getting shot a lot in Liverpool.

But seems fine now. Haven't really heard anything about Liverpool, so I assume it's fine. But then again, I mean, similarly, Glasgow had its own sort of, as I understand it, crime reputation, but that was less an organized crime thing. Although there were sort of brackets in the mob

and shit like that. It was just Francis Begby. But there also was like, yeah, you know, there's through the random stabbings. And then you think of something like Peaky Blinders that is Birmingham and some really like crime shit, you know, social dysfunction, incredible poverty and just like a bunch of geezers.

So yeah. When it's like, like everything in the UK, everything's so localized. I mean, again, this comes up in the film, but like how like the craze are running East London, but the Richardson's who are another real gang who existed are running South London. And there's like a constant sort of turf war about

if any of them show up in a pub north of the river, the craze are furious about it. And yeah, the Richardson's had this guy who doesn't really come up much in the film, but this guy called Mad Frankie Fraser, who's another like incredibly famous British gangster that people like to talk about in these kind of like, oh, Frankie A was all right terms.

And they called him Mad Frankie Fraser for a reason. Yeah, I was going to say, nominative determinism. Oh yeah. To Mr. and Mrs. Frankie Fraser, a son mad. Well, I mean, I remember hearing that name and yeah, you know, hearing stories about that being the case too that, well, I mean, there's a whole scandal isn't there

that like there was a ton of organized crime in London and there was also the police were famously corrupt. And so, you know, that was kind of a breeding ground for that stuff. And it's like in the United States, you had the exact same thing going on. It's just everyone was Italian, but it's the same sort of thing.

You had the New York mob and Chicago mob and Las Vegas being run openly by the mob and stuff like that. And that changed in the 70s. And particularly in the 80s, these guys started to get prosecuted. The big one was in the U.S. at least, and I don't know what it's like here, was that because the mob got involved

with drug trafficking that had been kind of like a thing that wasn't, they didn't really touch and then they made, they realized how much money they could make from it. The thing was post the start of the war on drugs under Reagan, these guys that used to be facing five, 10 year sentences for whatever dumb bullshit they were doing as mobsters, were now looking at 40, 50, 60 years in prison

for drug sentencing and stuff like that. And so a lot of people turned and flipped and stuff. And the mob lost all of its power relative to what it had previously had. It still exists, but you know, if you think about like the level of crime that they get up to in the Sopranos in terms of like, they're not exactly like-

Mostly bullying a guy who owns a sports store. Yeah, defrauding a sports store, stealing some cars and selling them to Italians, bringing actual Italians over to do physical crimes for them. A little stuff here and there with some front businesses- Pushing whibbistics. Yeah, getting construction companies to put, no show jobs on the books for them and stuff like that.

Very small scale stuff compared to like, running the gambling center of America. So it did exist in the 60s in America and like it doesn't, to any great degree anymore. No, exactly. And then yeah, so basically like, before we get into the film itself, kind of, the craze were like big in the kind of 50s and 60s.

At the end of the 60s, they both went to prison for life. Ronnie died in prison in 1995 and Reggie died in 2000. He got let out on compassionate release like a few weeks earlier. So that's kind of their period of activity. Yeah, so the film starts out,

Reggie is out on the town being a gangster. Ronnie is in a secure mental unit because he is paranoid schizophrenic. And Reggie manages to have a psychiatrist bullied into declaring him fit for release, during which time he has begun trying to charm a local cockney lass, Francis, whose mother doesn't approve of Reggie

because he is a gangster. But he insists that he's just a club owner. Exactly. And he does various romantic gestures like asking her if he can suck on the candy she's currently sucking on. Yeah. At one point, climbing.

This is cockney kink. At one point, climbing up the rain spout or the gutter spout to propose to her, taking her to the club, leaving her at the table with one of his henchmen for a moment while he punches a guy in the face and then comes back to show her an evening and have a sort of mock philosophical conversation

about the center of the world as wherever you want it to be and so on and so forth. Yeah, so it's just gotta go and punch a guy in the face. You know, that happens. Sometimes it's a little bit of business, a little bit of pleasure at once. It happens to the best of us. Yeah, there's kind of a running thing throughout the film

where there's this one guy that works for them. Jack. Yeah, Jack the Hat, Jack McVity, who is always doing something that pisses off Reggie and Reggie always gives him a cigarette and then punches him in the face. Yeah. This is a fun little visual gag.

The third time he winds up physically accosting him is slightly more serious. A slightly less funny incident. Exactly. Yeah, so he's dating Francis. They get married and he then gets, he gets put in prison for, well, actually this happens before they get married,

but he gets put in prison for this like previous thing that he was on a warrant for, which they don't really explain what it was. Yeah, it sounded like he had been, like the sentence had been suspended, but they decided to unsuspend it. So he wound up having to serve the last six months of his sentence in prison.

So he goes to prison, the cops beat him up. He then manages to fake, you know, grovel, snatch a pair of handcuffs from the cop, handcuff him to the bars and beat the fuck out of him, earning the respect of the prisoners that was already there to the begin with, and then getting him beaten to complete shit. However, you know, he's established dominance

in prison this way because he's Reggie Cray. Becoming the alpha in prison. Again, that was one of the things where I kind of wondered like how sort of accurate that was on the basis that like, the film sort of simultaneously is like, oh yeah, the craze of these like the tourist criminals that everyone knows who they are. They like run London or whatever,

but also that like Reggie Cray feels like he has to establish dominance when he gets in prison. When it's like, well, presumably not. Yeah, and also it's one of those things where, you know, particularly back then, no matter how famous a celebrity gangster you were, it's probably safe to assume that if you pissed off the cops in prison enough,

they'd probably murder you. Like, they kind of could, but it's just one of those things where it's a film, you know, they take creative license. How many flat nose keys have you got in? Exactly. That was the thing is that he had 501 flat nose geysers and they couldn't take on an army like that.

If it had been 500 or fewer, they wouldn't have thought twice about murdering him, you know. That's what happened to Dave. They couldn't handle a man with that much power. Exactly, you know, it's just the magic number. Italian sized geyser element. Lieutenant Colonel Dave Courtney

and his battalion of geysers. Yeah, so he gets out of prison. Francis makes him promise her that he is not going to go back to prison, but meanwhile, while he's been in there, Ron, his twin brother, who is still a paranoid schizophrenic, has been doing some interesting things with the business.

He tries to hand his stand up. Oh yeah. Bombs it pretty hard. Scares away everybody from the club because he's a psycho. Wants to build a utopian city in Nigeria called Inugu. They're doing some real like a North FC shit.

I had no idea if that's actually historically accurate, like if he had some harebrained scheme along those lines, but. I don't know. I think there's definitely sort of implied that he had endless harebrained schemes. Yeah, fair. So I don't know whether that particular one was true or whether that was more meant to give a general sense

of what he was like. I would just say that whom among us cannot relate to the idea of having to chase after a completely unhinged sibling who's constantly getting themselves into scrapes. I know nothing about this. Yeah. Yeah, no one knows anything about this.

There's a bit, I think which comes earlier in the film than this where they're in a sort of minor turf war with the Richardson gang. And the Richardson suggests that they have like a little a meeting to call a truce at this pub called The Pig and Whistle, which I found funny in and of itself, which is supposedly on neutral territory. I'm not sure they don't really say where the pub is,

but and the Craig twins show up and it's like, the Richardson's aren't there, but they've just sent some guys to like beat them up. And then Ronnie makes a show of Zoe has two shotguns in his coat pocket and manages to walk out and then they say they're going to beat up Reggie and he is talking about, all right, fine, let's have a fight then.

And then Ronnie comes in with two hammers and begins setting about everyone in the bar. They have a fight, the Craig twins win. During which time though, they refer to the guys that the Richardson sent as a bunch of nonces. Which did amuse me, I thought, you know, it's true. Much like the life of the craze does have some handshake memes

with being on Twitter. So, you know. Fair, yeah. I mean, well, being flash, calling people nonces, one person being decidedly better at posting than the other. Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's some similarities there. Absolutely. What is there were four identical twins

and they were all just the trash shoot show guys. Well, there's actually five of us, but we've forgotten. One can't be identical. A fraternal twin. Alice. Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah.

And so when Reggie gets out of prison, him and Ron have this big confrontation at the club because it's Friday night and there's barely anyone in there. And it turns out that, yeah, Ron has scared away all the customers and like extorted loads of money, embezzled loads of money rather out of the business. And so the business is all in trouble.

They have a big fist fight in the bar. I don't know how they shot Tom Hardy having a fist fight with himself. Technically quite impressive. But it's sort of played for laughs. It's like really, but there's sort of like, there's a bit where Ronnie is like grabbing his balls.

He's like, oh, come on, Ron, not like that. Yeah, yeah. There is a certain level of the boys are at it again as opposed to, well, I mean, here are two insane people who could absolutely kill each other and Reggie ends the fight by breaking a champagne bottle over Ronnie's head. Yeah.

So, yeah, it is not good. Pretty classic, yeah. Breaking a champagne bottle, as someone said. Yeah, during the fight, actually, one of the characters, one of the guys who works there in my camera, I think they call him Big Pat, whose character is just that he is very large.

He's like, I'm gonna separate. I'm not gonna fucking kill each other. And they're like, no, you gotta let him do this. It's funny you should mention Big Pat because Big Pat is bald and big and is the doorman at their club. And as I said to Milo as we were watching this, this seems to suggest that there's just an archetype

of Dave Kourtney that occurs throughout history. Whatever your crime operation, there will always be a bald doorman who is just a big guy. And that's all you need. Except that Big Pat is like double the size of Dave Kourtney. Dave Kourtney is wide, but he's not tall. He's not particularly tall, is he? And yeah, Big Pat absolutely is.

So we have, yeah, you have the henchmen like Albie and Big Pat and... Yeah, most of the henchmen look a bit like Brian Ferry or other members of Roxy Music, apart from Big Pat, who is like the gigantic bald guy who looks like he could crush your head like a melon. Yeah, absolutely. Everyone else just looks like they lacked vitamins as children.

Yeah, Albie is the guy who's like Reggie's main fixer, right, the guy who says like, you just stabbed a guy in a room full of people, are you fucking mad? Yeah. That guy. I think he's the one who I was thinking of. He looks like Brian Ferry. Yeah, well then there's also,

there's the Scottish guy too, isn't there? Oh yeah. There's two guys who are like skinny, just sort of like leathery skin looking guys and one of them's Scottish and one of them's not. Yeah. Yeah, there's quite a diverse gang of geysers from different parts of the United Kingdom in this.

Again, I don't know how accurate that is. I mean, I presume they're mostly based on real people because like Big Pat is clearly supposed to be Northern. He's got like a Yorkshire accent. Yeah, that's true. To be honest with you, you're... You're not the voice I did, but... You're better at picking up on that than I am.

Oftentimes when it gets super cockney unless like there's a very, very obvious Northern vowel drop, like I sometimes cannot tell them all apart. I'm getting better at it. I mean, I'm better at it in the sense now that when someone points something out like, the guy who grows the enormous vegetables who lives in Oxfordshire has kind of a West Country accent.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Someone asked me once like, what the fuck is that accent? I was like, honestly, that's West Country-ish. I mean, I imagine a guy that old, it's possible. He might have been born and raised in Oxfordshire and just talks that way. Old school West Oxfordshire, yeah. Yeah, like rural Oxfordshire, like proper Oxfordshire types.

It's like, I mean, there's lots of like posh home counties, people who have houses in Oxfordshire and they commute to London or whatever, but like proper, proper Oxfordshire is like, all right. And then obviously like Scouse is pretty distinct, so you can tell. And Geordie is pretty distinct too, because I can't understand any of it, so...

Geordie is quite something. Yeah, that is, it's hard to do as well because I think Geordie is so... They have so much of their own slang. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like ways of like, they call cigarettes tabs and stuff like that. And it's just very like, the whole way of speaking

is like, it's like a proper dialect, Geordie. Yeah, there were some good bits of cockney slang in this, but I can't remember now. I think they didn't put too much rhyming slang in it, because I think they thought for an international audience, it would just be too confusing. I do appreciate that as far as I'm aware, Tom Hardy did not grow up with cockney family

or speaking with a cockney accent, but he managed to do a much better job than... Yeah, I don't know where Tom Hardy's from actually. I know he's English, but I don't know where he's from, and he did do quite a good job of that. The sake of professionalism. Let's open... Let's mid-episode recording, open Wikipedia.

Absolutely. I feel like that's the nature. We don't have to leave everyone guessing. Oh, did you look at that? His real name is Edward Hardy. Ed Hardy. Ed Hardy. Yeah, we couldn't have that.

I didn't know he was in Black Hawk Town. Oh yeah, he's very, very young in that. I think he... Orlando Bloom... I was born in London, so... Private who falls off the thing, who's very, very young too, but I can't remember what... He was born in Hammersmith,

so I think it is fair to say that he is not... Yeah, he brought up in East Sheen and attended Tower House School. Yeah, this is not a cockney man. Yeah, for the sake of explaining this to our non-British listeners, Hammersmith... East Sheen is like... Well, because where he actually grew up is like Bougie. It's like that's like Richmond Park, that's sort of down the way.

Like Zach Goldsmith lives there. Hammersmith is in West London, so yeah. For the purpose of definition, because this is something I didn't really get until I spent time in the UK, cockney almost invariably means East London, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, yeah.

Would you consider someone who is just like extreme South London geezer to be cockney or no? In the broader sense of the word, like so technically speaking, cockney means born within the sound of the bow bells. So you have to be in like quite a small area of East London, but like in general sense, kind of London geezer is generally considered cockney.

So be it like North or South London, it's sort of like kind of of the same. The culture is the same. It's the same slang, it's the same shit, but it's like kind of the East End is sort of the traditional vibe. Which is basically where we are right now. We're literally on brick lane.

Like you don't get more obnoxiously just London than where we are around here. I don't know if you can hear the bow bells even from here. That is a good point though. But I mean, this is definitely like proper cock... I mean, like we were saying, most of the film looked like it was shot around this street.

Yeah, where our old studio on Ashefield Street was the buildings around there, genuinely it could have been shot around some of those side streets. Cause like it's absolutely still looks like that today. Like if you're gonna pick a spot with cobblestone streets and like flat fronted either like Victorian houses or maybe even older than that,

that like are just covered in soot. Yes, that is what it looked like. Absolutely, yeah. Like genuinely there were a couple of shots from like, I think I have walked down that street before at the old studio. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And yeah, so yeah, that's sort of the general taxonomy.

So I mean, like the Richardson's are like, they're like South London, but they're still kind of cockneys in the broadest sense of the word. So then we get this bit where they're approached by like Angelo Bruno of the Philadelphia crime family, I'm reading, who is approaching them on behalf of Maya Lansky, who was a Jewish gangster.

Correct, yes. They really call that mafia or not. They would call it the Jewish mafia, the Jewish mob. Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely. But yeah, Maya Lansky was weird because you brought this up when we were watching it. Lansky was definitely involved in the mob in the 30s, but he was old by this point,

but like a lot of these guys that stuck around, obviously Capone was dead. So yeah, he approaches them and he basically is offering them to front them the money to have like an underground gambling ring in exchange for like 50-50 split of the profits. Well, he offers them worse terms, but Reggie negotiates with him,

puts up his extremely hard man front and Bruno is impressed by him. So, and then there's an interesting scene where Ronnie basically talks about fucking dudes. Yeah, because the Italian guy is saying like, hey, whoa, you should come to Philadelphia, you can get anything you want in here. Pasta girls, it's like spaghetti girls.

I don't know what else the guys want. I think the joke he was making when he said spaghetti and meatballs, he's talking about like a hot Italian chick. I don't think he was specifically talking about spaghetti and meatballs, yeah. Yeah, yeah, you know. Yeah, and to be fair.

Some meatballs and some spaghetti, you know what I'm saying? Oh, I see, okay. Yeah, yeah, the chick with balls. That's right, we got lots of hot trans women. Yeah, you're gonna love it. And what's a fucking trans woman then? You gotta come to Philadelphia.

So, I mean, and one thing that might be slightly lost in the subtext here is that in the American mob, if you were gay, that was like a death sentence. Yeah, yeah, and it still was in Sopranos era. That's like a plot line in Sopranos. Yeah, in Sopranos, but especially in the, I can't remember the guy's name off the top of my head, but the American mob boss who got murdered

that sort of led to John Gotti becoming the head of the Gambino crime family or establishing dominance over the mob in New York in the 80s. One of, he was killed in a mob hit and the rumor was that he was gay. And so like that, absolutely. Like if you were, and they found out you'd die.

So the notion of Ronnie admitting that is a shocking, dual fucking guy from Philly. You know, he likes broads. You don't like fucking guys. Yeah, it's interesting. To be honest, I think the most shocking thing you could offer a Cockney gangster is spaghetti and meatballs because I can't imagine that either of them

would have had any idea what that was. I can remember like my mom talking about growing up in like the 50s and 60s in the, who's like my mom's parents are both like extremely cockney. And she's like, I didn't have pasta until I was an adult. And like, I remember she was like, she said that her mom bought spaghetti once, like my grandmother from the supermarket

and had no idea what to do with it. She was just like snapping into pieces and putting it in soup. My mom's grandfather was a, my great-grandfather was a Jewish guy from Woolwich. Or her grandmother was a woman from fucking Norwich. And her mom grew up in Norwich and like then married an American guy

and moved to America. And one time my mom tried to get, they had had pizza at school and tried to get her mom to make pizza. And she just described it to her. And she said what my mom came up with was basically toast with ketchup and like a slice of cheddar cheese

with just like ground beef on top. And she's like, imagine this to me, like nothing could be more indicative of that generation. Let me like describe pizza from experience and what they come back with. It's just sort of like how an English person would conceive of pizza. It's a fucking pizza, mate.

What's wrong with ya? It's bread in it, it's cheese, it's smart. What more do you want? Yeah, cursed British approximations of food. But yeah, and so yeah, Ronnie goes into all these details about like the different kinds and ethnicities of men he has fucked. Yes, exactly.

And to shock Mr. Bruno, but then Mr. Bruno says, basically, I'm impressed. He's like, ah, being gay, I salute. I salute, my own, you have the balls to admit it. Hey, let's toast, I'm being gay. Yeah, this is basically that. We're not really exaggerating. It's very funny.

Look at this guy, look at this big gay guy over here. And there is like, they don't really beat around the bush in that stuff. And I don't know if this is what Ronnie was like in real life, but there's a scene where Francis, Reggie's love interest in later wife, meets Ronnie for the first time, and he's living in like a,

you call it a caravan, wouldn't you? Like we'd say like a trailer or like a camper. Yeah, a camper. And then a dude steps out of the thing, and then he just goes, almost sexual. Like it just goes right in. Like he's very, very overtly in your face, about like, I am gay.

And I don't know how true to life that is, but obviously that's part of the mythos is that he was... Yeah, I don't know. I think that... Being gay was still illegal in the UK. I mean, in the 50s, certainly. And I think it was 1967, they decriminalized it. But, you know, obviously like they, maybe it was later than,

it was in the 60s, I believe, but like they didn't normalize the age of consent in the UK because it was higher for gay men than for heterosexuals. They didn't normalize it. I wanna say it to like the fucking 2000s. I think it, I'm not sure it was that late, but yeah, there was a higher age of consent. Yeah, there was all kinds of like fucked up laws.

America is different in the sense that like... This was back when it forced British politicians to be more cool because like Tory politicians were always getting caught like having sex in bushes in the park. There's my favorite Winston Churchill story about the, like one of his ministers had been caught like having gay sex in Hyde Park.

It was like February or something. And then supposedly the guy comes in and tells Churchill this, and then Churchill was just like, wasn't it dreadfully cold last night? And he's like, yes, it was the coldest night of the year. And he's like, they should be proud to be British, doesn't it?

Yes. Yes, I mean, I have always been taken aback by, if you look at like the social mores and such and the way that like people were, you know, regularly tormented and outed as being gay and like prosecuted for it. You look at something like Alan Turing and something like that. But then, you know, you also, you read the memoirs

of somebody like Robert Graves. And he talks about like, anyone of Graves's generation who grew up in the same class as Graves, like we'll have a story about going to public school and like being, you know, in some kind of a homosexual relationship. Like that was just sort of a thing that happened.

And it's just weird because like, that is kind of a stereotype, I think, that people who know stuff about, not British people who know stuff about British culture have. And I think in a way it's weird because I don't know if they're put it this way. You wouldn't have been able to be a mob guy and be openly gay in America in the 60s.

And a lot, I mean, obviously because of the fact that like, well, a lot of these guys like came from communities that were super religious and stuff like that, but also like the whole macho shit too. I mean, the problem is the Italians. It's not what I'm actually saying, but I mean, more than anything else, like the idea of there being a gay gangster,

it's not that it's unthinkable, it's just that in that, you know, the same time period in America. I'm not aware of anything that was- So according to, supposedly in his own words, Ronnie Crane is in his various like books and interviews has said that he's bisexual, but he was married to three women at various points,

all while he was in prison in Broadmoor. So yeah, I mean, I suspect that it probably wasn't like super open. I mean, very much the way they portray it in the film is that like he enjoys telling people it because like he knows that he's such a psycho that they won't say anything about it. Like that his whole like, they're like,

well, you can't really be homophobic around this guy because he will just hit you with a hammer. Yeah, exactly. Well, let me know what's thinking about- It's certainly one way of doing gay rights. It's just interesting too, because this is a thing that I've noticed that oftentimes when they'll do these big budget, big studio biopics of people

who are gay or bisexual or whatever, it's rare that they're actually ever depicted in any kind of like love interests, like actual physical contact, you know what I mean? Like he goes around this entire film, just being like, I'm almost sexual, but never kisses a man, never has, there's no like love any kind of ceiling.

He has these like hanger on boys, but like he basically always- It sort of implied that he's shagging Teddy, isn't it? Yeah, but like they just don't, aside from him lighting their cigarettes, there's literally nothing. Hilariously, I saw the Elton John biopics- The sex wasn't invented in Britain until 1970s.

Yeah, exactly, the reason why even gay sex was just like you strip down to your pants, you have a little cuddle, you light a cigarette. Yeah, exactly. You quiz each other on Greek and Roman mythology and that's it, that's being gay and pouring smoke. That is right, yeah. Yeah, and so, which is interesting because I mean,

I don't think Tom Hardy is like particularly openly bi, but like he was more or less outed by the fact that he had like total gay thought pics and stuff and listed himself as bisexual on like MySpace before he'd become famous. MySpace? Yes, yes. I don't know if you've ever heard

that Tom Hardy thought ass pics. Yes. No. And I mean, he's a good looking guy, let's be honest here. Tom Hardy got cake, is that what we're dealing with? Oh my God, yes, yes. And this is a film- I can tell these photos made an impression on me. I mean, this is a film that's basically a vehicle

for Tom Hardy to like look hot the entire time, but it is interesting to me that sort of contrast between I'm gonna, like it's in your face that I'm gay, but there's no acknowledgement whatsoever that like he is sexually attracted to men. You'd almost think if you didn't know anything about it that he was just telling people that to freak them out. If you just know what to think about the story.

It's like equally though, the way that Reggie is portrayed, like there's no, he's also very sexless. Like he has this relationship with Francis, but there's never like any... It's like his first crush practically, you know what I mean? Yeah, there's like never any like intimacy between them really of any kind. It's mostly him kissing her to apologize

after he's done something fucked up or his brother has done something fucked up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's that, and in some ways I feel like that might be quite accurate. I feel like so many, there is just a certain like sexlessness to British culture, which is like... It's weird because I think we have this impression

that British people is being really, really buttoned up about stuff, but I think... Yeah, it's not prudish, it's different. It's just like a kind of... If anything, it's probably a little more openly body. And we've talked about this on other episodes, like with drugs, people are way more open about drug use here. Like Americans are prudish and puritan about certain things.

It's just like, I think maybe the reason why British people have this reputation is because of the things that make us uncomfortable, don't make British people uncomfortable, but the things that make us that we don't bat an eye at would make British people incredibly uncomfortable. Talking about your personal life with someone you don't really know,

that's like British kryptonite, where... I feel like the most powerful like British guy energy, and particularly like Giza Hardman energy, is to be like, I have a hot girlfriend because like that's like a Chad thing to do, but also it's gay to get pussy. So like, I don't have sex with her. Yeah, I just bully her on my viral videos.

Yeah, she just comes out with me. And then we sleep in bed with like a big fucking Mormon bedsheet, stretch talk between us, you know? Well, I mean, I think about it too, that there's also the sort of reputation I think, British guy goes to California and is shocked by the openness kind of thing.

But like, not all Americans are that overt. Like we are probably as a people more so, certainly more so than the British and certainly more so than like upper class English people. But I mean like, British people, you get them drunk or high enough, they'll start telling you about their fucking life, you know what I mean?

Like it's not so buttoned up as to like necessitate the stereotype. Maybe it was more so in the olden days, but I mean, considering how many American servicemen just fucking like fathered children because they were just nailing people in alleyways and shit, like it couldn't have been that buttoned up. Britain is a very deeply horny country.

That I feel like. That is very true. I mean, you know, if we went back to the story of my mother's parents, two deeply horny people is in town. Well, I mean, my mother's parents, you know, American airmen who's like 21 and like 16 year old school girl in Norfolk

and like they got married like three weeks before my mom was born. Problematic age gap there. Well, I mean. Yeah. Well, Nate, when are you gonna answer for your grandfather's problematic age gap with your grandmother?

Canceled. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, I mean, like, well, I think I've probably mentioned this even on Britonology before, but like there's like this weird tradition in my family that when you're like 16, 17, you get to find out that like your grandparents

were having affairs your entire life and that like that guy that you thought was granddad's friend. No, woman rather. The guys were grandma's friends. If my grandparents had also been gay, that would have been a hell of a story. I just remember that my nan had this one guy who she was obviously like fucking whatever when I was a kid

called Dennis, who would sometimes be there like hanging out as she picked me up from school or something. And he, I remember being like, it's like one of my earliest memories. I was probably like five or something like really young. And I remember this guy just, all I really remember about him was he had a mustache and he absolutely stinked of Benson and Hedges.

Like this is a man who was like caning cigarettes all day long. And he tried to convince me that he'd been in the SAS. And even at five, I was like, I didn't even really know what the SAS was, but I'm like, no, no, bullshit. Five year old Milo doing a stolen Valor video on this guy.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I would say there is definitely a reputation for stuff being more buttoned up here. And I think that the thing about it is too is, well, I don't really think a lot of Americans in however as much as people conceive of sort of swinging London,

associate that with the craze or that kind of shit. That feels like kind of niche trivia. Like I remember hearing about Ronnie Cray because of a lyric to a blur song, the song Charmless Man when I was a teenager. But because I was a huge fucking Tiaboo, we know this is why I live in this stupid country. So that's why we do this podcast.

That's why we do this podcast. But I think that like... Ironic because the craze were huge Oasis guys. Really? No. That would have been hilarious. It's like from prison, they were writing fan letters to like fucking Liam Gallagher.

They're both wearing Adidas Gazelles in prison. But people would probably more likely associate it with stuff like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or Pink Floyd or the sort of psychedelic shit in general, you know, stuff like that. I mean, if you look at album sales, it might be the Beatles and the monkeys and that's about it, you know what I mean?

But it's more like that sort of undercurrent of the sort of British gangster thing. There was never really... There have been times when people have, there have been like column crazes, if you will, where people have really gotten into British stuff in America, Hugh Grant movies, Richard Curtis movies, stuff like kind of cult things like Monty Python

or a Hugh Checkers guide to the galaxy, stuff like that. Not even counting Austin Powers because obviously it's a parody of all of that. Yeah, classic. You know, or things like TV adaptations of Jane Austen novels and things like that. I like to think that Austin Powers isn't a parody of James Bond.

It's just about a different guy who works at the same office. Like he just has a very different take on the procedure. Well, it's funny to me because I remember when the Austin Powers films came out and I was old enough to sort of like get the jokes being made in the sense that I was like almost 13 when the first one came out.

It's a horny age. But the thing about it is though, is that what I didn't realize from editing Kill James Bond, I've learned this, is that everything in Austin Powers is a specific spoof of shit in the early Bond films. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I never really...

Still to this day, I haven't seen that many of them and I don't really feel like I'm missing out on that much. I think I've seen almost all of them, but probably not every single one. I've seen... Oh my God, I have a funny Bond. Okay, so I've seen GoldenEye when it came out because that was huge.

That was like a great good movie. All the Brosnan Bonds are great. I mean, The Die Another Day is a bit dubious, but it's still like an amusing film. I saw all of the Bond movies with Brosnan and I saw... What is it? I can't remember what the first one was with Daniel Craig.

Cine Royale. Cine Royale, that's the only one. And then I've seen Moonraker because it's absurd. Oh yeah, fuck yeah. Fuckin' Space Marines fighting in outer space with lasers. And I've also seen A View to a Kill because it has Duran Duran singing the song. It has James Cahn as the villain.

Like, yeah, it's wild. However... It has the two Amazonian twins as the henchmen. Along with Jules. So when I was probably about 17, you've met my friend Spencer, the Korean American guy who grew up together. He called me one day and he's like,

dude, this is so stupid. But like, my mom and her friends from church have decided that I should like have a play date with other fucking Korean kids. And he's like, could you come over? And I was like, yeah, man. So he's like, cause it's so weird. So I was like, yeah, what's up?

And he's like, well, it's me. It's two girls who are like 12, who like obviously like we were like 16 or 17. Yeah. He's like, and it's Jay. Jay Han was a drug dealer. Oh, okay. From our hometown.

Who from our currently drove a BMW. He'd bought with drug money. He told his parents. He went to the grocery store. He one time bought his brother like $1,000 worth of Gundam toys just because he could. He made great rap mixtapes that like my buddy used to buy. Like his brother Hussain Kizvani.

And so Jay was there and we came over and like Jay was just being himself and like reacting to the Bond film. And I just remember sitting with him that this is the one memory I have of whatever the film it was. I think it was, you only live twice. Jay goes, you know, man, you know, James Bond got to have fucking A's, right?

It's like you only live twice the one with all the yellow face. Probably. The Korean family being like, which Bond film is the most racist about A's? Why would you make your kids watch a 35 year old Bond film that is weird? Anyway, he goes, you know, you know, man,

you know James got to have A's or some shit, right? Cause like, look at this fucking guy, right? Like he's like, the girls are like, yo James, where are latex? And he's like, no, bitch. I'm hitting it raw tonight. Who the fuck is this guy? James L. Jones Bond.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yes, that's my Bond story that is completely off track from the craze. But the bigger point I was making was that this kind of current, I don't know and I'm asking you, is that a big thing people associate with like 60s London? Cause like if you talk about like 60s Las Vegas or 70s Las Vegas in America,

like the mob shit is undeniable. And if you talk about New York in like, well, any Chicago in Prohibition or New York, like in around the same time, like so much of that kind of like Godfather shit or like Al Capone shit, you know what I mean? Like that, that is a thing people associate with it. I think because London is so,

and I would say that like probably, and New York probably has a bit the same thing where because there's such massive global cities and there's so many things associated with them from a particular time it doesn't stick. Whereas like with like Chicago or Vegas, it does because they're like smaller cities where there was kind of less stuff going on

and particularly Vegas, like it's just casinos. So whoever's running the casinos is very much going to be like the figure of the day. And so yeah, I get that. But yeah, I think in London, there was just so much other stuff going on. Like the craze are definitely like a cultural reference point in a lot of stuff, which I think is worth talking about.

But yeah, I don't think it was, and I think broadly speaking in the 60s, the craze weren't something that like affected your life particularly even if you lived in the East end. Like it was mostly, as I think like broadly speaking, the mafia was too, it was kind of like gangsters who were like doing shit with other gangsters.

It's kind of like, if you're not a criminal, you're not really involved with it. They might hit you up for protection money, which you obviously, your life was easier if you paid. The cops were corrupt and taking bribes from them and shit like that. But it wasn't as if, you know. The filth.

Yeah, you weren't living in like an occupied territory. It's just, it was a thing that existed. Yeah, exactly. And so as a result, like a lot of British people from that era and even like younger have this like really sort of romanticized vision of what the sort of like East end gangsters were like. I mean, particularly the craze

because they're the most kind of pop-cultury figures. But that kind of that whole thing about like, oh, they were good to them, mom. Say what you're like, Barbara and Ian Reggie. And because they did have all these people defending them in the media, like people like Barbara Windsor, who were just like casually mentioned

that they were like mates with them, whatever. I can remember when we used to go on holiday a lot to Spain when I was a kid and to a part of Spain where there were like lots of Brits. And there was a, but we used to go to a place like up in the mountains, but there was this restaurant up there called the Valparaiso that I think was owned

by some like old East end types. And it was always like full of like East end gangsters who had like fled to Spain. That was like a big thing that people used to do. I mean, that was like what Ronnie Biggs and a lot of the train robbers, they went to Spain for a while. I think Ronnie Biggs went to Brazil for a bit.

But that was a big thing like cause you couldn't get extradited from Spain at some point. And then like the EU kind of made some changes to that. But yeah, so then there was the whole thing of like all the gangsters down the coast. But again, like sort of celebrities would like go and hang out at the Valparaiso with these guys. And it was always like a,

it was always a sort of romanticized cultural thing of like, well, they're criminals, but they're kind of like, they're the sort of like the honorable gentleman criminals. It's a bit like the way we now, if you compare al-Qaeda and ISIS, you know, you saw, if you look back on al-Qaeda as the kind of gentlemen terrorists, you know,

doing things in a refined way, looked after their mums. Yeah. Well, yeah, specifically though, they looked after their mums thing seems to be like a touchstone. It's like a meme about the craze kind of. Yeah, I've seen it. Yeah, I feel as though I've seen it referenced in stuff, sort of like explaining away the fact that like

they did murder people, they themselves personally murdered people. They didn't have lots of people killed because I feel like it's pretty much a given that America's just a much more violent country. And so as a result, like there were probably more mob killings, but by and large mob killings were like confined to other mob people.

Yeah. And you see this a lot in the film as well, that like the craze is sort of, they're like, they're most often they're just kind of like roughing people up a bit. There's not a lot of murder. And usually when there is a murder, there's usually a bunch of people going, what the fuck you done that for?

Yeah, it's weird because someone explained this to me about Korean gangsters and stuff. Because that's a famous sort of thing about Korea was that they had a lot of, sort of their equivalent to the Yakuza kind of shit. And there's sort of like, it's almost never happens that someone gets killed because if someone gets murdered, then it's like,

well, then the cops feel obligated to put someone in prison for it. Whereas like if you just beat the shit out of people or like stab them, but non-fatally, then, you know, you get your point across, but it's not really taking up too much time, you know, in the cops attention. Exactly.

And it's just, I mean, in the same vein as like, if you watch a movie comparable, let's say Serpico or something like that, the whole point of Serpico is like this one cop who dared to be like, actually the NYPD is corrupt as fuck and everyone's on the take from the mob. That's, I mean, they got shot by his fellow cops.

Like that's a true story. That was like in the 60s or the early 70s, I think. I think the film came out in the early 70s, but the story takes place in the 60s. Al Pacino, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so- It's been a mob film that Al Pacino is not in.

I was gonna say Jesus Christ, yeah. Yeah, flashing back, I was gonna say, I don't think he's in Casino. No. I think that's Robert De Niro. But one of the two of them- And he's not in Goodfellas, I don't think. No, but De Niro is, I think.

Yeah, De Niro is, yeah. Ray Leota is, Joe Pashie is, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just real shit right there. Damn, Son, where'd you find this? Damn, Son, where'd you find this? Yeah, so I mean, that's kind of a running thing through it. Is this sort of like slightly, again, just this vibe, I mean, we talk about this a lot,

but how like Britain is kind of a low stakes country. And that even the sort of like the guy, like I mean, Jack the Hat steals from them and then like Reggie just punches him in the face and he's like, don't do it again. And it's kind of like, yeah, you feel like if that had happened even in the Sopranos, like that guy would have absolutely been murdered.

Been murdered, yeah. Yeah, and so there is that kind of it, which I think is like sort of a fair representation of it because I think a lot of like British criminals time and memorial of the focus is on like kind of, you're paying the cops off, but there's only like so much you can get away with. So they're kind of trying to exist in this.

So they've got this like kind of, yeah, I know that during the supposedly like much like the American Rob, they had a lot of hookups in construction and a lot of, so it basically in Britain, there weren't really any motorways until like the 1960s. I think they built the M1 in the late 50s, which was because hence the name, the first one, which goes from like London to Leeds basically.

And but in this period, like the kind of the late 50s, 60s, 70s was when they were building a lot of like the major arterial motorways. And supposedly the craze were like concreting bodies into the motorway, like the structures of flyovers and stuff. Cause like they knew this would just never be found. They're not going to fucking dismantle an arterial motorway to see if there's a body in there.

But yeah, supposedly that was what was going on. I don't know how true that is, whether that's like a rumour. Yeah, so they're in this thing with the American mob. Ronnie kills an associate of the Richardson's, George Cornell in a pub by just walking in and shooting him in the head. Yeah.

And again, just cue various of the minor crane forces going, what the fuck you done that for Ron? And then he just like calmly goes around to his mum and dad's house and is like eating cake. And Reggie comes in and is like attempting to remonstrate with him, but like without like really revealing to them other what they're talking about. Because they love their moms.

Exactly. Yeah. They don't want to upset them. And then mom's just busting around kind of, would you like a cup of tea? That would be lovely. Thank you. And yeah, so then they send,

he like sends a bunch of guys to like intimidate witnesses like burn Ronnie's clothes or whatever. Like Ronnie is refusing to take it seriously. And this is like one of the few parts where it's acknowledged that Ronnie actually fucks, where he's insisting that he's staying over at his mother's and then his mum is like turns to Teddy and is like, would you like to stay with him?

And he's like, oh, yes, that'd be lovely. Thank you. Teddy is like an absolute twink. Yeah. There's also another one too. I can't remember. There's another blonder guy as well. But yes, Teddy is just, yeah,

is sort of like twink on his arm the entire film. Yeah. And you wouldn't like to think about what Ronnie Craig does to Teddy. Teddy looks like he's of a delicate disposition. Ronnie makes it very clear in the beginning that he is always atop and never a bottom. There's the whole thing with the Tory Lord

and them having like weird sex parties. Oh yeah, because he's trying to build this African city. So they're trying to get this Tory Lord Booth, a real guy who was really involved with the craze to invest in him. The most sexual thing that winds up happening is him them screening a gay porn film at his flat and him like spanking a guy with a big wicker paddle.

But like once again, Everyone's wearing like baggy white frances, like the most like unsexual, it's like a gay sex party, but everyone just looks like the gym changing room. And like not in a good way. Yeah, it's a, you know, I saw the Elton John biopic on a plane and they'd censored all the sex scenes. And apparently that's the...

Can't have people getting horny on the plane. Yeah, exactly. Apparently that's also when they released the film theatrically in Russia. They had to show that cut. Yeah, they cut out all the drugs and all the sex. Cause I remember hearing that, cause that film came out about the time I was leaving Russia.

And there's someone said, yeah, apparently they've cut out all the drugs and all the sex and that's gonna be a short fucking film. Elton John, we've just cut out the 1970s and 80s. Like they're just gone. Exactly. But yeah, once again, I mean, this films portrayal of Ronnie's sexuality

made me think of that no sex allowed cut on the plane. Yeah, yeah, it was very, it was very odd. And yeah, I mean, it's weird. They don't really try and develop anything with Teddy. They never even really make it explicit that they're like dating or whatever, other than the sort of like nods to the fact that there's clearly something going on.

Yeah, I mean, it's just sort of implied he's around a lot and Ronnie hasn't killed him and he's a twink. So... Likely hood is, as Michael York would say, he's getting sucked off by a twink. One can presume. Yeah, you do never see this on screen. Yeah, so they're now under like an intense investigation

because Ronnie's murdered this guy. There's an amazing line of the Wikipedia summary here, which is Reg's marriage with Francis crumbles due to his addiction to crime. I'm simply addicted to crime. He's a professional criminal. He's not addicted to crime. It's just like what he does for a living.

Bloody relapse on crime again. I'm on a 12 step program for crime. Last night, I was close to knocking off a butcher's, I had to call me sponsor. A.A. for crime. Yeah, I found myself about to have gay sex in a park and I had to remind myself of the steps. Yeah, so...

Phoning up people you've extorted money from and apologizing. Got to make amends one way or the other. I mean, it's, yeah, so basically there, there are relationship crumbles. It's implied that Reggie is drinking more heavily. He winds up beating up Francis. She leaves him, she goes to stay with her brother. He decides to try to reconcile with her.

They agree to go to Ibiza together. I refuse to pronounce it the cockney way. A beifer. Yeah, and... Got a beifer. And then instead of going to Ibiza with him, she overdoses on pills and dies. But she's the narrator of the film,

so we then learn this moment that she's narrating it from beyond the grave. Yeah, which is, you know, that's the kind of high sex technology they have in films these days. Yeah, exactly, yeah. So, and then he goes down for murdering Jack the Hat. Yeah, because basically...

After Jack the Hat gets paid by Ronnie to murder their sort of like fixed lawyer accountant guy. The Nick the accountant of the Cray situation. Shout out to Nick the accountant. Hi, Nick, we promise we will never do that. Yeah, no, that is not on the cards. Basically, they... Ronnie pays Jack the Hat to shoot the accountant,

but he fails to kill him. Jack the Hat is like the comedy criminal who can never get anything right. So it's like very funny that... He's the guy who's... When we tell you that he's punching people in the face, it's really just that guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's just he's always like, oh, I've bolstered up again. He's punching me in a bloody mouth. And so then for some reason, Jack the Hat, maybe this is right at the moment that cocaine was introduced to the UK. I have no idea. That was breeding population of cocaine

was introduced into the UK. Unlike his usual hangdog apologetic self, he's just kind of like aggressively provocative with Reggie at a party. When Reggie's like, what the fuck did you do that for? So Reggie puts a gun to his head and dares him to say, after he makes fun of him for his wife dying,

dares him to say her name again. He does, he pulls the trigger, there's no bullets in the gun. So he grabs a knife from a cake and stabs him to death. Oh, I forgot my fucking bullets. I will say that this is unlike normal movie stabbings. Like this is like a real psycho stabbing.

He stabs him like a hundred times. Yeah, and it's pretty, it's like one of the, I mean, I don't know, I think we're all pretty desensitized to like film violence at this point. But it's one of the ones where you watch it and you're like, oh, yeah, that looks unpleasant. It looks really unpleasant.

Like I wouldn't want that to happen. Unlike the shootings in the film, which are mostly like, just like a little like, oh, God, there's an owl in mid. Oh, I've fallen over. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He shoots, when Ronnie shoots the guy George in the pub,

George like smirks at him before falling over. It's just sort of like, not really how it works. But yeah. Well, I love is that there are so many incidents in the film of people getting murdered and then they're just being just like general, just like ordinary people around him and they're like, oh, fucking hell.

I'm just like, they're just not reacting with like the requisite amount of terror. Like I get shot in the head in the pub and there's just like some guys that can't have it. Oh, for fuck's sake. Oh my God, fucking a fucking mopping bucket. They're all way out from Australia. Now you're murdering someone.

Oh, there's been heaps of murders around here. This guy got shot, that is the truth. Exactly. Anyway, so. Walking into a pub and so-called. Good morning, Ronnie. Yeah, long story short, they, the movie's denouement is basically,

he gets arrested, Reggie gets arrested, the cops come and break his door down and arrest him. It's said that he died in prison. Well, he died after a compassionate release from prison, but the entire 33 years he was in prison before his death in 2000, he apparently carried the tickets on him for him and Francis to go to Ibiza together

because once again, their romance is portrayed like it's his first crush or something like that. Whereas Ronnie. Apparently they only knew each other for like two years. I'm reading and. Ronnie, Ronnie, it says gets sent back to prison or rather he's recertified as insane and he died in a facility in 1995.

Yeah, Braulmore, which is like the big secure, high security mental hospital in Britain. Is that sort of like, that's like we're like. So like all. Myra Hindley. Yeah, Myra Hindley was in there for a bit. I don't know if she stayed in there, but yeah, like lots of really famous British murderers

have been certified insane in there. Yeah, and of course, all British gangsters always die before the age of 70 because all they do is smoke cigarettes and like eat processed meat. Like it is just endless. Like eating a fry up, smoking a cigarette, drinking a pine like there is.

I don't know how any of them ever shat. Like they consume no fiber at any point in the film. And I think that's an accurate portrayal. So yeah, basically the film ends implying that. I don't bottom because my ass, I'll seize that. Yeah, that's Milo hacking and coughing because even though he doesn't smoke or drink pints or eat fry ups with the same frequency

as your garden variety British guy, he is still related to them genetically. I'm doing the accurate cause you got that. Oh, you're using a Dave Colney. You're gonna hear the years of cigarettes in the throat there. Yeah, it's a weird frog in the throat voice for a frog like guy.

You have to sort of like, you have to have like a narrow, a thin but wide mouth shape to do the Dave Colney voice. Like you're sort of grimacing. That's the... Then again, thus ends the Tom Hardy hotness vehicle that is legend. Yeah, looking pretty good as Reggie and more weird as Ronnie.

Yeah, more psychotic as Ronnie. Yeah, it's quite an impressively done thing of like having him play both parts. And he does look different as both of them, but also similar enough. It's actually when you look at the two Cray Twins, they did look really similar. I've got this picture here.

A deeply, this picture looks so much like an album cover of like an album, Nate would send me. Though to be fair, yeah, they do absolutely look way more just British in that photo than someone like Tom Hardy, let's be honest. Yeah, exactly. Important Haggerson, is it? Yeah, Haggeston, around the corner.

But yeah, I mean, yeah, quite. Yeah, fucking Paul Bettany was in this. Paul Bettany was Charlie Richardson. Not sure I know who that is. Charlie, Paul Bettany. Paul Bettany, yeah. Paul Bettany was in Margincall, Wimbledon, what else is... Oh, he played the Unabomber in the Unabomber TV series.

I don't know, he's been in a lot of stuff. He's a British actor, he's like, yeah. And fucking Christopher Eccleston as the cop that's chasing a Nipper Reed, apparently also a real guy. If I was like the feared cop, I wouldn't want my nickname to be Nipper. It also feels like Nipper's henchman is also sort of a similar twink figure

who's always in the car with him. Oh yeah, it was like the little cop who has to wear a uniform. Whereas Nipper's just a big Northern guy wearing a big tweed suit. There was that weird, and I don't know how accurate this is, but there is that weird conception at the time of the police almost being like a rival gang to the gangs

and the way that they interact with each other is like sort of intimidation and stuff. Whereas I don't really know how accurate that is. It is definitely true in America still. Yeah, the American police not behaving themselves. What a surprise. And Francis is played by Emily Browning, who, I can't remember what else I've seen her in,

but she is hot. Yes, if you're into... She's Australian, there you go. Yeah, see, exactly. You can always suss out in Australia and everywhere you go. Good morning, Reggie. That would have been fun if they just made her

do her like regular accent. Well, anyway, Emily Browning DM me, but... But that being said... Tom Hardy, DM Nate. Hey, you know what? You know what? We just wanna ask what you're doing with all that cake. Exactly.

I just want the outtakes of those MySpace thought pictures that you posted in like 2003 or whenever the fun. It's just all the Tums, Arshah Hardy. They've all got cake, you know? Just fucking yams. Yams left and right. Yams.

So I suppose having seen the film and talked a little bit about the legend as it were, we should just sort of maybe end on what is the cultural significance of this kind of thing now? Because I feel like Guy Ritchie stuff, movies like Layer Cake, even some of the bullshit weirder,

like the TV streaming series is like Gangs of London, are in many ways kind of playing off of that, but just making it more flashy or show you're updating it or that kind of a thing. It's a certain kind of like, I think it, I mean, it does have that thing in movies where I think that like it's been like updated by people like Guy Ritchie into a more stylized thing.

But there's also like, there's just a certain, it inhabits a large part of the minds of geese. Like guys who now live in Essex and like they own a roofing company, but they just love the craze. And it's very, I think it's kind of, it's a Southern thing. It's not, I don't really think you get it up North. I think that's kind of a different pathology,

but yeah, guys who just like, they love it. I remember like there's a fish and chip shop in Harlow. It's a really good fish and chip shop. And it is run by Essex Guido Italians. Essex is the New Jersey of the United Kingdom. You have to specify that. And that's also where Milo is from. So it explains so much.

It's full of Italians. It's got the same, but it's like very, the British equivalent of a wall, which is always might. It's like, yeah, all the guys who like, you know, left London because, you know, too ethnically diverse or whatever, they wanted a big fuck off house. The same as all the people who left New York

and went to New Jersey. And then now it's all like second generation left New York families, but have all this like romantic idea of themselves as like Brooklyn gangsters or whatever. Yeah, fair. But yeah, in this fish and chip shop, they redid it and they had this huge mural put on the wall,

which contained loads of light. It was like, we're a British, British references. I think I might have a photo of it somewhere, but it's amazing. It's got like a bulldog on there. It's got like Churchill. It's got like, it's got the flag of the Royal Navy for some reason,

but it's got the craze on there. It's kind of, one of the graphics on there, which is absolutely amazing and sent me is a like a graphic of the UK and EU flags, like with a like Photoshopped in rip like between them. So like half the flags, Britain half bag is EU with a 52% and 48% written on them.

Brexit references. I just, what would really make me laugh is if they had the Craitians in a memorial, but they're like on a wall, but they also had a memorial to Lee Rigby and be like, no, see, brutal crime is on. Lee Rigby is on there.

Oh, fuck sake. With like an angelic halo background. Oh my fucking God. You're joking. You just, I didn't remember, but then you said it. Oh my fucking God. I've lived here too long. You're beginning to understand.

No, let the Britain flow through you. For the purposes of people who aren't familiar with the story, Lee Rigby was a, I believe he was a bandsman in the British army who was murdered on the street in Woolwich by two self-declared ISIS guys who were like British Nigerians.

Yeah, they attacked him on the street. Yeah, it was pretty nasty. They like beheaded him with a machete or something. But it is now just like the- It is a co-celebr of the most insane people in this country. Absolutely, yeah. And yeah, whenever they wanna bring up anything, it's always Lee Rigby.

Yeah, if you see Lee Rigby's face on something, it's basically the person is- It's always like warning, this person is insane. Yeah, they are insane and they hate immigrants. So yes, the fact that he's in the same mural as the Kray twins who probably would have beheaded someone if they hadn't had other ways of killing them. Yeah, hilarious.

Yeah, exactly. Britain, that's all it is. Would have beheaded someone, but only if he was the nonce. Right. So anyway, I don't really know if there's much else to go on. I mean, the film's, you know, It's a decent film, it's worth a watch.

If you're looking for a film to watch, it's an entertaining film. And yeah, definitely these guys are absolutely real. And it's interesting, I think this is an interesting follow-up to the Dave Courtney episode in the sense of like, Dave Courtney is trying to pass him off as part of that, pass himself off as part of that world. And it's not to say that that world didn't exist, but rather that it does have a huge amount of hangers on.

And those guys were long since in prison by the time that Dave Courtney got involved in his crime shit. Yeah. He was doing crime shit in the very late 70s and early 80s. And then not too long after that, retired from crime shit. So like the craze had been in prison at that point for 12, 13, 14 years. And there's lots of people who like, for example, someone who genuinely did work with the craze

is Lenny, the governor, McLean, who died in like, he died shortly after lock stock was made. He was Barry the Baptist in lock stock. But he wasn't a criminal. He was like a bare knuckle boxer and also a doorman. So he worked in a lot of the craze clubs as a doorman. But like, so there's lots of people like that who like weren't, they weren't exactly criminals,

but they were like involved with that criminal world because they were like doorman or boxers or whatever. So much of the money was in unlicensed boxing and stuff like that. Or you have people like Vinnie Jones, who was a professional footballer and like a construction worker, but just a bit rough. He was just sort of this guy who was around people like that. He's a fucking guy.

Yeah. I mean, there's just a story about Lenny the Governor McLean. There's an amazing interview. I think you could probably find it on YouTube of Lenny the Governor McLean in like the late nineties, where he's like sat out the back of his house. It's like the most fucking British guy dream ever. He's got like a concrete statue of a bulldog next to him. This is like huge beer guy lying on a sun lounger with a mirror,

like directing the sun onto himself, taking an interview from this BBC guy who's asking him about like his days working with the craze. And he's like, he's like, oh, yeah, I threw the door at the acne ipodrome and that. And then they're like, oh, right. And then they're like, Lenny, what was what was the worst fight you ever got involved in on the door?

And he's like, well, once these these about 14 bloke showed up and they I wasn't letting them in. So they said about me. He's like, thing is, I'm a nice guy. If you're a nice guy, I'm a nice guy. But if you want to be a tough guy, I'm a fucking animal. You can see this like guy becoming more and more concerned. And he's like, yeah, so they said about me.

And, you know, we got into it and they're like, well, then what happened? And he's like, well, I knocked seven of them out. The other seven ran off. And then he's like, how did you knock seven of them out? And he's like, oh, I had a stick. He's like a stick. And he's like, yeah, we used to keep a stick behind the door case, things got a bit tasty, you know, because you need to know.

Exactly. Just got a big fucking pickaxe handle behind the door. That's the most British criminal thing ever is just having a fucking pickaxe handle as a weapon, because no, I'm actually surprised how much in this film there was of like portraying people using guns because like you look at stuff from the like the Great Train robbery, which was like the biggest heist in Britain of that era, like they were literally just using pickaxe handles. And they got charged with murder because one of the guys they hit him

too hard with the pickaxe handle and he died. But I don't think they shot anyone. It was like kind of like, you can't imagine that happening in America, like a huge robbery like that. And they just armed with like bits of wood. But like it's the most powerful British energy. Not even a sharp piece of metal on the piece of wood, just pieces of wood. Yeah, I've got a geyser over a big piece of wood.

And if you don't stop that training, let you with it. But like, oh, fair enough, mate. That is quite a large piece of wood. Fuck's sake. Well, you know what? If you don't want to be hit in the head with a large piece of wood, then please do not come within, I think, three or four degrees east or west of the Greenwich Meridian of the Prime Meridian.

Yeah, because this is a this is a country of geysers who will hit you with objects. Yeah, and they take their inspiration from the Cray Twins. Yeah, and I come around Whitechapital with it. You would attract huge pickaxe handle. Oh, my son. Oh, legally, we will not do that. Really, we are not allowed to threaten you. That is a joke. No threat.

So anyway, once again, Milo, it's been a pleasure. As always. And we will catch you next time. We love to learn about Britain. Bye-bye.