Not Very Friendly

Some readers may be interested in this extract from an interview with the actor Matthew Perry, interviewed in the ‘Sunday Times’,  27th April 2014. He is referring to my clash with him on ‘Newsnight’ shortly before Christmas, when we disagreed about drug courts and ‘addiction’,   which he claimed (mystifyingly) was an ‘allergy of the body’ . I think I may have laughed.

 

Apparently he wanted to hit me, but didn’t. In that case I am not sure what he seeks to prove by revealing this desire, or by saying (as he does) that I am one of the few people he could beat up. I am not especially distressed to admit that he may well be right and that, had he attacked me, I very much hope I would have had the good sense not to retaliate.

 

My brawling days are long over (though I once long ago surprised myself with the power of my left fist,  in an act of pure self-defence). I am 62 and he is 44, which, alas, inevitably weighs against me. But I suppose it just illustrates that the self-righteous liberal’s reaction to any kind of contrary opinion is instinctively totalitarian. The desire to thump an opponent  is not that far from the desire to arrest him and lock him up, which is just violence in slow motion.  He certainly didn’t offer (and still hasn’t offered) any actual counter to what I said.  In fact, in the same interview,  he offers evidence for my position.  If ‘addiction’ were the force he claims it to be, how could he have ‘battled’ against it? What else, except his own will, did he use for this battle?  Had he not chosen to exercise his will, wouldn’t ‘addiction’ have won?  In which case I am surely right to say what I say. He couldn’t have picked a fight with ‘addiction’, and thumped it for disagreeing with him.

 

By the way, it’s not really the case that we ‘had to be escorted separately out of the building’.  We were kept apart before the programme, perhaps because Mr Perry, like most Hollywood aristocracy, was accompanied by a large retinue, which took up an entire hospitality room.

 

As we left the studio, one member of this very large entourage started barking at me about drug courts, quite rudely and aggressively, and I replied as reasonably as I could, and he desisted. There were so many of them that they completely filled the first of the (rather slow) lifts which descended to the basement from which ‘Newsnight’ is transmitted, and I was happy to let them go first. Had I squeezed in,  the atmosphere might have been a bit tense, I suppose. Also I wasn’t feeling particularly combative,  being at that time on a course of an unpalatable substance called ‘Gastrografin’, which I had been instructed by my doctor to take before  a CT scan I was to undergo the following day (I, at least, am glad to say that the scan found nothing alarming) . Those who have come across this prescription will know that, as well as having an unlovely taste, it has a number of disagreeable effects into which I will not go.

 

Anyway, here are some extracts from the interview. Mr Perry has recently been in London again, making a film about a man who throws a dog in the air and catches it.

No, me neither.  

He told Benji Wilson (the whole interview is in the 'Culture' section of the paper, which is behind a pay-wall. Do read the whole thing) that he had "bumped into an idiot (that's me) on national television."

 

He said it was rare to meet "somebody who's so off the mark about something", adding "If he'd said that addiction was controversial, I could have worked with that.

Apparently, when I said trhat 'addiction' is a fantasy (as I did, because it is ), Mr Perrry didn't know what to do. I was, it seems "attacking something that has been the pre-eminent battle of my (his) life" . I was saying it was "nonexistent and it was a choice, a matter of will."

In a wonderful piece of California rebuttal, Mr Perry then expostulated : 'Like I've chosen to almost die from this disease four different times in my life. We had to be escorted separately out of the building.

"I don't think I've ever hit anybody in my life, but I almost got up and hit him on national television. He happens to be one of the few people I could beat up."