Pistol whipped

11:59am Friday 18th April 2008

Sarah O'Meara discovers that ex-Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren hasn't lost the knack of upsetting his audience

WHEN he ran for mayor of London, Malcom McLaren said he wanted to turn the lights off so people could see the stars.

But the former Sex Pistols manager is certainly no hippy. Last summer he filmed ITV1 reality show The Baron, competing against the late actor Mike Reid for a genuine aristocratic title.

Viewers of the show, which is broadcasting next week as a tribute to popular soap star Reid, may find McLaren's spirited, anarchistic attitude to life as invigorating, and embarrassing as a sprint round the park in your underwear.

Introducing himself to his potential subjects as the 'godfather of punk', he is met with blank faces.

"I anticipated something really special about challenging someone for this title of The Baron, " says McLaren.

"But of course on arrival all my original thoughts were thrown out the window as I discovered this rather grim, dour, forlorn, sad and really sinister, religiously-fanatical part of Great Britain that I never thought existed."

Gardenstown is a small town in north-east Scotland with a population of 700, no mobile phone coverage and more churches per head than anywhere else in Europe. The local people are clearly less concerned with cultural rebellion and more with the fact that, for the first time in 300 years, their stretch of coast is without a baron.

ITV stepped in and bought the vacant baronial title to offer it up as prize. The winner will be dubbed the 13th Baron of Troup and be expected to grab the bottom rung of the nobility ladder and get involved with Gardenstown life. McLaren, ex-Hearsay singer and skating star Suzanne Shaw and Mike Reid were chosen to take part in the contest and sent to Scotland. But poor McLaren, who is much more comfortable working on musicals in New York than singing hymns, is sent to live with non-smoking, non-drinking evangelical Christian townspeople Margaret and Alec. This couple seek only to serve the Lord and privately admit they were hoping for Sean Connery.

McLaren starts out diplomatically.

"I'm not certain I'm intellectually compatible with them, " he confides to the camera. But his patience soon starts to wear thin.

"People were trying to convert me every five minutes, " he explains in exasperation. "I heard a story that after discovering some poor kid was gay, they raised money, sent him to the edge of the town, gave him the money and told him he was banned and could never come back. Then I heard another story about a poor little old lady who hung herself out of sheer loneliness and despair in the adjoining village." After baffling the local community in his first public speech, McLaren is simply described by one as 'strange'. "The whole place took on a whole different aura as each day went by, " he says. "Canvassing and being part of this mad challenge for the Baron started to fade into the background as you learnt more and more about this village. By the end I was determined to make a stand."

Standing in the harbour, McLaren did exactly that. He declared he disliked the town and called Jesus Christ a 'sausage'.

"They all went up in arms and decided to stone me to death. And I guess, had I been there 20 years before they probably would have done. I got hauled off the steps of the harbour wall by the harbour master, got punched in the ribs and my beautiful fashionable coat that I'd just bought in New York and cost $1,500, was ripped to shreds.

"I was asked to leave the town for my own safety. I felt like an actor in The Wicker Man. I had been participating in a part of England that I never knew existed apart from in fiction and movies. A place medieval in its outlook and attitude, but here it was in globalised Britain. It's all very well going on about Cool Britannia, but there was nothing cool about Gardenstown at all.

"I was really angry that I was not even allowed to go back into the village.

But I understood that the production crew had their cameras thrown into the sea and they were not going to be allowed to finish the programme at all if I turned up."

As a result it's safe to say that McLaren wasn't likely to be the winner.

The Baron, ITV1, Thursday, April 24, at 10.35pm

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