Thursday 3 March 2011

Icon #77 David Icke

The most iconic celebrity meltdown.
Most celebrity meltdowns involve vast quantities of drugs, a few loose tongued prostitutes and an ego the size of Everest.  David Icke fits only the third of those.  He's too busy running away from the lizard people for the other two.

Icke was a sort of semi famous sports news reporter for the BBC.  He'd appear on Grandstand on a Saturday afternoon or report on one of the minor sports during the Olympics.  He'd had a career in football in the early seventies prior to that but arthritis had ended any chance of longevity.  Then suddenly, at the start of the 1990s he went utterly bonkers.  He's reigned in the bonkers a bit since.... well a tad... well you be the judge...

In 1991 he resigned from the Green Party following a visit to a psychic and announced to the world (well, England) that he was now a channel for the 'Christ spirit' and that the world would end in 1997.  There was a nice list of approaching disasters too, just for good measure.  Suddenly that bloke from South to Day who would tell you all about Southampton's latest football match on a Saturday evening thought he was connected to God.  It was big news.  Massive news.  And utterly hilarious. 

I remember him being on Wogan (prime time three nights a week chat show on the BBC back in the day) and remember the interview more clearly than any other.  He claimed to be the son of God.  The audience laughed.  He claimed that wearing turquoise was a conduit for positive energy.  The audience laughed.  He said laughter was good.  Wogan pointed out that they were laughing at him not with him.  

From there things got worse for Icke.  The nation was hungry for more of the crazy but his sudden switch from polite respectable broadcaster to madness had resulted in his family becoming a target for journalists and bullies and he disappeared off the map for a while.  Was he done?  God no, of course not.

He came back with a series of books that in a nut shell have pulled every conspiracy theory ever together in a mash up to end all mash ups.  There's an alien elite running the world in the background?  Oh yes.  Are they actually lizards?  Of course.  Shape shifters?  Probably.  Is George Bush one?  Of course he is.  And yes, just as you'd always feared Kris Kristofferson is a shape shifting lizard like fiend who probably wants you to have a microchip in your brain that turns you into a robot.

Brilliant.

He's gathered a bit of a following, has a bit of a problem with the Jewish community who are pretty certain that when he says 'lizards' he means 'Jewish'.  When he went to Canada the border control only let him into the country when they realised that he actually did mean lizards.  Personally I'd have still kept him out.  He's still churning out books, has, it turns out, a great website, that's just full of the crazy.  There are even DVDs up for grabs.

What do I think?  I think he had a break down and gathered a small following as a result of the bollocks he spouted.  He went away and got better but figured out that if he continued in a slightly watered down version of lunatic, people might buy stuff.  And they have.

Well done Planet Earth.

Tonight's post is dedicated to Tigerblood.

And @L0rdTweed, @idance36, @The1nbetweener, and @SdruhCram.

I picked it cause it's my favourite, but Brian Harvey eating the jacket potatoes and then running over his own head in a car does run it close. 

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