James Wilson takes the Burchill v Berkoff libel battle at face value
The inveterate newspaper columnist Julie Burchill is not, to put it mildly, someone afraid of speaking her mind. In 1993, for example, during a famous exchange with the American feminist scholar Camille Paglia, Burchill used the sort of terminology that is not repeatable in a family publication. So when The Sunday Times appointed her as a film reviewer around the same time, it would have known what to expect. Burchill did not disappoint. In a review of the 1994 film The Age of Innocence, she wrote: “Film directors, from Hitchcock to Berkoff are notoriously hideous-looking people.”
Harsh review
Nine months later she returned to the same theme in a review of Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein: “The Creature is made as a vessel for Waldman’s brain, and rejected in disgust when it comes out scarred and primeval. It’s a very new look for the Creature—no bolts in the neck or flat-top hairdo—and I think it works; it’s a lot like Steven Berkoff, only marginally better-looking.”
The impugned Mr Berkoff was clearly wounded
