Mr Keith Fortner (2/7) By The Silver Fox

(1/7), (2/7), (3/7), (4/7), (5/7), (6/7), (7/7).

This phenomenon inspired a young Keith with the theory that the local authorities (this was in pre-privatised Britain, of course) used to put something in the water; some chemical compound that stimulated hitherto untapped areas of the brain and turned the larvae of the middle-management class into the likes of Paul Weller, HG Wells, and Transvision Vamp's Wendy James. He abandoned this theory after exhaustive tests upon his own home's water supply that he conducted with his chemistry set revealed the local H20 to contain no additives beyond fluoride, various anti-pollutants, and a trace element of a psychotropic drug that weakened the mind's resistance to Conservative election propaganda.

Despite Keith's own disappointment at this undeniable refutation of his theory - and equal discomfiture at the excoriating denunciations of his methodology printed in The New Scientist (whose editors had, rightly or wrongly, promised their readers "sensational revelations" on the say-so of a twelve-year-old boy with a chemistry set procured from the Kays Catalogue and who were a little irate at his disclosure that his hypothesis was a load of crap) - those around him realised that this was no ordinary boy: here was a boy who had, in addition to a keen and disciplined intellect, a capacity for asking important questions and for seeing possibilities that his elders were either unable or unwilling to grasp.

"Boy Genius" is a tired and overworked sobriquet (although it wasn't in my own childhood, it pains me to point out) but back then, as people watched this tender visionary tackle even weightier problems and concepts, they were at a loss to find any other apposite description. Keith's decision to bring his considerable gifts to the world of media production was a surprise to everyone. While it is a field of endeavour that prides itself on containing more visionaries and prodigies than you can shake a stick at, they are visionaries and prodigies of a very different order to the young man who made his tremulous application to a prominent London film school in 198-.

This was a time when (much as it is now) a "prodigy" was someone who dared to book The Krankies and Nooky Bear for the same episode of Crackerjack, and a visionary was the sort of blue-sky thinker who saw the possibilities of a world where one visit a week to Coronation Street just wasn't enough - someone who might actually bring something genuinely exciting and thought-provoking to the scene was, to the self-satisfied, BAFTA-award-strewn shitbags that were charged with the "informing and entertaining" of the viewing public, only slightly more welcome than the resurrection of Lord Reith himself.

Continued...Next Page (3/7)

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