What Fresh Lunacy is This?, by Robert Sellers – review

Midway through this startling book, Robert Sellers asks himself a question with such apparent seriousness I barked with laughter: ‘Was Oliver Reed an alcoholic?’ A more pertinent enquiry would be: ‘Was the man ever capable of drawing a sober breath?’ What Fresh Lunacy is This? is the monotonous chronicle of a nasty drunk whose ‘explosions of pissed aggression’ filled every waking hour, culminating in a deranged session, while filming Castaway in 1986, when he attacked an aeroplane.

Reed would gulp 20 pints of lager as a way of limbering up. He’d then switch to spirits and the cycle of fighting and carousing would begin. It’s a miracle he survived to be 61, dropping dead in a Maltese bar after ‘drinking copious amounts of rum and arm-wrestling with 18-year-old sailors’.

Myself, I find no amusement in dissipation, but Sellers seems always to be impressed and tickled by Reed’s nasty pranks: sticking a lit candle up his nose for a bet, chewing light bulbs or putting cigarettes out on his tongue. He loved to climb up a pub chimney and leap into the grate as a demonic Santa Claus. He liked to beat up waiters, hoteliers and chauffeurs. ‘He was always trying to test a person to see how scared they were of him.’ He would dangle people over balconies or insist on swordfights. He said to a restaurant manager in Austria, ‘I’m coming back tomorrow night. If you haven’t got a Union Jack by then, I’m going to trash this place.’ They hadn’t. So he hurled chairs through the window.

There was real violence in him. On location, there’d always be ‘knife wounds, hospital visits and stitches’. Reed urinated on foreign flags, on Mercedes limousines and on anyone standing below him on the stairs.