Rainbow George by Alex Games
George ‘Rainbow’ Weiss died last December, aged 81. His death marked ‘the end of an era’, said the (local) papers. He was a Sixties character, a Hampstead oddball. His chief claim to fame is that for several years in the 1960s he lived next door to Peter Cook, aka the ‘funniest man alive’. My name is Alex Games and I introduced George to my friend, the film-maker Barney Snow. We spoke a few days ago, and I have added my own thoughts next to his words. Photos: Barney Snow
Barney Snow (BS): Thanks for introducing me to George, Alex …!
Alex Games (AG): Pleasure! I thought you’d get on.
BS: George wanted me to make a film about how all the world’s problems would be solved if only people voted for him in whatever election he happened to be running in as an independent.
AG: So true. He genuinely believed that there were enough people in the world who shared his hippy ideas. This led to George standing – or persuading other minor celebrities to stand – in a stream of elections, both bye and general. Result: a huge number of lost deposits.
BS: I filmed him at home in his ‘famous’ squat in Hampstead'. Ronnie Carroll was there too. I filmed them both. I still have it. Somewhere.
AG: ‘Northern Irish singer, entertainer and political candidate.’ — Wikipedia
BS: And he persuaded me to fly to Ireland with him. He was standing in an election and it was also a kind of sentimental journey. He wanted to revisit the scene of his most serious relationship.
AG: Penny McMullan. Went out with Errol Brown of Hot Chocolate – no kidding! – before she met George. Love of his life?
BS: I remember a defining moment for me. We were in a taxi near Dublin. I was filming George and he was talking ten to the dozen, as usual.
AG: Hmm. Personal matters? He’d rather I checked out his several volumes of press cuttings. And of course there was nothing about Penny in those. An oddly ambiguous attitude toward his own past.
BS: And at the end, the cabbie turned to me and he said something like: ‘You know, I’m not sure you should be making a film about this guy.’
AG: Maybe that was why in his last years he turned more and more to the Bible. Most listeners soon found their attention wandering, but George could plough on for hours about St John and the Revelation. Yawn.
BS: This resonated. George was driven but often tiresome and possibly vulnerable and the taxi driver’s remark encapsulated my unease.
AG: The journalists I talked to did not hold back. ‘Why do you bother?’ I’m not sure why. Maybe I – and Barney – admired his tenacity.
BS: And of course broadcasters would not be fighting over a film about George, so it would have to be a passion project – entirely self-funded.
AG: I think that cabbie was onto something. Whenever George rang, part of me went ‘Oh no, what now …’ But he was so mad-cap, so full of enthusiasm for his lost causes that I forgave him.
BS: I filmed when you and I interviewed him last year, in his bedroom, in East Finchley. We asked him what had guided him through his life. As usual he explained he was on a mission from God. He was a dreamer, and that’s probably why a parade of people including Ian Dury, Alex Higgins the snooker player and Jon Moss of Culture Club were drawn to him.
AG: Of course. ‘Would you write my biography, Alex?’ Right, George. How much will you pay me? ‘Someone will …’ And he never even read what I wrote!
BS: But what precisely was it about George that intrigued any of us?
AG: Email from George, November 2021: ‘Would like you to record “A telephone conversation with the Optimistic Mystic Rainbow George” that could truly become a best seller for you.’ Strange, he always phrased it like that. ‘Your book …’ he would say. Not ‘ours’.
BS: Should I have made a film? I know why I didn't but I do have the tapes and drives sitting in my house. So maybe ...
AG: He was in the great tradition of British eccentrics. He was a misfit: a one-off. But no matter how many radio station phone-ins banned him – even at two in the morning – he’d still send me the Youtube link to the one successful call he’d made that month.
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George’s friends are currently trying to establish the whereabouts of his three or more decades of intimate recordings. Literally anyone who crossed the threshold of his Hampstead home from 1970 to the year 2000 and beyond was recorded, on audio cassette or CD, which has left us with a vast collection of people making tea and discussing the football, and occasionally Peter Cook being funny or sounding pissed off – or just pissed. But the British Library recognises that this could be a unique audio portrait of daily life, and would like to preserve it. If George’s family, who clearly took a dim view of his profligate activities, have disposed of them in a nearby land-fill, just before the British Library offers him literary immortality, that would, I suppose, be a typically ‘George’ fate. Let’s hope that, for once, George accidentally ends up on the right side of History.
