Sex on Fire

Sometimes a headline just leaps out at you. The other day it was one on Teletext about a British tourist being set on fire in Greece. My first thought was that maybe some unfortunate drunken Mancunian had stumbled into some kind of Hellenic Wicker Man scenario, looking to get laid, they instead found themselves burned to death in a huge wicker penis as some kind of sacrifice to the Gods of Olympus. The fact that it had happened in Crete stirred vague memories of a 1970s badly-dubbed international co-production involving nubile young women being sacrificed to a stone effigy of the Minotaur by naughty local Greek cultist Peter Cushing. Land of the Minotaur, or something similar. I seem to remember that Donald Pleasance was an Irish priest who eventually makes the villains explode by waving his crucifix at them. I could be confusing several films here and it probably isn't anywhere near as exciting as my fractured memories make it sound.

However, having also recently read in the papers about yet more complaints about the loutish behaviour of British tourists abroad, I realised that it was probably something a bit more mundane - a nasty accident suffered by some pillock lighting his own farts, perhaps. As it turned out, I found the story did have some interesting points when I started reading it. Apparently, a local woman had doused a British tourist in a bar with an alcoholic drink, then ignited it with her lighter. Good improvisation by a psycho woman, was my first thought. Then I read on - it was actually his genitals she torched, after the git had dropped his trousers in front of her. Suddenly my sympathies decisively switched in favour of the perpetrator. A fried cock is no more that this arsehole deserves if he thinks it's funny to go around exposing himself to random women abroad. Of course, he probably does it all he time at home, where is undoubtedly considered a local Oscar Wilde by his mates for his witty exploits. Sadly, any woman he does this to in a British bar is likely to be too drunk herself to react appropriately. Indeed, it might even be considered a form of mating ritual. Hopefully, a few more incidents like this might deter our louts from travelling overseas and embarrassing us all.

Oh,and that film with Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasance I mentioned before - it was released as The Devil's Men here in the UK, and is available on DVD under that title. The general consensus is that it's shit.