How does a royal kidnapping become a kind of hoax story?
Start with the 1974 attempted hostage-taking of Britain's princess Anne. The ambitious perp fails, gets arrested, then placed in a mental ward. Thereafter, the story is launched:
In 2005, Ian Ball set up a website from Broadmoor Hospital. On the site he explained that the kidnap was in fact an elaborate hoax set up by himself, offering 1 million pounds to anyone who could prove it was a hoax. Ball also paid £15 to the Anarchist magazine Class War for an advert to promote his cause.
It's a tale of police frameup, relentless persecution, multiple identities, multi-leveled schemes, and untrustworthy roommates. Not to mention "the most dangerous working-class dissenter this country has ever had and is ever likely to have."
There's a Poe-like atmosphere of mental gloom:
Ball's monologue vacillates between megalomania and persecution; an individual tortured by isolation to such a degree that all other players in his reality are merely weird servitors of his self importance. In other words it is a mechanically perfect model of a severe affective disorder.
Yes, Poe, or something like that:
There are even hints that Ball seems to be displaying symptoms of Capgras Syndrome when he 'realises' that Princess Anne has been replaced by a double during the kidnap attempt.
Naturally, we can be suspicious:
There has been some suggestion that the Ball's website is really a clever piece of viral marketing by Channel 4 – as part of the promotion for the 2006 docudrama To Kidnap A Princess.
Obviously this can also be interpreted as madness, or an imaginative attempt to make something of a failed crime. The storytelling aspect fascinates me, though, especially with its recursive levels of hoaxes. Ball writes a story explaining that he pretended to attempt the kidnap, so created the appearance of doing so to housemates and a police officer; said copper then build a framing narrative around the hoax.
And there's an audio version, complete with disc and download.
Using found recordings, a research group from English Heretic reconstruct the attempted kidnap of Princess Anne by Ian Ball...
In presenting the kidnap from different angles: Ball's confession; Reggie Bosanquet's slurred ITN news report, and the mumbling gaucheness of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips' recital on The Parkinson Show – what emerges is a Parallax View of the event. A cubist documentary. Time conflates and distorts, the players exhibit distinct symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – flashbulb memories of trivial details magnify and all notion of forensic truth smashes like a broken window in the back of Princess Anne's limousine.
(via k-punk)
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