The Common Sense Club believes that society should be governed from the bottom up not from
The Common Sense Club believes that “society should be governed from the bottom up, not from the top down”. This 90-minute film is soon to be released on video, along with Griffith’s other work, some of which has never been broadcast. When Griffith’s film was over, the audience were invited to put pounds 20 into a bright orange kitchen bin.The idea for the statue came from the Common Sense Club. A fervent, radical and highly individual documentary- maker, Griffith revisits the sights of Paine’s life, and puts the case as trenchantly as you could imagine for Tom Paine being – as the film’s title proclaims – “The Most Valuable Englishman Ever”. Thirty years ago, Attenborough tells me, he would have asked Anthony Hopkins.The audience on Friday night watched another film, by another Welsh actor, Kenneth Griffith. We’ll have to do something about that.” Daniel Day-Lewis has been approached to play Paine. Trevor Griffiths has written the script, which Attenborough describes as “staggering” Griffiths is an old hand at dramatising revolutions He wrote about the Russian one for Warren Beatty in Reds.
The Tom Paine script, says Attenborough, “is now in the final state of revision” The Americans are keen on the project “They think Paine is an American. It is, says Attenborough, “a major epic”, and will cost around $75m. “Start with the statue and finish up making this country of ours a real democracy,” Michael Foot said. Michael Mansfield said: “What Paine would be saying now is not what are the rights, it is how do we enforce these rights so that ordinary people feel empowered?”Richard Attenborough (who was unable to be there) told me that his film will take Paine’s story from the moment Paine leaves England for the American Revolution, and then follow it through his participation in the French Revolution, to his imprisonment, his release, and his return to the States, where he died. But we can never be anti- the Britain of Tom Paine,” Keneally said.
A hundred people from the arts, law, media and politics were there. They included Schindler’s List author Thomas Kenneally, the poet and critic Al Alvarez, Billy Bragg, agony aunt Claire Rayner, Geoffrey Robertson QC, Michael Foot, playwright Trevor Griffiths and Paine’s biographer, John Keane “We are often accused of being anti-British. It was also the eve of the 350th anniversary of the execution of Charles I. Either that, or on the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.On Friday night the appeal for the Thomas Paine statue was launched at a private cinema in west London Friday was Paine’s birthday. The campaign’s supporters want the statue to be placed on College Green, the patch of grass opposite the Houses of Parliament, where MPs stand to give television interviews. Ideally, the unveiling of the statue would coincide with the abolition of voting rights for the 752 hereditary peers. A statue would have seemed a far-off prospect.
The proposal is to erect a statue outside the Houses of Parliament.
