I don’t disagree, actually. I quite liked TSP, though I was struck enough by the vagueness and implausibility of the legal case at the start to google variations on their names (or what I imagined their names to be), and to be interested in the fact that nothing came up at all. But I’m around a lot of writers, and one of the things it brings home to you is how much people construct particular narratives about an event, or their past, or a relationship, which don’t always bear much resemblance to my impression of the ‘facts’. Not just writers, obviously, but they’re one of the ones who put it down in written form.
The others are actors being interviewed. As someone said on this or another thread, Jason Isaacs says he was a oro skateboarder in his teens, opening skate parks and in magazines, but no one who was around in that world then has any memory of him at all, and no trace appears to exist in any magazines. Conscious lie? Amplification of some less significant truth, like him being a bit good and calling himself a ‘team’ with some other guys? Does he be,Eve it himself now? Possibly. Who knows?
ETA. Sorry, sent too soon. My point was going to be thst the story in the Observer actually makes sense of quite a few of the oddities in TSP. Not just the handwavy court case, but the fact that it seemed they had so few friends and family rallying round, the fact that they discounted staying local because of ‘gossip’, and their sense of self-righteous anger towards other people.
That scene where RW shoplifts food because they’re hungry and down to their last fiver, or when they stay in the campsite without paying makes a lot more sense if your life narrative is ‘We stole from richer people because we were desperate’.
Ditto the various scenes where Moth gives a poorer homeless person some of their food.