Paul Oremland | Andy the Furniture Maker / 1986 [TV documentary, episode of Six of Hearts]

inventions of a self

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Oremland (director) Andy the Furniture Maker / 1986 [TV documentary, episode of Six of Hearts]

 

This truly charming TV episode of the British Channel 4 series Six of Hearts begins with a wonderful self-introduction by Andy (Marshall), the Essex-born Furniture Maker:

      “There’s somebody here interviewing me, but they’re going to edit him out. So, I’ve got to tell you all these things on myself if you start going. Well, I come from this place right where you either got married and had a mortgage or died on a motor bike before you were 18. ….It’s a friendly place. It’s so small, everybody knows everybody. And people are just like they’ve lived there for so long. It doesn’t make any difference anymore.”

   What that difference consists of is what makes this documentary, which does in fact have some interviewers later on, so very interesting, and rather charming.

    Andy quickly goes on to tell us that he started making furniture on February the 9th, 1983. He was so tired of not even having a place to sit, no where to eat, and not even to sleep; he made a chair. Soon after he sells one, and begins to create a great deal of furniture out of found wood.

    Norman Rosenthal, a curator of the Royal Academy of Arts who describes the furniture as having lots of style, and being “very good and really strong.” And the maker as being as being very self-destructive, moody, morose, and sometimes very aggressive. He shifts yet again to describing the furniture: “We want his furniture, really. What it shows is extraordinary imagination above all, and the sort of feeling of making the right piece for the right person, and every pieces is carefully thought out and made, and the sort feat of imagination is kind of sculpture really”

     And all of this is said in the first 4 minutes of a 53 minute film. What possibly could be left?

     Well, actually he has quite a bit to say about his wild youth. He worked on an oyster boat where the head fisherman, after tiring of Andy’s “cheeky” behavior chucks him overboard and puts his head next to the propeller just to “wash some sense into him.” Andy screams underwater, “You bastard, you bastard.”

     Later he recounts that he used to pull the oyster bags out of the pens and he’d fall into the water but the others just leave him, soaked through on a February morning at 8 o’clock, all for 12 ½ pence per hour!

    But Andy’s just warming up for the stories of his quite incredible young life. He next joins up with the merchant navy for 3 and a half years. “It’s terrible, you know, you get called names for the first two years that you’re at sea.” But then suddenly in London for the first time he meets a boy who is the same age as he is. Having always thought homosexuals were like 40, overweight, and balding, but now he was picked up by a boy and taken to several bars, including the Regency, the Apollo, and another one whose name he can’t recall. He admits it was all rough rent boys and “horrendous old queens that were like punters…who paid for boys.” It was a world of drug abusers, transsexuals, transvestites, indeed every kind of person one might imagine was there. “It was fabulous. You could do anything you liked to do. …It was fun, it was friendly in a kind of way.”

    At first he had a great deal of money—making it apparent that he quickly became a popular rent boy—but then he ran out and didn’t quite know what to do. Sometimes he even when into the area where women prostitutes hung out, and when men wanted a want, he asked if he might do, and usually that was sufficient.

    But he admits you meet people you don’t really need to meet in your life, who are totally disgusting. And he admits that it’s not an easy life, reiterating what other reports on British rent boys have told us, if you make 30 quid a day, you spend 20 on rent and the remainder of drinks to meet the punters. Moreover, it’s often tedious work. You don’t an erection on demand. A song quite clever song created just for this documentary by Jude Alderson, “Rent Boy! King of Meat Rack” is repeated.

    We have already gone a long ways from our enchanting Essex furniture maker. And Andy and director Paul Oremland quickly take us even further.

     One might argue that this musical fetishization of Andy’s London career is not only intrusive, but rather over the top, until the very next moment we are introduced to the noted gay filmmaker Derek Jarman, who tells us about how he met Andy: “I was down at a discotheque called Bangs one evening. And there was this lad, rather drunk going to the bar, and I went up to him and said hello and he said “Fuck off.” And I thought people have said that too me once to often. So I wrote my name down on a piece of paper. …And I gave him the piece of paper.” The next thing he hears from a social worker who talks about a “lad” who needs to be bailed out for a sizable amount (250 quid). There in the prison he first encounters Andy screaming at his prison guards. He demands the boy calm down, reporting that he’s come to “collect” him. “And that’s how we started. How we began.” 

     It’s clear from his further comments that, despite the difficulties, Jarman is still a bit in love with the rapscallion rent boy who by this time was stealing cars, but nothing more is made of it. But it certainly didn’t harm Andy that he had such a powerful person in the arts as a friend and supporter.

     Furthermore, Andy now begins to work for art director Christopher Hobbes, particularly at a time when they were filming Jarman’s Jubilee (1978). Hobbes describes him as both alarming and possessed of a somewhat electrifying personality. Obviously there was something more to him than most other such angry young men. “You couldn’t just ignore him. And you felt there was something worth helping him out a bit.” At first the things he was making were rather crude, but then it became apparent that he had a special talent. “He had a perfect eye for proportion” that Hobbes found somewhat “creepy,” a work he uses in recognizing Andy’s natural talent. He made Hobbes a “grand bed."

    The interview turns to Scarlett (Cannon), also a friend, who finds it difficult to talk to Andy on tape without laughing. She asks what was his favorite night club, and he answers The Regency, which he describes as the first disco that had a dance floor as big as a kitchen table. They used to have drag shows there. “The tackiest drag ever. People used to spike drinks there all the time, and think somebody spiked mine one night.” He describes that he walked down to the Hilton Hotel and a huge Chevrolet Impala drove up, the doorman going to the wrong side of the car. As the man got out, he slipped in and drove away with the car with which he truly wasn’t acquainted with the gear shifts. He finds the police are chasing him, enters a back street and hits the median, backs up and hits it again. He jumps out the car with security guards now racing after him as well, and ran through Mayfair with the guards following. And suddenly after a long while he ran down cul-de-sac, and realizing he was trapped, hid under a parked car. 20 minutes, a half hour passed and he could still see boots running down the streets. And one was standing right next to the car, who suddenly got into the car and he had to get from under, as he was “grabbed.”

    One person soon after comments that he is not sure that one can believe all of the wonderful stories Andy tells.

    Jarman haughtily says we have all darker sides to our personality. But Andy, he argues goes on binges, like Caravaggio on whom he was working for his movie Caravaggio during the filming of this film. Regarding Andy, he suggests “On the whole things have become less extreme. But it is still there; I’m well aware of it.”

    Hobbes describes Andy’s process, as he looks for old plinths and ship parts, as in the beginning almost relating to punk. But it’s not become less respectable and even somewhat sophisticated. And for a while we watch him at work, sanding down the large planks, painting them, varnishing others, and turning them into chairs, tables, and other pieces of furniture.

    Jarman relates Andy, I think quite correctly, to the 19th Century Arts and Crafts movement, to William Morris, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and others. “It’s in the true tradition of British furniture.”

   Many of the figures featured in the film, particularly late in a film at a restaurant celebration are now dead of AIDS, including commentator Jarman.      

  As Tim Jonze wrote in his 2025 obituary of Andy, “Marshall avoided that fate, but his demise was still tragic. “Andy got stuck on a terribly morose downward spiral,” says Cannon. “When I saw him out he was always really negative and drunk and just awful. Then he got stomach cancer, because of the drinking I believe. He would push me away, and he did that with a lot of his friends, even though we all loved him.”  

 

Los Angeles, February 16, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).