An Introduction
This is an introduction to The Bernician Chronicles, the eclectic journal of my life and times as a comedian, playwright and a filmmaker, a blacklisted ‘potential subversive’ and a notoriously unrelenting recalcitrant.
It is a story that spans five decades, told partly in prose and partly in extracts from my diary, which I have kept since I was a twenty two year old London comic with serious writing ambitions.
The primary purposes of this work, which is dedicated to my daughter, Serenity Rose, are to document the extraordinary events which have dominated my life; and to set aside persistent suspicions, doubts and lies about the life I lived before I changed my last name from Knighton to O’Bernicia, more than a decade ago.
Suffice to say that by the time I was thirty two, it was widely predicted that I was destined to become “L’Enfant terrible of the British film industry”. It was therefore inevitable that I received an invitation to sell my soul, which is where these chronicles begin in the Autumn of 2004.
For the purposes of protecting the privacy and safety of some of those who were and/or remain closest to me [and a few who would rather I was dead], I have used pseudonyms instead of real names, whenever appropriate.
There are also others I have loved and lost from my life, whom I have omitted entirely, with the same protective purposes in mind.
That being said, everything else you read in these pages is true, correct and not misleading, to the very best of my knowledge and recollection.
