This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
It is all rather a long time ago, but back in the 1990s there cannot have been many newspaper readers who failed to chance upon the name of Hector Savage. Some of this exposure came by way of reviews — puzzled, if not actively hostile reviews — of his early novels (these had titles such as Cruising with the Bitch-pack and My Baby Makes Good Sculptures.)
Far more of it, though, was the result of Hector’s abrupt translation, at around the time of the fall of the Major government, from the relative obscurity of the culture sections to the paralysing spotlight of the gossip columns and — on one momentous occasion — the front page of the Daily Mail.
How to account for this sudden access of celebrity? To begin with, there is the book-publicist’s dream of Hector’s back-story: the Eton education, the expulsion from Oxford for (allegedly) smoking heroin in the warden’s lodgings, the three marriages, the backing vocals (purportedly) contributed to a Rolling Stones album.
The accompanying five-page interview hinted at, if it did not absolutely confirm, a relationship with Madonna
Then there was the stream of notorious incidents to which he seemed to gravitate like an iron filing obeying the magnet’s call. It is a fact, for example, that within the space of a calendar year he is known to have been present on a remote Hebridean island when a “radical media collective” incinerated a million pounds’ worth of bank notes as an art statement, importuned Princess Anne at a reception and dropped a syringe on the studio floor during the filming of an episode Never Mind the Buzzcocks.
With these imbroglios behind him, Hector celebrated the new century with a Loaded front cover of his by now quite substantial figure dressed in pirate gear and holding a cutlass between his teeth captioned “Fiction’s Bad Boy Talks Turkey”.
The accompanying five-page interview hinted at, if it did not absolutely confirm, a relationship with Madonna, whom Hector referred to as “Mads” and described as “a very seductive lady, who I hope I’ll be seeing a whole lot more of”. It was after this that the trouble began.
The chief item on the charge-sheet was a tell-all memoir by the second Mrs Savage. It said not only that Hector was boorish, egotistical and insensitive, but that his first novel had plagiarised Martin Amis’s Money and the second one Will Self’s The Quantity Theory of Insanity.
There were other, equally distressing revelations — these included his habit of binge-watching old tapes of The Black and White Minstrel Show — and an account of a Booker Prize after-party, at which Hector stripped to his underpants, climbed onto a table, declared that professional jealousy had kept him from winning, and offered to arm-wrestle anyone in the building.
For a time Hector’s career kept up. He continued to appear on such Channel Four comedy shows as would have him, and he wrote a wonderfully high-brow novel called Road Trip in which all the characters doubled up as engine-parts.
The latter did not, for some reason, sell well. When last heard of he was writing a TV column syndicated in half-a-dozen regional newspapers and doing warm-up for Jimmy Carr.
