And so on a Saturday night “the effect of a week’s monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill”. Maybe someday in the future people will see the comparable cultures of the Rake and the Rope and see - alcohol definitely leads to a path of self- and social-destruction.

A story of four of the greatest thespian boozers who ever walked - or staggered - off a film set into a pub; of drunken binges of near biblical proportions, parties and orgies, broken marriages, drugs, riots and wanton sexual conquests. He has slapped together a string of outlandish stories about four of the British Isles’ most stylish drunken actors, and he doesn’t even pretend to have turned those stories into a coherent book. They got away with the kind of behavior that today's film stars could scarcely dream of, because of their mercurial acting talent and because the press and public loved them. Like the rejuvenating martinis and blurry haze of cigarettes in 'Mad Men, ' Robert Sellers's nostalgic Hellraisers .Even for actors, its four subjects were uncommonly theatrical and loved telling merrily exaggerated stories about themselves. Of course Sellers finds it hard to keep the jokey tone going for the whole book as professional alcoholics - sorry, hellraisers - while being entertaining are also tragic, but he does a decent job of keeping things light. Hellraisers" wants only to be a rowdy collection of greatest hits, and it lives up to that fun-loving ambition. Most of us, certainly myself, lead constricted lives, anxious to please, concerned about our reputations. In a key scene Begbie and protagonist Renton encounter an “auld drunkard” in a now defunct railway station.

Three of them died as they lived, taking no prisoners (Reed fittingly passed on in a pub after a drunken evening arm-wrestling a group of Maltese sailors while filming "Gladiator", and Burton literally pickled himself to death--his autopsy found his spine to be completely encrusted with crystallized alcohol). Anyone horrified by the reckless abandon of “Hellraisers” should know what its ultimate effect turns out to be. There's a scene where his character has to drink one of those small airplane miniature bottles," Sellers explains.This is the story of four of the greatest thespian boozers who ever walked - or staggered - off a film set into a pub. At his height in the 1950s, Burton could consume a fifth of brandy and still play Hamlet with little or no ill effects.

Perhaps that was possible because his drinking was simply an adjunct to a far deeper and more pervasive eccentricity: “I will not be a common man,” he wrote in a notebook while a teenager. Perhaps, though, there’s a kind of antique dignity in the simple refusal to justify one’s self upon demand. While I agree with the author they were great actors, I think part of the reason for the nostalgia is that, in our digital age where everyone has a camera, all that was available to describe their exploits were words. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book.

Alas, despite a few walk on roles, the world has been spared his acting, which is perhaps all for the best.