Greed, cash, theft, stars – and lots of sex. They should make a film of it!
SHE has cheekbones that look like they were chiselled by Michelangelo, eyes as blue as a Killarney lake on the best day of summer, and Titian hair that flicks out so far on both sides that it probably straddles postcodes.
Aoife Madden is the sort of actress you’d imagine would be besieged by casting directors searching for the timeless beauty that would look perfect in the beribboned corsets of a Downton-style drama (earthy Oirish scullery maid or repressed mistress of the house both perfectly credible options that, one way or another, would lead to a fourposter bed and a quick cutaway to a blazing log fire).
Or she could be the ice-queen boss thawed out by the cheeky intern who shows her that there’s more to life than the email alerts on a zinging BlackBerry. Maybe a visiting consultant on Casualty causing ripples among the male doctors for professional and personal reasons alike, or the young widow with A Dark Secret who arrives in the cosy Cotswolds and causes chaos. Instead, Aoife Madden has been cast as the bad girl – and the drama is very much set in the real world.
Conspiring
Madden (not to be confused with Aoiffe Madden, a Series Two contestant on TV3’s The Apprentice who was gifted with that distinctive extra F, a wise move in retrospect) comes from Newry in Co. Down and is now on her way to Holloway women’s prison for almost five years after being found guilty of conspiring to defraud Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs Service of over €3million. The scam also involved a Pakistani lecturer in finance, an Iraqi former property developer who went bankrupt, a Mancunian architect and a Jordanian businessman, none of them the most obvious of bedfellows, it must be said.
Throw in a former weathergirl making her acting debut as a bisexual therapist, then add a former EastEnder best known for cheating on his girlfriend in front of millions of viewers (including her, one presumes, placing him so high on the stupidity scale it had to be recalibrated) on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! and you have a plot you’d be hard pushed to pitch to a movie producer without being shown not only the door but probably the sole of a Size ten boot, too.
But this i ndeed was the cunning plan (well, ish) that came to light this week when the five co-conspirators each received jail terms ranging from three and half to six and a half years. Madden herself got almost five years so, if nothing else, anyone planning to revive Within These Walls, the rather camp Seventies television series about life in a women’s prison, may have to rethink traditional notions of what women prisoners look like.
Theirs was a simple idea, a caper that, if it were itself turned into a film (and it seems that that may happen) would demand a music score by Henry Mancini and the lightness of touch of Steven Spielberg in the canvas chair.
The conspirators spied a loophole in British tax law – and tax law has so many loopholes, it often appears to have been crocheted rather than written in pen and ink. If your movie makes a profit, you pay tax on it. If you make a flop, then HM Revenue pays you a rebate on the investment. It is entirely likely that a child of nine could see the fatal flaw in this system, so the combined intellect of the five found guilty doesn’t seem to have been much of stretch.
They claimed they had secured a £20million budget for a movie originally called A Landscape Of Lives. Jeremy Irons was, they claimed after seemingly picking a name from thin air, to star in it. Unfortunately, there was no script, though that seemed a minor trifle.
Instead, they dummied up a fake one and produced counterfeit documentation to show the losses they were making, triggering a tax rebate scheme that saw them receive over £1million in 12 months.
But officials in the tax office became suspicious and demanded to see footage from the movie, so the gang convened on Aoife Madden’s f l at, where facilities were presumably a little less lavish than in Pinewood or Shepperton Studios, and cobbled together eight minutes of filming that they presented on a DVD in a bid to prove their bona fides.
But the investigators then also discovered that the production company’s office i n Harley Street, better known as the home of London’s most prestigious private clinics, was in fact a single, empty room, and had the five arrested.
And here is where it all gets even more bizarre. Suddenly forced to conceive of an actual movie with a real script while out on bail, they filmed one for £90,000. Rather sublimely, given that the real budget stretched to hiring actors not so much from the A-List as from lists so low on the pecking order they didn’t even share a letter with vitamins, they convinced Andrea McLean, the former weathergirl now a staple on the daytime chat show Loose Women, to abandon her wholesome image and play a bisexual therapist, adding yet more sauce to a story already swimming in it.
They signed ex-EastEnder Marc Bannerman, too. Best known as Gianni di Marco in the BBC soap, his flirtation with Catatonia singer Cerys Matthews in the Australian bush effectively ended his mainstream career. Of all the players in this saga, he was probably the only one who couldn’t get arrested.
So, the stage was set for a complete farrago, a flop on the scale of Springtime For Hitler in the classic Sixties comedy The Producers. In that movie, producer Max Bialystock sells percentages of a Broadway musical so offensive (at one point, a high-kicking chorus line forms into a swastika) he is certain it will be a flop.
Instead, it is a smash and, with funding oversold, he can never repay the investors and is sent to jail.
And that’s what also happend, to a much more modest extent, to A Landscape Of Lives, by this stage renamed A Landscape Of Lies, a slightly Freudian admission of purgative guilt.
It actually was good. So good, in fact, that it won an award at the Las Vegas Film Festival (well, okay, it wasn’t exactly Cannes, but a gong is a gong).
After all the hard work trying so desperately to deceive, Aoife Madden and her friends might actually have made legitimate money if they had gone down that road in the first place.
She had a decent career, starring in Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant Of Inishmore in a touring production by the Royal Shakespeare Company. She took to the West End stage with Oscar-winner Holly Hunter in Marina Carr’s By The Bog Of Cats.
Victimless
But maybe no casting agent ever was so moved as to call and have her fitted for a corset, a power business suit, a stethoscope or widow’s weeds, and she had no option but to try to scam her way into a few bob. Sometimes, needs must, and an apparently victimless crime might seem attractive.
But one thing is for sure. As she entered court, Madden had more cameras trained on her than at any time in her life and she was ready for her close-up. Composed, dramatic and beautiful, she certainly made an impression.
Ours is a funny old world and notoriety is a saleable commodity. Out in three years with good behaviour, who knows where she might end up?
As in all the best caper movies, possibly on a tropical beach with a glass of champagne in hand, given that the tax rebate cash mysteriously disappeared to Jordan.
Or, at worst, in a hot tub on Celebrity Big Brother. With Marc Bannerman and Andrea McLean.