When they first released BONE GRAFTERS II there were scandals aplenty of course. It’s true that the protests in Bible Belt Scotland, riots in Sydney and injuries on the Occupied West Bank could easily have been orchestrated by a decadent and cynical publicity department eager for press and attention. But not even Michael Verbige would have courted the deaths, the sixteen fatal heart attacks in less than six public previews of the film, or the attempt by George Van Genitals to take his name off the credits, or the long list of suicides of so many minor role-players. Not even Verbige would have dared to contrive the tragic detainment (under the 1983 Mental Health Act, Section 3) of the chief script writer Helena Tereshkova, or, indeed, the wider, broader effects of the movie on our collective unconscious to this day.

Given the events of March 1984 it’s hard to be sure how much of the script Tereshkova really wrote. Her other work is incontestably mediocre – a string of adult comedy capers, standard loss-of-love-and-innocence movies and porno-chillers often set in the unremarkable town of Paris (Endland) where she grew up. If she did script it fully BONE GRAFTERS II is really something of a U-turn, a creative breakthrough whose next logical step we can only suppose, was the breakdown that claimed the life of her daughter (Joely, aged 5) in such regrettable circumstances and which cost Tereshkova her freedom, and ultimately, her mind.

If only one thing is certain now it is that Tereshkova herself will shed no light on the matter of the script. You can see her in the documentary BLINDED BY THE LIGHT (Vostock 1998) – a skinny bird like creature in a secure wing of Rampton run by Virgin/Securicor, her eyes dull with medication, her attention permanently scrambled by the steady stream of ECT that has been the mainstay of her treatment in 13 unlucky years, wrists scarred with the ploughed skin of so very many suicide attempts.

Those with a taste for literary analysis tend to put the script down to a three way combination – Tereshkova as the story framework and then Wilson and Callaghan as the real architects of the devil in the detail. The other writers credited – O’Neil, Evangelista, O’Casey and Moss – generally don’t get much of a look in on the scholarly attribution of lines and in any case it’s well known that with actors like Paunch Davies and Ludger Shat on set the chances of anyone sticking to a script for long were pretty remote.