"The David Farrant Story" is a short video made by Max and Bart Sycamore who, while using BBC archive footage from 1970 of Seán Manchester in some parts, do not actually identify, ie name, him.
Unlike the Sycamore brothers, Seán Manchester was acquainted with Farrant in the 1970s and early 1980s, which is why this biography can be dismissed as a fantasy originating with Farrant himself.
David Farrant provided all the "facts." However, this is still no excuse for the Sycamore brothers employing misleading and incorrect newspaper articles throughout the video. For example, when examining Farrant's first imprisonment on remand at Brixton in 1970 for supposedly vampire hunting in Highgate Cemetery they chose to show completely unrelated and irrelevant press cuttings from November 1972 which reveal him in Barnet's Monken Hadley churchyard where he was arrested and later found guilty of indecency. His "assistant" Victoria Jervis was similarly found guilty of indecency. She would reveal two years later under oath that what was claimed about her by Farrant, eg that she was a witch, was totally false, and that she had been duped into becoming "involved."
This 1972 case was about necromancy, not vampires. Yet one might be forgiven for thinking it related to the vampire arrest at Highgate Cemetery two years earlier. Why didn't the Sycamore brothers use cuttings from the massive coverage available about the other case two years earlier?
Probably because the photographs showed Farrant brandishing a large cross and a wooden stake!
Early on in the video, Farrant disingenuously claims that in 1966 he was engaged in some sort of "psychic investigation" with the "British Psychic and Occult Society." What makes that claim both fraudulent and absurd is that David Farrant was not a resident in the UK at that time, and, of course, the "British Psychic and Occult Society" did not exist. In fact, it has never existed, save in name. The "BPOS" was not used as his title and nomenclature for a non-existent "society" until 1983.
David Farrant was living in France and Spain throughout 1966. He met his first wife, an Irish girl called Mary Olden, while still on the Continent where he made her pregnant. They returned to England in the summer of 1967 and married in August. Their son was born in November of that year.
Mary attested under oath at the Old Bailey when subpœnaed by her husband in 1974 during his notorious criminal trials for tomb desecration and threatening police witnesses etc that his self-proclaimed association with witchcraft, the occult and psychic investigation was bogus, and that his nocturnal jaunts with friends in Highgate Cemetery were "giggles in the graveyard after the pubs had closed." When asked if her husband and his friends were involved in witchcraft and the occult, she said: "No, I am as sure as I can be about that." She she should know because she was there and was present in the graveyard when they "mucked about." These friends also used her flat as a hotel.
This is the David Farrant that Seán Manchester eventually revealed when the layers of pretence had been peeled away; this is the man he unearthed after years of knowing him; someone who believed in nothing spiritual or supernatural; someone who was a complete charlatan. Farrant's primary motivation was gratuitous attention seeking, as many others have found, sometimes to their cost. The press have their own agenda, and seldom allow the truth to get in the way of a sensational story.
The people to shoulder blame are those who provide David Farrant with the publicity he craves. They are his "dealers." He is the hopeless addict, and his fatal addiction is for manufactured self-publicity.
Directly above is a Daily Mirror newspaper report the Sycamore brothers could have used instead of the misleading articles about an indecency case in November 1972. Click on it to view Farrant reconstructing for BBC television in October 1970 what he was doing when he was arrested in Highgate Cemetery. To view "The David Farrant Story" by the Sycamore brothers, click on the image showing David Farrant as a teenager with his mother (from the video) at the top of the page.
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