Peter Rachman - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• In Michael Caton-Jones's 1989 film about the Profumo affair, Scandal, Rachman is portrayed by actor Johnny Shannon.
• In the film An Education (2009), Rachman has a minor role (described by one character as a "complete bastard") and is portrayed by Luis Soto.
• Linda Grant's (2008) The Clothes On Their Backs, Virago Press, features a main character modelled on Rachman.
• Harry Starks, the fictional protagonist of Jake Arnott's novel The Long Firm, begins his career working for Peter Rachman, who is described in the book as a Holocaust survivor, and is said to hoard bread crusts.
• Peter Flannery's (1989) Singer was inspired, in part, by Rachman's life.
• Indie-Pop band Carter USM's hit 1989 single "Sheriff Fatman" refers to the titular fictional slum landlord as "a born-again Rachman".
• Julien Temple's 1986 musical film, Absolute Beginners, loosely based on Colin MacInnes' 1959 novel of the same name, features a predatory Notting Hill slum landlord named Saltzman, who is clearly modeled on Rachman. In the film Saltzman evicts West Indian tenants from his properties to make way for a redevelopment and gentrification scheme. Perhaps not coincidentally, the actor who plays Saltzman in the film, Johnny Shannon, is the same actor who later played Peter Rachman in Scandal (see above). It is also likely not a coincidence that Rachman's one-time mistress, Mandy Rice-Davies, appears in Temple's film as the teenage protagonist's promiscuous mother, who runs the boarding house where she resides and often cuckolds her husband with "gigolo lodgers".
• In 1973–74, the British rock band, The Kinks, released a two-part rock opera, Preservation Act 1 and Preservation Act 2, which chronicles the rise and fall of a wicked property developer called Flash — a character that is probably based, at least in part, on Peter Rachman.