We all knew about the slap but to me it's sounds like Rula knew how to provoke him and press his buttons, I also heard she nearly got him in to debt.

Locked Out wrote:

There are no excuses for anyone belting anyone

Except, in the ring, obviously.

I agree LO and can't imagine losing my temper so badly I strike out but it DOES happen and if you'd met men, as I have, whose insane second of red rage meant murder and life in prison, you'd be more tolerant of ghastly accidents.

JK2006 wrote:
... if you'd met men, as I have, whose insane second of red rage meant murder and life in prison, you'd be more tolerant of ghastly accidents.

I have met such men, JK. And some of them were, in the circumstances I met them under, completely charming, humourous people and we got along well.

Please understand this- my posting in no way indicates the intolerance you implicitly accuse me of.

My objection is twofold : To Waterman suggesting {as I saw on the front page of a newspaper} that intelligent women tend to make men want to hit them {and isn't there just a hint of "she was wearing a short skirt so she was asking for it" about that?} and the fact that, presumably, he was paid good money for the story of how he gave his wife "exactly what she deserved".

Yes and I might watch the Piers Morgan show although I'm not that interested in Waterman (and equally don't trust "direct quotes" reported in the papers).

My personal opinion is - as nearly always these days - somewhere in the middle; there are some men and women who are dangerously out of control; others who are provoked; some who simply have a moment of insanity; some who made a mistake... and my criticism is that, thanks to my personal experiences (and yours) I've generally found that most simplifications are inaccurate.

We will never know exactly what she said or did but obviously she did something to him. She got a slap but he did not beat her 24/7 like some men do.

I tend to agree with you, JK, inasmuch as when i was younger things were either "black or white" whereas nowadays (i was 15 when you had your first hit) things tend to be much "greyer".

'Violence is the last resort of the incompetent' Isaac Asimov

Except for self-defence or in controlled circumstances involving sport there are absolutely no excuses to resort to it...either verbally or physically.

I too am looking forward to the Piers Morgan Dennis Waterman interview. Did you see this from Piers Morgan’s Mail On Sunday column:

I’ve been filming Life Stories all week in London - the new series starts airing in a couple of weeks - and today, the subject was Dennis Waterman.
I’ve never met him before, though I’ve always enjoyed his work in The Sweeney, Minder and New Tricks.
As I usually do, I went to say hello in the dressing room before the interview.
He seemed nervier than previous guests but I put this down to the fact he rarely does anything like this.
Those nerves were even more evident during the first half hour of filming.
I could tell he was finding it hard to relax and his answers were brief and disjointed. Then the audience got behind him a bit and he began to be more the Dennis Waterman I expected from his on-screen characters.
And that’s where the trouble started.
Waterman’s outrageous comments about hitting his ex-wife Rula Lenska - saying ‘strong, intelligent women’ can argue so well they make men hit them - have made headlines for two weeks and speak for themselves.
What’s extraordinary is that he didn’t seem to have a clue that what he’d said might be remotely controversial.
‘I think that went pretty well,’ he told me afterwards. ‘It was good to finally set the record straight.’
As with the time I interviewed Jim Davidson for the BBC a few years ago, I got a sense of a man trapped in a time-warp - with views, especially about women, that were considered perfectly OK back in the Seventies but which have rightly become increasingly unpalatable to a modern generation.
Dennis, I’m sure, will be baffled about what all the fuss is about.
Just as a bemused Jim couldn’t understand why he could no longer call gay people ‘shirtlifters’.

Jim Davidson as one fan and that's himself now, he blames the poor attendance of shows on the recession not that people can't stand him. I like Dennis Waterman's acting and Rula needs to speak out what happened that night.

My partner worked in a garage years ago near where they lived, he used to see Rula and Dennis the worse for wear come in for fags often, Rula unsteady on her pins..