You had to hand it to Oscar! No doubt the camera angle had been carefully chosen, but it was really very difficult to believe that this beach, these rocks, those plashing wavelets were not part of a natural coastline, but a swimming pool five kilometres inland. As for the members of the group sitting around the table in the shadow of a huge green and blue parasol, toying with iced drinks, packs of cards and magazines full of games and puzzles, they were fairly typical of anyone who might have been found at the villa on any given day during July and August that summer. Besides Oscar and his wife there were only four guests: Burolo assiduously preserved the mystique of the villa by restricting the number of visitors, thus increasing their sense of being privileged intimates. His excuse was that the household was not able to cope with huge parties.

Despite the tall tales of resident slave communities, Oscar's staff was in fact limited to an elderly caretaker and wife, together with a young man who had come with the lions and also helped to look after the garden. Oscar made much of being a self-made man with no wish for ostentatious display. 'I am what I am,' he declared, 'a simple builder and nothing more.' The truth was that he had realized that it was easier to dominate and manipulate small groups than large ones. The video made this very clear. In every scene, inside or out, it was the host himself who was invariably the focus of attention. Lounging on his personalized beach in silver shorts and a clashing pink and blue silk shirt, his head exaggerated in size as though by a caricaturist's pen, Oscar looked like the love child of the Michelin man and an overweight gorilla. One of his unsuccessful rivals had remarked that anyone who still doubted the theory of evolution obviously hadn't met Oscar Burolo. But it was a waste of time trying to be witty at Oscar's expense. He promptly took up the story, telling it himself with great relish, and concluding, 'Which is why I've survived and Roberto's gone to the wall, like the dinosaur he is!' Oscar the ebullient, the irrepressible Oscar!