TV Review Hilary Fannin'You've got a lovely arse," said the silky groom, a line of charlie glistening on the cistern lid, a bottle of Bolly dangling from his manicured fingers.
"And you've got a lovely husband," said the dolefully beautiful young waiter to whom the compliment was issued.
Written by Kevin Elyot, Clapham Junction, the tarnished jewel in the crown of Channel 4's series of programmes marking the 40th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act in Britain, which decriminalised homosexuality (between people aged over 21, in private, no more than two at a time, etc etc), was a bracing, if somewhat tendentious, appraisal of gay life as seen through several interlinking stories set around Clapham Common in south London.
Angrily provocative in spots, Elyot's drama, which played out over 36 hours of a white-hot summer (obviously not this year, then), was inspired by a murder on the Common in 2005 of a young barman, beaten to death in an assault so vicious that his family were initially unable to identify him.
"This whole gay thing - is it still an issue? Can't we have something on sex trafficking instead?" asked a fictitious floppy-haired commissioning editor at the start of the drama. For Elyot, the answer to "the gay thing" is obvious: despite civil partnerships, his-and-his wedding lists, high-camp TV hosts and political wooing of the pink pound, society is still awash with homophobic violence, dangerous sex and emotionally squalid sophisticates spitting their vicious prejudices into their chilled Sauvignon.
Bloody, graphic and coarsely funny ("you look like you need a stiffy," said dinner-party host to late guest, delayed because he was being happily and vociferously buggered in a public toilet while his wife kept his seat warm), Clapham Junction was a far cry from the asinine depictions of gay men in most TV soaps and flaccid sitcoms, and some may have found this uncompromising drama's plethora of penises and their empirical pursuits a bit hard to swallow.
Neither did the film's bleakness confine itself to gay life: in the thin light of its cruel summer day, a lifeless straight marriage was played out over a far more enthralling monkfish casserole, a domineering actressy matriarch lost her plot, and the casual explosive violence of a group of bored teenagers extinguished hope.
Although a raw perusal of rocky states of yearning, the play did feel somewhat dated, with most of the male characters resorting to cottaging and picking up blokes on park benches, and not a gaydar profile in sight.
Memorably and beautifully gloomy nonetheless.
LATER IN THE week, Channel 4 proffered the good news, a feel-good, fun documentary with the portentous and irritating title, How Gay Sex Changed the World, charting an extraordinary 40-year journey from the cowering injustice of illegality to social acceptability. It then went on to outline the reasons a gay lifestyle can be an enviable state: more money, more sex, nicer apartments and less chance of someone regurgitating their 4am feed all over you.
Intercut with recollections from, among others, the tireless Peter Tatchell and Matthew Parris (keepers of the flame), the programme was a busy cut'n'paste from the archive, featuring Boy George with dreadlocks, many merry queens click-clacking their way through decades of gay pride marches, Jimmy Somerville staring hungrily out of the window of a moving train and Frankie Goes to Hollywood whipping up the pre-Aids generation to a frenzied climax.
Contributors unfurled the four decades since decriminalisation like a glittering prophylactic. Art critic Brian Sewell reminisced about the Victoria and Albert Museum on decorous Sunday afternoons, ripe with the expectation of picking someone up over the gothic statuary, and MP and actor Michael Cashman described his own journey from gazing at the half-naked men in his mother's shopping catalogues to marching through the streets of London chanting "two, four, six, eight, is that copper really straight?".
Overwhelmingly, the programme portrayed a bright and exciting contemporary world in which being homosexual is no longer burdensome and where, as David Furnish (who recently wed Elton John) said, things keep getting better and better.
How Gay Sex Changed the World didn't need such an all-encompassing title - whether the liberalisation of gay sex did or did not loosen things up for the rest is really not the point. In answer to Clapham Junction's implicit question, "this whole gay thing - is it still an issue?": yes, it is.
Russell T Davies's brilliant Queer as Folk still stands as the benchmark and the breakthrough, but the need for this "special season" suggests that gay programmes are still not mainstream (though then again, maybe the mainstream's not all it's cracked up to be).
IT'S FUNNY WHAT people find perverse. Personally, I wouldn't bat an eyelid at a couple of blokes snogging in the park, but the sight of a child with hair extensions, fake tan, acrylic fingernails and a smacker full of lippie makes my stomach turn. Teen Body Obsession: Too Much Too Young was a pretty vile little half-hour, a prurient look at the woeful excesses of bored and under-confident mothers who decorate their children like cheap Christmas trees, forcing their daughters' fragile young minds through the needle eye of self-obsession and self-loathing. A lazy flick through any teen mag would have provided the programme-makers with their subjects, among whom was one poor child who, having been bullied at school and lost her best friend, denied herself food in an effort to look thin and become popular, eventually flirting with death at less than five stone before regaining a fragile equilibrium.
Another gentle, nervy child, obsessed with a necessity to "glow", spent her dinner hours on a sunbed. And then there was the self-conscious starry kid, full of the self-aggrandising joy of having a camera pointed at her, who pushed her pasta around her plate and told us that fat kids are friendless and only the beautiful are worthy.
"It's my life, I can do what I want!" said Emma (10) as she trotted into the beauty salon behind her mother to have a fake-bake. Jordan was her role model, her mother proudly assured us, and "it's her life, she can do what she wants". The next day, when Emma was collected, crying, from school, her highlighted hair falling in kiss curls around her golden face, the issue of bullying again raised its head (her persecutors having this time hidden Emma's runners). They're just jealous, insisted Emma's mother to the teary and confused child, before bringing her home to work out on her exercise bike.
There is a furtive quality to these worryingly familiar documentaries, and one senses that the attention their beleaguered subjects receive may be doing more harm than good.
WHERE DOES THE time go? As the rain poured down, this week's telly was awash with nostalgia. It feels like yesterday that the sun shone on freshly baked suburbs and "gay" meant a jolly state of mind.
Around about the same time that Brian Sewell was pulling on his needle cords for a trip to the V&A, young Irish couples, with their bouffants and their prams and their crinkled packs of 10 Major, were swarming to Dublin's newly built suburbs to start a life, leaving behind them the squalor of the tenement, or the "rick of turf and the weedy hay" of the farmhouse. RTÉ's enjoyable and gentle archive series, Home, this week looked at how our dwelling places have changed in the last 40 years. From the damp thatched cottage with well and hearth to the monstrous follies that litter the landscape from Killybegs to Kinnegad, the pace of change in this country is faster than a drag queen with a curtain call.
Changing interiors, too, were excavated, with recollections of large families in tiny houses who may have slept five or six to a room but who nevertheless preserved, in a kind of houseproud aspic, the good front room with its thrilling swirls of loud carpet and chintz, where antimacassars and framed photographs of earnest communicants battled for attention with the newly arrived television which lit up the chilly evenings and befriended the lonely girls in their concrete boxes. "A force for incalculable good and irreparable harm," Dev said. Bring it on, baby.
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