A very liberal candidate

March 14, 2010 at 12:27 am (Lib Dems, Sex)

There are some things we come to expect with elections, and dodgy statistics are one of them. And not in the manifestos, either. Already a couple of friends in the Labour Party, in widely differing constituencies, have reported the emergence of everyone’s least favourite bit of election paraphernalia, the Liberal Democrat Bar Chart. I’m sure you’ve seen at least one of these – the Lib Dem candidate’s glossy leaflet will invariably have a colourful bar chart purporting to demonstrate that Only The Lib Dems Can Win Here. It will then be cunningly marketed to wavering Labour/Tory/Green/whatever voters who might be bamboozled into lending the Lib Dems a tactical vote.

As a hardy perennial, it ranks right up there alongside the poll the Daily Record always publishes about a week into the campaign, invariably showing Labour miles ahead of the SNP (regardless of what the likely results may be) and accompanied by furious editorialising to the effect that “Only Labour can win! The SNP are dead in the water!! Vote Labour!!!” As with the Lib Dem Bar Chart, this is aimed much more at influencing opinion than reflecting it. And when it comes to the LDBC, so often is this deployed and with such egregious use of statistics that I’m amazed they’ve never been done by Trading Standards.

You may have gathered that I’m none too sold on the Lib Dems. Although they’ve been having their spring conference this weekend, the idea of turning on News 24 to listen to inspirational addresses from Mr Nicholas Clegg, Ms Lynne Featherstone and Dr Death Evan Harris has proved eminently resistable, although Vince Cable’s lugubrious Yorkshire undertaker routine is not uncongenial. Cranmer takes the jaundiced view, and I largely agree with His Grace.

No, I mention the Lib Dems because of their colourful new candidate for Gravesham, one Ms Anna Arrowsmith. As you may have learnt from your morning news-paper, Ms Arrowsmith is a prolific director of blue movies. Under her Anna Span pseudonym, she has knocked out an extensive back catalogue of what she describes as women-friendly porn. Whether she has succeeded in her task, or whether her films are any good, I cannot inform you, as I must regretfully own up to never having seen any of the Anna Span œuvre. All I can say is that she’s managed to make a living at it. Still, the female-friendly tag might make her a bit more palatable to feminists, who might have got a little hot under the collar if, say, Ben Dover suddenly became a candidate.

So what does Ms Arrowsmith have to say for herself? I suspected she might have been intrigued on hearing Mr Clegg talking about hung parliamentary members, but sadly, she says she was motivated by the expenses scandal. Indeed, she comes across in this interview as being quite sensible:

How seriously will the voters take Ms Arrowsmith, 38, on the election trail? She wants to be respected for her business and campaigning record but knows that her career will present a problem for some. “There will be some people who will never like porn,” she says. “People approach sex in different ways. For some people it is only an emotional act. For others it is a variety of different acts. Some people will never accept that. They are probably the same people who never had a one-night stand. There will be some people who are conservative and very anti-porn. I think on the whole these days people are far more liberal.”

What about the Liberals? Aren’t some of them going to be affronted by a pornographer in their midst? “I don’t think so. On the whole they are a sexually liberated bunch.”

You know, when Peter Hitchens blames Britain’s troubles on “sixties liberals”, I always think he’s being a bit harsh on poor old Jo Grimond. This metrosexual attitude is a very long way removed from the old-fashioned Nonconformist Liberals you used to find in places like Cornwall or Cardiganshire, people who would have thought Clement Freud was a bit racy. Although I suppose the exploits of Mark Oaten and Lembit Öpik may have softened up the Lib Dem ranks a little bit.

Fed up with seeing porn films that focused on women pleasuring men she has carved a niche making films in which a third of shots show the woman, a third the man and a third the couple together. She says that the films she makes are humorous and that there is no airbrushing.

Nearly half her customers are women, she says: “Women definitely need this.”

And it is further reported that Ms Arrowsmith has recently won a battle with the BBFC that allowed her to depict squirting on screen. (If you don’t know what that is, you probably don’t want to know.) Sadly, bar charts notwithstanding, Gravesham is a Labour-Tory marginal where the Lib Dems have no chance of winning. Putting her into Parliament would be nearly as good as having Tuppy Owens as an MP – and, while I wouldn’t necessarily want Tuppy Owens to be dictating policy, there is such a thing as having a voice of conscience that needs to be heard. One may object that the Italians have already been down this road, with la Cicciolina having been elected as far back as 1987, but Cicciolina can hardly be held to blame for the rise of Berlusconi.

No, for those of us who like a bit of grotesquerie, it seems unlikely that the Lib Dems are about to become the second incarnation of Miss Whiplash’s Corrective Party. Mr Clegg and his chums just don’t have the flair and imagination for such a thing. However, Ms Arrowsmith has succeeded in briefly making the Lib Dems look slightly interesting. That in itself is no mean achievement. And the best we can do over here is Mike Nesbitt and Fearghal McKinney? How dull are we?

14 Comments

Balls!

February 25, 2010 at 5:41 pm (Catholicism, Education, New Labour, Sex)

For the sake of my blood pressure, I really shouldn’t listen to the Today programme. But more of that presently.

As the left blogosphere’s designated religion correspondent, a role graciously shared by the incomparable Red Maria, it would be remiss of me not to pass any comment on last week’s No Popery demonstration in London. But to tell you the truth, it looked to me like the damp squib of the season. This was, let’s recall, a mobilisation of various anti-religious organisations along with some militant gays, and to be honest, “anti-Catholics don’t like the Pope very much” is about as newsworthy as “Pope may not be secular liberal”.

But that’s not to say that there was nothing remarkable about it. In fact there were several entertaining eccentricities. Firstly, the demonstrators met up at the Natural History Museum to namecheck Darwin and pat themselves on the back about being, like, all scientific and shit. This seems to have been based on the idea that the Catholic Church is opposed to the Darwinian theory of evolution, which would come as a shock to the late Cardinal Newman as well as at least the last half-dozen popes. (Catholicism’s allegorical reading of scripture has never really had a problem with evolution; that’s Protestant biblical literalism you’re thinking of.) From there, they set out to Westminster Cathedral to try and have a row with the congregation, by such means as brandishing placards featuring Pope Benny’s face with a Hitler moustache drawn on it – that must have seemed absolutely hilarious at the OutRage! office, but was perhaps not the best way to win friends and influence people at Westminster Cathedral. And the final lap was a walk to the Italian embassy to proclaim solidarity with some two-men-and-a-dog outfit in Italy that’s been campaigning to get Berlusconi to unilaterally tear up the Lateran Treaty and annex Vatican City. And all I have to say about that is that if you don’t like the Pope that’s fair enough, but if you think Berlusconi would be an improvement then you need your head felt.

Notable too that despite sympathetic media coverage less than 200 people bothered to turn up; and that atheist icon Maryam Namazie was a no-show, although some Iranian bloke did stand in for her. This is ominous for the No Popery Coalition, because militant secularist demos usually rely heavily on the WCPI to make up the numbers, and while the Hekmatists are up for any opportunity to bash Islam, they really don’t care about Catholicism. One tentatively suggests that, if they want to bolster their numbers come September, they’ll have to block with the Democratic Unionist Party and the Orange Order, although that might be a profound culture shock for Terry Sanderson and Peter Tatchell. Incidentally, I do worry that the enormous respect that Peter has rightly accrued down the years is undermined a little by his insistence on hanging out with these strange people.

But no matter, these guys were not to be discouraged. Over the last couple of days they have been in action again over the Children, Schools and Families Bill – yet another rather silly piece of Orwellian legislation from New Labour – and have been boosted by the support of the Liberal Democrats. It appears that Mr Nicholas Clegg and Dr Death Evan Harris are making a pitch for the militant secularist vote, although I’m not certain that a couple of hundred retired Open University lecturers are much of a vote bank. The proximate cause of this is the question of what’s now known as Sex and Relationships Education (SRE) and how this is to be carried out in faith schools. But there’s more to this than meets the eye, and there are three aspects I want to explore – the legislative, the political and the educational. There are a few philosophical issues underlying it as well, but I’ll only be able to touch on these in passing – to go into them in depth would take unconscionably long.

Part the first:
New Labour, like most modern governments, produces far too much legislation and certainly far too much bad legislation. I was very taken by Jamie’s reference to the theory of Chinese Legalism, the idea that the government should legislate to improve the moral condition of its citizens. New Labour, combining as it does deracinated liberalism with a belief in the perfectibility of man, is especially addicted to this, and it’s resulted in a whole series of blockbuster laws that seek to get rid of every social ill you can think of. Harriet Harman’s current Equality Bill is a case in point – since the last (itself rather far-reaching) Equality Act came into force as recently as 2006, and was augmented by the Sexual Orientation Regulations 2007, it’s not immediately apparent why yet another substantial piece of equality legislation is so urgently required.

Forgive me for going a bit Ron Paul, but the legislative process would be enormously improved by applying the “better fewer but better” approach, passing fewer but shorter laws that are competently drafted and properly scrutinised. Nor would it hurt to realise that some things can’t be easily sorted out by legislative fiat. At the risk of getting ahead of myself, if schools have a problem with homophobic bullying (and we know they do) it would seem sensible to me for the DCSF to issue schools with guidelines setting out best practice, and to get feedback from schools on the extent of the problem. It’s an executive problem, not one that can be solved by legislation. (It’s worth noting that teenagers involved in homophobic assaults will have spent their entire education under New Labour and will have had the whole gamut of diversity and equality drummed into them. This indicates that we’re dealing with a cultural problem that needs a long-term perspective.)

A further issue is that of what may be termed bullshit autonomy. It’s a bit like Francis Canavan’s critique of liberal thinkers like Ronald Dworkin – that they relied on statist solutions to uphold the supreme good of the autonomy of the atomised individual – but, this being practical politics, it’s the Beavis and Butt-head version. I draw your attention to “Dave” Cameron promising more local decision-making in the NHS, even including workers’ co-operatives. But on electoral hot-button issues like cancer care or IVF, “Dave” says he’ll end the postcode lottery. It obviously not having occurred to “Dave” that localism implies a postcode lottery – because local decision-making means differing decisions being made on the allocation of limited resources. So the line is that we’ll get more localism except where it matters, and where it matters there will be increased uniformity.

Education is an especially obvious example. What with LMS, the gutting of local education authorities, parental choice, academies and all the other shiny initiatives of the last three decades, one would imagine that education would be all localism and diversity. And yet, this is one of the areas most notorious for pettifogging micromanagement from Whitehall. And since the far distant days of Ken Baker, the weapon of choice for enforcing bullshit autonomy has been the National Curriculum.

What’s wrong with the National Curriculum could take up an entire book, but in very general terms it’s both too broad and too narrow. What it should be doing is setting a standard for the study of various subjects. It should define what’s necessary as a minimum, and it should also indicate academic range – for instance, the study of history should involve some sort of variety of topics, instead of the scandalous situation where you can get a history qualification after studying nothing but Hitler. That’s the sort of thing it should do. In practice, it’s a dumping ground for every bit of harebrained social engineering a government wants to try its hand at, via citizenship classes and the like. At the same time, the NC is absurdly prescriptive. Take literacy. Any teacher worth her salt knows there are a whole lot of different ways of teaching literacy, appropriate to different kids, of which synthetic phonics is one. But, thanks to New Labour’s kowtowing to the Daily Mail, synthetic phonics is now compulsory. And now, on the grounds that parents are falling down on the job and the NC has to take up the slack, kids who are already suffering the Tony Blair Literacy Hour face being subjected to the Ed Balls Sex Hour.

Finally, however bad New Labour are on this ground, we can confidently expect Cameron and Gove to be ten times worse.

Part the second:
This is where it’s necessary to separate the substance from the spin. At 8.10 on Tuesday morning the Today programme carried a rather weird interview between John Humphrys and Ed Balls, on the subject of an amendment Balls had introduced to his own bill, which is ostensibly about protecting the religious character of faith schools. More on this below.

The interview was rendered even more weird in that it was preceded by an appearance from Rabbi Jonathan Romain, who was arguing in favour of one-size-fits-all statism and against any religious dispensation. This seemed an odd position for a rabbi to take, but then Reform Judaism is a strange beast.

There then followed the main event. Although the bill would also affect the more numerous Anglican schools (though many of these are faith schools in name only), not to mention Jewish, Muslim and Hindu schools, the entire conversation was about Catholic schools, and moreover between two men neither of whom had the faintest idea what Catholic doctrine actually was. (Can we please have Ed Stourton back?) Humphrys was hyper-aggressively demanding of Balls that Catholic schools should not be allowed to be influenced by, er, Catholicism; Balls was positively surreal, simultaneously posing as the defender of faith schools while reassuring Humphrys of his fidelity to secularist orthodoxy by affirming that he would be requiring Catholic schools to provide their pupils with information on how to access contraception and abortion.

The spin on this, too, has been wondrous to behold. Secularist groups (among which we can count the Liberal Democrats) have been spinning furiously that this is all about Teh Gays. You can’t blame them for taking this tack – look at the media success they had a few weeks back when the Pope made a speech that didn’t mention homosexuality once, and we ended up in a “hands off our lovely gays” condemnathon. (And, having tapped into primordial English anti-Catholicism, there was little need to bother with details such as what the guy actually said. Better to have well-meaning liberals getting really angry about what they knew he’d said.) Actually, while homosexuality isn’t irrelevant to all of this, discussion in Catholic fora has been much, much more concerned with abortion. As for the government, prior to the amendment it had been spinning that its religious critics were a bunch of lunatics opposed to any and all sex education (Mark Steel, for one, seems to have accepted this); after the amendment, their spin came back to bite them in the bum as BBC newsreaders were berating MPs for allowing the “opt-out”.

What of the Catholic spin? Well, there hasn’t been any. Archbishop Nichols, Bishop McMahon and the blessed Oona have been conspicuous by their vanishingly low profile. There was a very brief and neutrally worded press release from the CES about the amendment, but that was it. If one were to go by the radio silence from +Vinnie and +Malcolm, one might get the impression that the bishops endorsed what New Labour was up to. Not least because Balls is quoting them in support of his position, with nary a word of contradiction.

Let’s backpedal slightly here, because faith schools under New Labour are a classic example of bullshit autonomy. New Labour loves faith schools, because middle-class parents love faith schools. In the absence of a government with the balls to bring back grammars, the middle classes have identified faith schools as ersatz grammar schools and will go to extraordinary lengths of feigning religious belief so as to get the kids in there. (There is an analogue, though an inexact one, in the way south Dublin is full of middle-class atheists who join the Church of Ireland for schools admission purposes.) New Labour loves faith schools so much that a whole slew of government ministers have managed to get their own kids into exclusive faith schools. But New Labour also remains committed to a long menu of liberal policies that sit uneasily to say the least with actually existing religion. Hence Barry Sheerman’s comment that faith schools were fine as long as they didn’t take the faith bit too seriously. Ideally, New Labour would like the “faith” bit of faith schools to be just a bit of branding, a logo on the school gate. You can get away with that to some extent with the C of E, but the likes of Catholics, Muslims and Orthodox Jews are a tougher proposition.

So to the SRE proposals, and the Bill tightens considerably the leeway that schools had in designing their own SRE curricula. It would become illegal for any school not to offer SRE – even in primary schools, it is envisaged as being compulsory for the 8-11 age group, which is an odd move for a minister who’s said he’s concerned at how society is sexualising young children. From the age of fifteen, it will be illegal for parents to withdraw their children from SRE, no matter what reasonable concerns they may have about the content of what the school is offering. And this DCSF press release gives a flavour of what would specifically be expected from faith schools:

Q How could this work in practice in a faith school?

Let me answer that by way of providing an example. (This is Ed talkin’ here.)

St Thomas More is a mixed secondary school in Bedford. 60% of students are from a Catholic/Christian background with 40% from a range of ethnic minority groups, including Muslim. It has achieved Healthy Schools Status and has an Outstanding Award for cultural diversity.

St Thomas More delivers SRE through the pastoral programme in conjunction with the RE syllabus. It is led by pastoral tutors, all of whom are well prepared and confident to lead discussion with students across a wide range of SRE issues.

The school has developed a very successful balance of providing students with accurate information within the faith ethos of the school. For example, sex within marriage is promoted as the ideal of the Catholic faith, but the school explicitly recognises the reality that some young people may choose to be sexually active and, if that is the case, they need the knowledge and confidence to make an informed choice to protect themselves from pregnancy and STIs.

The school nurse provides students with clear accurate information about the full range of contraception and STIs and details of local services. Chlamydia screening is also offered to students in Years 11 to 13. Pregnancy options, including abortion, are also discussed in a non-judgemental way with the RE syllabus requiring students to understand the spectrum of pro- and anti-choice views on abortion. By combining the pastoral and RE teaching, the essential knowledge component of SRE is provided to students but within the context of relationships and the school’s values.

Terry Sanderson has been banging on about the rights of children to an “objective” sex education, as if you can eliminate values from such a discussion. In the spirit of Dude Hitchens’ proclamation in God Is Not Great that “my belief is not a belief”, Terry is arguing not for a value-free SRE curriculum, which is impossible in any case, but for one that reflects his values – with the rhetorical rider that “my values are not values, they’re objective”. Ed Balls, who’s much more important in this context than the voluble Mr Sanderson, actually comes closer to a value-free approach with his demand that schools be “non-judgemental”, in other words following the timeworn liberal view that radical personal autonomy is the supreme value.

But this is where liberalism’s insistence on the atomistic individual, at least when it devolves into statist solutions to reinforce personal autonomy, becomes deeply anti-pluralist. And this is where Balls and Sanderson are as one, because what they view as “enlightened”, “neutral” or “non-judgemental” is in fact a value statement, and one that many people don’t agree with. The real difference is that Balls thinks the demands of liberal statism and those of faith can be reconciled by the teacher adding the rider “here’s what we believe, but here are some other beliefs of absolutely equal value”, while Sanderson thinks the teacher should be legally prevented from adding the rider.

For example, let’s say your faith holds up lifelong monogamous marriage as an ideal, while recognising (and being sensitive to) the fact that actually existing society is more complex. Ed Balls wants to make it compulsory for you to say that cohabitation and civil partnerships are of equal value with marriage – so how do you express an opinion without being judgemental? The canonical example is abortion, where Mr Balls seems to think Catholic schools can instruct girls in how and where to obtain abortions – and in a “non-judgemental” manner – as long as they say “but we don’t do that”. One would have thought Archbishop Nichols might have explained to him that for Catholic educators to assist a pupil in obtaining an abortion is for them to be complicit in a grave sin, but then that would presume that a government minister would understand the concept of sin.

And what of the ostensible opt-out? Here is the text of the amendment:

Subsections (4) to (7) are not to be read as preventing the governing body or head teacher of a school within subsection (7B) from causing or allowing PSHE to be taught in a way that reflects the school’s religious character.

Note that this replaces the provision in the Education Act 1996 that allows schools to opt out of what they consider to be inappropriate material; and that this amendment is in tension with all the other bits of the Bill stipulating that SRE must be carried out according to the (extremely broad-brush) requirements of “equality” and “diversity”, and it really doesn’t add up to much. What it amounts to in practice is that you can rely on the teachings of Jesus Christ as long as they don’t conflict with the teachings of Ed Balls. If they do, so much the worse for Jesus.

Even if you don’t subscribe to Catholic moral teaching – and I’m certainly not advocating that Catholic doctrine become the law of the land – there are good reasons to be alarmed at these occasional outbreaks of authoritarian Jacobinism from New Labour. I was saying a little while ago about the danger of erecting liberal analogues to Section 28, and this is exactly the sort of thing I meant. Genuine pluralist liberals – and a lot of liberals are shockingly illiberal on these issues – should realise that, at least on the Niemöller principle, it’s often necessary to defend the liberties of people you don’t agree with – as Pope Benny says, tolerance is not the same as approval – and that religious liberties are very often the canary in the mine. Apart from the civil libertarian argument, there’s also the prudential argument outlined by +Rowan at General Synod, when he talked about Section 28 and the danger of enshrining legal norms on disputed moral issues. You may not be worried as long as the government is enforcing liberal nostrums on the education system, but once put that sort of system in place, and should a morally conservative government come to power, the liberals would soon know what end was up.

Part the third:
This post has got far too long already, but I’d just like to quite briefly state my scepticism about whether these brave new plans Mr Balls is putting forward will actually do much good. One might profit from asking why there were much lower teen pregnancy and STI rates forty or fifty years ago, when there was almost no sex education in schools. Not, I hasten to add, that I’m calling for a return to those days.

I mention this because the debate on the CSF Bill has coincided with discussion of the government’s Teen Pregnancy Strategy, which will certainly miss by quite some margin its target of halving teen pregnancies in ten years, even with a bit of statistical jiggery-pokery aimed at making the headline figures look better. Sceptics view the TPS as not much more than a teen abortion strategy. (As the latest figures confirm, teenage birthrates have got very low, but that’s largely thanks to a 50% abortion rate rather than a reduction in teenage pregnancy.)

Many of you will have seen Anna Richardson’s Sex Education Show (aka Britain’s Got Herpes) on Channel 4. This was quite interesting in that it was arguing, on the face of it, that the teen pregnancy and STI crises could best be dealt with by more sex education. But, considering that there’s more sex education now than there has ever been, it might be more pertinent to call for better sex education.

There’s also the aspect of societal pressures. There are enormously strong influences on kids from the mass media, the internet, porn and what have you, reinforced by peer pressure. By far the most powerful vehicle for sex education in Britain is Radio 1’s Sunday Surgery, which always does some brief throat-clearing on the age of consent, and occasionally has on Christian girls who wear purity rings as a sort of sideshow attraction, but in general has a relentless message of “if it feels good, there can’t be anything wrong with it”. Set against this, pupils getting an hour a week in school of what Ed Balls considers to be good sex education – regardless of whether it’s any good – is comparable to government advertising campaigns on alcohol abuse when set alongside the mammoth advertising budget of the drinks industry. It’s a drop in the ocean.

Finally (phew!), there’s a general cultural issue. Holland, as is well known, has extremely permissive laws and as much sex in the media as you could possibly want, but a much lower teen pregnancy rate than Britain. But Dutch society, especially outside of the Amsterdam metropolis, is characterised by tight family units and a level of community cohesion that seems very old-fashioned to Brits. I can’t see the problem being sorted this side of a serious change in the culture, something that no act of legislation can decree.

More thoughts on this from Archbishop Cranmer.

Rud eile: I was immensely tickled to see Cardinal O’Brien slapping down the odious Jim Murphy. More on which here; and Ruthie reports that someone is having trouble with his comments box.

62 Comments

Department of the lowest common denominator

February 5, 2010 at 1:26 am (Fashion, Sex)

And now for something completely different. The incomparable Madame Arcati draws our attention to a company called “Dapper Dicks”, which makes… well, there’s no way to say this politely… clothing for the penis.

I kid you not. You know when you see people out walking those wee dogs with beady eyes, and at this time of year the dog often has a coat on it? This is the same idea. There is a one-piece garment, in a coat or jacket style, that you can wrap around your member, as well as a rinky dinky little hat that you can stick on top of John Thomas if you so desire. And a mere snip at $45 a go! How did we ever survive without these ingenious inventions?

But before you commit yourself to a job lot of XXLs, it may be as well to mosey on over to the Dapper Dicks website to get a look at what range they have on offer. It may not surprise you to know that, if you’re looking to outfit your knob tastefully in a sober grey suit or maybe a nice brown Harris tweed with blue twill, you will be disappointed. I’m sorry to say that the Dapper Dicks wardrobe does tend towards the garish.

We start off with a Mafia-style pinstripe, and from then on… you have medical scrubs (tip of the hat to George Clooney), a pirate, a cowboy, a fireman and a GI. You may have noticed a theme developing here, but there is still some way to go – by my reckoning, a Sailor, an Indian, a Cop, a Construction Worker and a Leatherman – before Dapper Dicks can boast a full lineup of Village People.

Who exactly is the target market here, I wonder? As a fun novelty item, I can see it. As a bedroom enhancement, one suspects it might be more likely to rouse the Other Half to uncontrollable laughter than uncontrollable lust. Maybe, to appreciate the concept, you need quite a silly sense to humour to begin with.

On the other hand, I can see it taking off big time with male strippers. If you come on stage dressed as a fireman, stripping off to reveal a junior fireman downstairs would be a neat embellishment for your act. And if the ladies love a man in uniform, a cock in uniform might be worth a punt – at least it would make a change from the boring old posing pouch.

The funniest thing of all about Dapper Dicks, mind, is the warning that “Dapper wear must be removed prior to intercourse.” From the point of view of health and safety, not to mention lurid litigation, some people just need to be told.

One final thought: for their next outfit, it would be a hoot if Dapper Dicks could do a replica Chelsea strip. I’ll want commission for that, mind you.

7 Comments

No sex please, I’m the commissioning editor for drama

December 11, 2009 at 1:57 am (Movies, Sex, TV)

A while ago – well, it would be a wheen of months ago now I suppose – Greg Dyke was on the telly asking why British TV can’t make dramas like the Americans do. Greg argued, and I think he was correct in this, that the Brits do love their formulaic hospital dramas, police dramas and soaps, with the occasional costume drama thrown in. This is true – not that there’s anything wrong with TV stations producing this bread-and-butter stuff, but the real question is why the reluctance to produce things other than hospital or police dramas. It’s a good question.

Greg’s star exhibit on the other hand was the US cable outlet HBO. You may not know HBO, but you’ve surely watched some of its product, which spans The Wire, The Sopranos, Sex And The City, The Larry Sanders Show, Deadwood, Six Feet Under and Curb Your Enthusiasm, amongst many others. I know the law of imports applies here – that the best American product is imported and there are oceans of crap on the TV over there that we don’t get to see, but even so, it’s an impressive hit rate. And the thing is that what HBO is known for in the States is that, being a subscription service and not reliant on advertising, it can fill its schedules with nudiness and cuss words that the networks can’t get away with (I will return to this presently), but if you look at the programmes listed, you’re also talking about generally intelligent adult-oriented drama of the sort that has provoked the networks into raising their dramatic game.

Greg was interested to know why the BBC, with far greater resources, couldn’t produce that sort of material on a regular basis. I would guess that it has something to do with the BBC’s funding base, and its requirement to provide something for everyone, which exists in tension with the Reithian idea of giving the public what they don’t yet know they want. You get bits of this in the documentary strands on BBC4, but it’s sobering to think that Beeb bosses think of their more intelligent programming as the expendable bit. On the other hand, if the Tories get in and allow broadcasting to degenerate to the levels of Italy, we may look back on this as a golden age.

But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about the nudiness and cuss words, well, specifically the former.

Apropos of HBO, I’ve lately been enjoying its new series Hung, which you may want to catch if you haven’t already. The show revolves around Ray Drecker (Tom Jane, of The Punisher fame), who works as a high school basketball coach in Detroit. Ray, when we meet him, is a man down on his luck. His wife has left him. His kids have gone to live with his wife. His house has burnt down, and he’s living in a tent. He hates his life, and he has no money. Ray realises that he does have one marketable asset, and it lives in his trousers. So he decides to put his generous male organ to work and goes into business as – let’s not beat around the bush here – a male prostitute.

This is where the show could easily devolve into Deuce Bigalow territory, but really it doesn’t. What it is, is a decent if near-the-knuckle comedy-drama very much like Californication, or that old HBO classic Dream On. The humour is ribald without being crass, and the scripting is surprisingly subtle. The important point is that Ray’s knob is really just a maguffin to hang the story on – the impressive thing about Hung is how character-driven it is. Thanks not least to Tom Jane’s nicely nuanced performance in the lead, we come to care about Ray and his various problems, emotional issues and dilemmas – his self-loathing and hankering after his failed marriage in the first instance. There’s a certain amount of flesh of course, though not as much as might be expected, and if you took the flesh out – which is always a good test – you’d still have a pretty good drama.

This leads me to ponder a question somewhat at a tangent to Greg Dyke’s, which is to ask why British TV drama, with rare exceptions, can’t do sex. I’m not talking about sexual explicitness here, nor about the physical staging[1] but about the portrayal of sex in a dramatic sense. With the notable exception of the late Dennis Potter, it’s hard to think of good examples of sex being integrated into drama in an interesting or intelligent way. And although I’m cautious of cultural essentialist arguments, I have the feeling that this has something to do with inherited Puritan attitudes and particularly the close association of sex and guilt. You don’t get this in French or Italian or Spanish cinema. That old sexist reprobate Tinto Brass doesn’t do guilt, and his films are all the better for it – if they were guilt-ridden, they would be unbearable. Maybe it’s a Mediterranean thing. (In the context of Puritanism, it’s interesting that northern European culture – see Babette’s Feast for example – tends to stereotype Catholic cultures as voluptuous and sensual. I suppose this again shows how Irish Catholicism, with its strong Jansenist influence, is deeply weird in European terms.)

Another thing that doesn’t help is this tendency in British – or rather English – culture to put on a distanced, ironic, even supercilious air, and to distrust anything done with passion. To digress a little, as bad as Kate Thornton was hosting X Factor, the more accomplished Dermot O’Leary is far worse, because la Thornton was always willing to give it some welly. O’Leary tries to be as hip as he was on BBLB, but just comes across as Mr Insincerity, which is a terrible fit for the pachyderm bombast of X Factor. The lesson is that there are certain things you can’t do in a distanced way – if you’re going to do them at all, you have to do them with commitment.

Which is a roundabout way of coming to the way British drama deals with matters sexual. There is of course the vacillation between the censorious and the gratuitous – the former can be seen in something like The Vice, where those involved in the sex trade are so unremittingly grim and grotty and evil that it just sinks into this misanthropic mire. But there are also the two key dramatic paradigms. The most straightforward is the Bouquet Of Barbed Wire paradigm, which quite obviously draws on issues of guilt and concerns of respectability, and which ends with the moral lesson that the character of loose virtue (which is almost invariably to say, the promiscuous woman) must be punished for upsetting the social mores.[2]

This is why I didn’t like the BBC’s Mistresses, billed as the British Sex And The City. I don’t like SATC much either[3], but the whole point of it was surely the lack of guilt – Samantha shags her way through New York and has a ball doing so; she has her share of heartbreak, but that isn’t set up as a heavy-handed punishment for her promiscuity, and if aspects of her life are empty, then she’s learned to cope with that. On the other hand, Mistresses, although it had an excellent cast (I’ll watch Sarah Parish in just about anything), high production values and decent writing, couldn’t escape suburban moralism. You had these nice, prosperous women with their nice jobs and nice families and nice houses and nice bits on the side – and the whole story revolved around how miserable they were. Thirty seconds of a woman indulging in some illicit rumpo would be followed by twenty minutes of her sitting around with her friends, drinking red wine and moaning about how miserable she was. Maybe there was a female thing I was missing, but unless you’re Dostoyevsky there’s a limit to how much dramatic mileage you can get from people being eaten up by guilt, especially when there’s not all that much to justify the guilt. Sometimes, and by this point my attention may have been wandering, the women seemed to be wallowing in guilt over sins they hadn’t committed, which is taking the Puritanism just a teensy bit too far.

The other dramatic paradigm is of course the Carry On paradigm, which is more widespread than you might think. This isn’t, by the way, incompatible with the guilt scenario. The important thing about the Carry On films and their 1970s offspring was that coitus was permanently interruptus, and much of the humour derived from Sid and the other lecherous old blokes failing to get their leg over. Moreover, a bit of Donald McGill saucy humour can work well as a means of sidestepping (not challenging) a puritanical culture.

So there is of course the direct line of descent from Carry On through the Confessions series and other 1970s sex comedies[4]; to shows like the late lamented Eurotrash, which almost seems like nice clean fun in this age of Babestation; and indeed into modern British porn – Ben Dover’s character is basically Sid James with a camcorder, and the Omar series is essentially constructed in terms of Robin Askwith movies with real shagging[5]. But the influence of the Carry On aesthetic goes well beyond that, even into the realms of costume drama – The Tudors has more than a hint of the classic Carry On Henry about it, and the recent Desperate Romantics partook of the same approach. Even if you take the BBC’s adaptation of Fanny Hill, which had fantastic source material plus the reliable Andrew Davies on script duty, there was a pronounced undertone of Carry On Up The Brothel. ITV, on its occasional breaks from Lynda La Plante police procedurals, sometimes does a “raunchy” drama, usually starring Suranne Jones, and they invariably fall into the Carry On mode.

So, there is a huge swathe of human experience that is habitually treated as either a nail to hang moral lessons, or as an occasion for nudge-nudge wink-wink tomfoolery. This doesn’t leave much space for other interpretations. Maybe it’s me, but I find that an approach of at least moral ambivalence – the way the prostitution in Hung, like the gangsterism in The Sopranos, is not taken as the subject for a treatise but as a window onto our protagonist’s character – works better dramatically. I say this not in a prescriptive way, but in the sense that cliché is the enemy of good character-driven drama.

There are two other points that are worth flagging up. One is an aesthetic point, in that the dominant mode on TV is naturalistic, as exemplified on the soaps. Obviously this is not documentary but a faux naturalism, and is a very stylised aesthetic in itself. And it’s an aesthetic that draws a lot on the theatre, in being very dialogue-heavy and plot-heavy. You can of course get this in the cinema, but cinema is a different medium and different aesthetics work well in it, especially with a heaviness on the visual and a willingness to tolerate periods of silence. Some American TV dramas – Without A Trace comes to mind – are moving towards a more cinematic style, and the HBO phenomenon has encouraged that, but it still hasn’t really filtered across the Atlantic. And the cinema’s visual aspect means it can draw not only on the theatre, but also on the aesthetics of (say) painting, or more often photography.

As you art buffs will know, both painting and its offspring photography deal in large part with the human nude, and this is an aesthetic of form.[6] Apart from a few extreme moral puritans or radical feminists, not many people have a problem with it. But such is the theatrical influence that it still feels odd if that attitude is translated into moving pictures. The cliché is that nudity must not be gratuitous but must be justified by the plot. Let’s say you are a film director and you have Kelly Brook in your cast – how do you justify getting her naked? To stay respectable, you have to use some plot device. Actually, Kelly Brook has been naked in a few films, not very good ones, where some flimsy plot device has been found. But a film director who just said that Kelly Brook looks beautiful naked and he wanted to capture that on screen – that comes across as a bit off, even though it would be perfectly acceptable from a still photographer.

So it goes. Tinto Brass has a reputation as a sleazy old perv, and maybe he is a sleazy old perv, but is what he’s doing essentially all that different from Lucian Freud’s painting? His film Miranda is essentially an extended study of Serena Grandi’s naked form – it’s the fact that it’s in moving pictures and not stills that’s the issue. An analogous example from the Anglophone world would be Nicolas Roeg’s infamous Full Body Massage, which consists of little more than Bryan Brown and Mimi Rogers talking philosophy as Brown rubs oil into Rogers’ breasts. The camera’s lingering on Rogers’ body is an absolutely photographic aesthetic – and it’s no coincidence that Roeg is a cinematographer by background – it’s just not something we’re really used to in film, still less in TV.

Finally, there’s also the question of what you’re trying to say – or if you’re trying to say anything. If you like the commedia all’italiana of the 1960s and 1970s, you’ll know that it’s not just a matter of saucy humour – many of the directors, writers and actors were communists, and had some things they wanted to say about Italian society, bourgeois morality, corruption, religion and so on. To go downmarket, the German B-movie genre of nunsploitation relies on some sort of critique of Catholic morality and sexual repression – well, all right, it’s mostly about actresses in nuns’ habits getting their tits out, but there wouldn’t be much point if it didn’t tap into some social attitudes, if it wasn’t subversive or satirical in some way.

Possibly part of this relates to the consequences of sexual liberation. What used to be transgressive is now commonplace. In the 1970s a drama like Bouquet Of Barbed Wire, centred around extra-marital sex and illegitimacy, could be considered risqué. In times gone by, homosexuality could be used to shock, but now it’s almost totally mainstream. There aren’t many taboos left, and it’s much harder to work in a shock factor. Actually, in strict terms, that may not be a bad thing – if you can’t reach for an easy shock factor, that could create an incentive to write something imaginative. But again, it depends on programme-makers being creative rather than lazy, and on having something to say. American TV drama shows that’s possible – British TV drama is a bit dispiriting at the moment, but it’s hard to imagine that the potential isn’t out there. If only it could be put to some use.

Tangential to this, there’s an interesting discussion of porn over at AVPS.

[1] There is the perennial problem, experienced by everyone from novelists to pornographers, of how to actually present a sex scene that isn’t hackneyed. As gonzo porn auteur Ben Dover says, at this point in his life he can’t tell whether that last anal scene was any good, because it looks indistinguishable from any one of the last hundred he’s done.

[2] This finds expression in the iron rule of horror movies, that the girl who shows most skin dies first, and the one who keeps her top on survives at the end.

[3] My basic objection to SATC is that it’s shoehorning female characters into a gay male fantasy. But then again, millions of women love it. Go figure.

[4] At this point one recalls veteran pornographer David McGillivray quipping that he started to agree with Mary Whitehouse at that point in the 70s when you couldn’t go to the cinema without seeing Robin Askwith’s naked arse. Mind you, it’s not as if McGillivray raised the tone much himself.

[5] Omar’s faithfulness to the Askwith template is remarkable. The basic plot is that Omar finds himself in a situation, like joining a gym or becoming a door-to-door salesman; he meets a woman and engages in some saucy dialogue; he and the woman shag; immediately after the pop shot, there is a loud banging on the door from the woman’s husband/boyfriend/dad; Omar has to flee, running with his knees up in the air like he’s in a Madness video.

[6] We must emphasise here, the classic approach is to examine the whole form – not some airbrushed beauty, but a whole that incorporates the imperfections.

26 Comments

Meet the well-known serious actor, Mr Ben Dover

September 10, 2009 at 4:42 pm (Sex, TV)

benfilth

BBC4′s Rich Man, Poor Man has consisted of a slightly odd pair of documentaries, a sort of cousin to Secret Millionaire, about materially successful men getting to a point in their life where they are pondering what they’ve achieved and what they were going to do with the rest of their lives. The first subject was self-made publishing tycoon Sir John Madejski, who made his money with Auto Trader. I must confess to not knowing very much about Madejski, but then I’ve never been to Reading. Madejski, in a rather touching show of local patriotism, has put an enormous amount of money into regenerating Reading; but, as is the way with these things, this means that almost everything in Reading, from the football stadium down, is named after Madejski. One immediately thought of the way Castlereagh Council keeps naming its public buildings after Peter Robinson.

Nonetheless. I didn’t feel the programme really worked in terms of giving an insight into Madejski. The guy seems to have an interesting family history, which wasn’t given much play, and how he’d made his money was likewise skated over. And while Madejski is evidently quite a prickly character, the voiceover was so sarcastic one actually started to feel a bit sorry for the Tory tycoon. Generally, the feeling was of a lost opportunity.

But it was the second documentary in the series that appealed to this blog’s unfailing instinct for the lowest common denominator, as we spent an hour in the affable company of Lindsay Honey. Probably the name Lindsay Honey doesn’t mean much to you, but if I mention gonzo porn auteur Ben Dover, you’ll likely nod in recognition. The two are in fact one and the same. (I know Lindsay Honey sounds like a porn name, but it’s actually his real name.) So we meet Lindsay at the difficult age of 52, having spent the majority of his life in the adult industry, and reaching something of a crossroads.

The starting point is that porn isn’t what Lindsay wanted to do in the first place. He’d started out as a musician, had some ephemeral success with that, then drifted into porn as he found himself between careers. He would have preferred straight acting, but found he had a knack for porn, then made a success of it. And now, he’s got plenty of money, a lovely big house, flash cars and shelves full of porn industry awards. He’s respected – nay, lionised – by his peers. But he’s not content with that. For one thing, his success means he has far too much time on his hands. For another, he’s approaching that age where he physically won’t be able to do what he’s made his living at all these years. He could, he supposes, sit around the house drinking beer and annoying the hell out of his wife and kid. (And there was a missed opportunity there in that Linzi Drew didn’t appear. She always gave good interviews, and her telling her other half to catch himself on would have added something.) Or, he could try something else. And this is where his ambition to prove himself as a straight actor comes in.

The journey was a lot of fun, although the (again) sarcastic narration in the Nick Broomfield style was a bit of a distraction. Old Lindsay is an engaging character and an accomplished raconteur, he doesn’t take himself at all seriously – which is sort of a prerequisite for the Broomfield style to work well – and you were involved enough to be interested in his journey. In fact, there was a surprising amount of pathos there, as a morose Lindsay contemplated the state of modern porn and said he wished it was still illegal. He doesn’t seriously mean that – after all, he did time under the Obscene Publications Act – but I got where he was coming from. In the old days of illegality, there was only a smallish amount of product coming from a handful of swashbuckling producers. Today, not only is the romanticism gone, but there is this enormous glut of porn, mostly of terrible quality, and particularly in Lindsay’s gonzo niche, where any bozo with a camcorder can make a movie, and the temptation is strong to use more extreme imagery to cover up for a lack of quality.

So it would be fair to say that Lindsay has mixed feelings about his business, and that’s what informs him as he tries to decouple Lindsay Honey from Ben Dover and try his hand at legitimate acting. Thus we got the best bits of the film, in Lindsay’s interactions with his acting coach. The thing is that Lindsay obviously has some natural acting ability – he’s created and spent twenty years playing a popular character, the mullet-haired, anally fixated cheeky chappie Ben Dover. But, while he’s made a living exposing himself physically in a way most actors couldn’t do, he’s never exposed himself emotionally, and you can see the stress he goes through trying to go through an acting lesson without resorting to the cheeky wink to camera. Quickly he discovers that trying to master the process of acting is actually bloody hard work.

And so, this raises the question of whether he’s willing to stick with his new project, or just lapse back into his comfort zone of presenting porn awards and lending presence to the Ben Dover stall at Erotica. Another obstacle is trying to convince anyone in legitimate acting that he’s worth bothering with – despite there being a shortage of male actors of his age, most agents aren’t interested when they hear of his porn background. He eventually does get two wonderfully condescending female agents to give him a chance, and their comments are revealing. They don’t care about his background, but they are quick to pick up on how nervous he is and on his lack of training. Despite noting his natural charisma, it’s the nerviness that worries them, and convinces them that he would have trouble getting past an audition.

So that’s the set-up, and it’s this tension that keeps us with our protagonist to the end, cheering him when he shows application and cursing him when he’s just being lazy. Towards the end, Lindsay is virtually in tears when the great Ken Russell remarks that he has some potential; but then the next day, it’s back to the comfort zone. An entertaining ride, then, and now I wish I’d seen the Ben Dover one-man show at Edinburgh.

On related notes, there’s a consideration of the economics of porn at AVPS, and some thoughts on sex-positive feminism at Unknown Conscience.

12 Comments

Richardson contra pornographiam

April 7, 2009 at 12:41 pm (Sex, TV)

225px-anna_richardson

And so we’ve had Channel 4 bringing back their smash hit Sex Education Show, starring Anna Richardson, or “that mad sex woman” as she’s now known up our way. I dealt in passing with the last series, but here I just want to ponder the show in a bit more detail, and some of the issues it’s brought up.

Firstly, what’s right with it. A lot of the show’s success does really depend on the presenter, and la Richardson is tailor-made for this sort of thing. She’s no-nonsense without being unsympathetic, and has a natural ability for talking to young people. She also seems game for just about any wacky stunt the producers throw her way, which is maybe why I do have some misgivings about it. The thrust of the show may be educational, but this is C4, so the powers that be (I’m guessing middle-aged blokes in the commissioning department) want it to be Phun. That means a self-conscious wackiness often veering into Eurotrash territory, which does sometimes clash with the serious tone in other segments.

But maybe that’s fitting, because this series is billed as Sex Education vs. Pornography. We’re talking here about how the rampant pornographication of popular culture rubs up against the traditional prudishness and prurience of respectable British culture. As our host kept repeating, 90% of teenagers had seen porn and 30% claimed to be using it for educational purposes. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure that things have changed qualitatively since the days when teenage boys would pass around top-shelf magazines, and the Auntie Jayne column in Escort was about as near to sex education as anything you could find.

Of course, the net has changed things massively in terms of quantity. Porn is much more accessible now, in no more time than it takes a teenager to click “Yes, I am 18” on a computer screen. And yes, much more extreme material is readily available online, stuff that fifteen or twenty years ago you would really need to search for. Although, from the sniggering of the boys talking about bestiality or coprophilia, and bearing in mind what teenage boys are like, I suspect that their downloading of these clips and passing them round on their mobiles has more to do with the gross-out factor than any actual arousal, the same way kids of a previous generation used to dare each other to watch video nasties.

And yet, this huge amount of explicit material still goes hand in hand with stunning ignorance in matters of sexual health and even basic biology. It was amusing to notice that the teenage boys, voracious consumers of porn though they may be, still didn’t know how to locate the clitoris. Probably that says something about most porn’s lack of attention to female arousal. Other clues are that teen pregnancy remains at very high levels, and chlamydia is almost endemic amongst British teenagers, when you would expect them to be better informed than ever. There is probably more sex education in schools than ever before, but it clearly isn’t doing the job; condoms are readily available, but kids don’t seem to know how to use them. Whether this is the crisis it’s hyped up as, I don’t know, but it seems obvious that something is wrong somewhere. I suspect, though, that it’s got at least as much to do with the culture as the availability of porn.

This, of course, is where Richardson and her crack team of health professionals come in, with frank advice for the kids. A particular highlight is seeing their faces when confronted with graphic pictures of the outcome of gonorrhea or syphilis, a shock tactic that military doctors have applied to good effect for decades. But it’s this more worthy material that doesn’t sit too comfortably with the wackiness, and perhaps demonstrates why Antoine de Caunes isn’t presenting.

It is true that the influence of porn can be seen, particularly when it comes to body image. 45% of the girls surveyed were unhappy with their breasts. Some 27% of the boys admitted to being insecure about their cocks, and presumably the other 73% were lying. It was predictable, if depressing, that when the boys were shown pictures of ten pairs of breasts, all of them chose the single fake pair as the most attractive. It was much more depressing when the girls did likewise – with all the eating disorders about, they really don’t need more unrealistic images to live up to. And, as one might expect, everyone regarded pubic hair as somehow gross and abnormal – not something that you start out with and can choose to remove or not, according to taste.

There was, mind you, one of the stunts that worked quite well. This was when our foxy presenter got a porn star makeover. This involved fake nails; fake eyelashes; fake tan; about a yard of hair extensions; waist painfully corseted; tits hoisted up to throat level; and enough mascara to put Alice Cooper to shame. And all topped off with an outfit straight out of Footballers’ Wives. This led Anna to say, “I feel like a slag.” Then she went out on the street, noticed the stares and whistles, and started to see why some women get a kick out of dressing that way. Her insouciance lasted until the vox pops, when the punters said that she looked “up for it”, and, on being shown a picture of her in her normal state, that they found that much more attractive. Aww. (And they were right, too.)

What was interesting about that was that the vox-popped punters were older – not middle-aged necessarily, but past school age. And this is why I tend to be a little more sanguine about whether there’s a crisis. Get together a group of fifteen-year-olds, ask them about sex, and you’ll get all sorts of strange ideas and attitudes. By the time they’re 25, most of them will have outgrown most of those attitudes. The question is, whether they do themselves any damage in the interim, and this is where decent education comes in. I have a feeling Anna Richardson may be trying to turn the tide back, but one can only salute her indefatigability.

11 Comments

Jings! Stormount Semmlie man scundered at porn in Ulster Scotch

March 4, 2009 at 12:43 pm (Movies, Norn Iron, Sex, Ulster Scots)

flesh-gordon-porn_76908t

From today’s Tele:

An event combining Ulster-Scots with pornography which is due to be screened at the Belfast Film Festival has caused a furore among local politicians.

A proposed screening of the 1974 soft porn film Flesh Gordon — an erotic spoof on Flash Gordon — on April 2 will be accompanied by a live translation in Ulster-Scots from three local comedians.

Jaipers! An’ ah always thocht sex wis thon big begs ye put yer coal in.

Entitled Shockin’ly Spaiked O’er Smot (Badly Dubbed Porn) Live, the so-called “evening of titillation” has raised objections in certain quarters over funding.

One MLA has said that money should not have been handed over to support the event at The Menagerie, Belfast — even if it is designed to highlight the beauty of a fast-shrinking dialect.

In fect, yon Davie McNarry his tuk the heid-staggers an’ is richt leppin’ aboot the hale thing.

“Porn is porn is porn is porn — and whether it is done Ulster-Scots-style, well, it really doesn’t come into it,” Stormont culture, arts and leisure committee member, David McNarry, told the BBC.

“This event has presumably been given funding and all this kind of thing does is make people look all the harder at an application the next time it comes round.

“The committee wasn’t aware of this but the department must have been.”

But the fillum festival fowk be unrepentant:

A Belfast film festival spokeswoman said the use of Flesh Gordon might “seem at first a peculiar choice of film”, but insisted it was “almost logical”.

“Contrasting Ulster-Scots against such a coarse and roguish piece of film such as Flesh Gordon will optimally highlight the extent of the detachment between the culture of the tongue and the culture of the film,” she said.

Ah hiv a feelin’ yer wee woman may be takin’ the han’…

Fer mair wittins, gae til 1690 an’ All Thon.

9 Comments

And, just to raise the tone a little, it’s Flynt contra Palin

October 13, 2008 at 12:11 pm (America, Movies, Sex)

The US Republicans are getting very angry these days, aren’t they? Those McCain rallies are starting to get a bit boisterous whenever the uppity Negro – you know who I mean – gets mentioned. Well, if they were lacking something to get really angry about, they’ve got a good cause now. Yes, it’s your friend and mine, that old sexist reprobate Larry Flynt, who’s releasing a Sarah Palin-themed porno under the Hustler imprint.

We should, of course, have seen this coming a mile off. Larry loves his political satire, as Rev Falwell painfully found out. He’s quite serious about political advocacy, especially around civil liberties issues (check out his book Sex, Lies and Politics for an idea of what makes him tick politically). He hates the religious right, and he really, really hates the moralising hypocrites who are so much in evidence on the religious right. So Palin getting the scabrous Flynt treatment is only natural. Not to mention the Republican base’s outrage at Palin being sneered at by metropolitan elitists, which has some truth behind it – as a born-and-bred hillbilly, Larry is allowed to sneer at her cornpone folksiness all he likes.

So, hitting the video stores soon will be milftastic industry veteran Lisa Ann playing America’s hottest governor. I can’t honestly say I’m familiar with her body of work, although the cognoscenti reckon she’s a reliably filthy performer, as one would hope. You may cast your eye over the image above and say that she doesn’t really bear that striking a resemblance to Governor Palin, but at least she’s in the right age bracket, and you know, the right hairdo and a pair of power specs might work wonders. I’m also intrigued by the casting of socialist porn star Nina Hartley in the role of Hillary Clinton.

But, much as I love Nina, this opus probably isn’t going to make my must-watch list. Although the concept is sound, I confidently expect the execution to be horrible. For one thing, Who’s Nailin’ Paylin is a shockingly lazy title. Larry should be ashamed of himself, especially with a gimme like Drill Baby Drill conveniently to hand. So we probably aren’t talking the height of sophistication here. Anyway, it can’t possibly be as funny as the classic Linda Lovelace for President.

Unless, of course, Larry throws in some unspeakable act involving a moose…

But I suppose this is what you get when you’ve a succession of facile male media pundits who can’t seem to find anything worth saying about Palin except to remark on her sex appeal, or to put it more bluntly her fuckability. This might go some way to explaining why Palin’s polling numbers are a good deal higher among men than women. (I’d also not be surprised if she had developed a lesbian cult following. She has that tomboy-femme thing that lots of gay girls find irresistible.) But really, you’re electing one of the highest offices in the country, and the eye-candy quotient of the running mate becomes one of the major talking points?

And don’t even get me started on Justin Webb…

37 Comments

Tuesday evening, before the watershed

September 24, 2008 at 4:30 pm (Food, Sex, TV)

Hasn’t pre-watershed telly got very near the knuckle these days? I notice that Tuesday evenings are shaping up as the Battle of the Bosoms – at seven on BBC2 you can see Nigella Lawson (32G) ladling on the sauce with her current series of food porn, while at eight Anna Richardson (32F) is fronting C4’s Sex Education Show. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’m complaining, it’s just that the hour seems a bit early. Time was when this sort of thing would be held back to the midnight hour.

Nigella Xxxpress is a very odd show. It’s nominally a cookery show, of course, but in fact the cookery is a minor, if vital, theme. Now we know that the old-fashioned instructional cookery show has died a death except for the sainted Delia, and whether we’re watching Masterchef or Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, we expect some gimmick, hook or drama. Nay, we demand it! Nigella is probably the acme of this. Some people will, I expect, be watching for the cookery tips, but they’ll be a distinct minority. There might be a larger audience, mostly of the female persuasion, who will be watching for the lifestyle. I can see them being fascinated by Nigella’s enormous spice rack and treating this as aspirational or escapist programming, the same way people used to watch Dynasty. But mostly it’s about the sex. This is a cookery show that’s not about us wanting to eat the food, but about us wanting to fuck the cook. Or possibly both, maybe even simultaneously.

There are, I suppose, good reasons why the format is ripe for sexing up. Going way back to the Bible – or, for the scripturally challenged, you may like to think of 9½ Weeks – popular culture has drawn a very close link between food and sex, those two great pleasures of the voluptuary. It always fills you with confidence if you’re faced with a cook who obviously loves food, which is why TV cookery shows are all rich flavours rather than healthy options. And, as Jamie was saying apropos of Sarah Palin, if someone gives the impression that she has a lot of sex and enjoys it, that makes her much more attractive. In Nigella’s case, it’s the air of the devoted sensualist that’s as important as her appearance.

And this is what’s played up to so shamelessly. That’s why all the fluttering of eyelashes, flicking of hair, licking of fingers and acres of heaving cleavage. Hence, too, the Meyeresque low-angle camerawork – if you ever see Nigella in the flesh, you’re immediately surprised by how small, almost elfin, she is, because on the telly she looks like Tura Satana. (At least, her tits seem to take up three-quarters of the screen, and while substantial, they’re not that big.) And this all has to be done in a teasing, naughty-but-nice style that won’t scare off the suburban audience. It helps a lot, of course, that she’s posh. A host with the accent, demeanour and wardrobe of Jodie Marsh couldn’t pull it off. It’s quite a delicate confection, and you need the ingredients to be just right.

Frankly, it’s a little embarrassing. You’re talking here about a woman who’s naturally very sexy and doesn’t need to camp it up, but it’s being laid on so thick that Nigella is increasingly coming to resemble, well, Ronni Ancona sending up Nigella. And at the end of it, you feel like you need a bath.

C4’s Sex Education Show, while definitely risqué, is actually much less lascivious. At least, while it must be said Anna Richardson is very attractive, the show is not sold on the host’s sex appeal. There is more going on than that.

The target audience is teenagers, which would explain the early time slot. And there’s a clear justification for something like this, in a context where rising teen promiscuity exists alongside monumental levels of basic ignorance of sexual health issues, among adults as well as kids. Hell, you’re in a situation where chlamydia rates are practically at epidemic levels. It seems reasonable to suppose that taking teenagers and giving them a good shake can only be a public service.

So there is actually a serious core here. Last night, for instance, was focussed on childbirth, and was quite good on women’s experiences. Last week, on STIs, was even better, as Anna showed a group of teenagers graphic photos of diseased genitalia. This had a visible, visceral impact on the kids – I’m amazed none of them puked – and if they were shocked into using condoms, this is obviously a good thing. The public service aspect of breaking down British reserve, getting useful information across and exploding old wives’ tales is managed reasonably well. Of course, with British culture being what it is and Channel 4 being what it is, there are also a fair number of daft stunts to lighten the mood. But at least the stunt quotient is kept low enough that we don’t just drift aimlessly into Eurotrash territory.

I should also say that, while I’m not too familiar with Anna Richardson, she may well be the perfect host for this sort of thing. She’s articulate, game for anything (from having an STI test to getting her bush waxed), shows a refreshing lack of vanity, is humorous without sniggering and is obviously very good indeed at talking to young people. Where have the TV bosses been hiding her?

So there you have it. The sex show actually felt cleaner than the cookery show. And both were racier than what was on after the watershed. Scheduling is a strange art indeed.

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Oh lordy, he’s at it again

June 2, 2008 at 2:31 pm (Far Left, Movies, Sex)

You know, I never liked Sex and the City when it was on TV. Much as I might have appreciated the craft that went into it, it always left me cold. Maybe it’s because it’s a show written by gay men and marketed to a certain kind of aspirational women that it doesn’t tick my boxes. Or maybe it was just the shoe thing.

So I fully intended to ignore the new SATC movie. And I might even have succeeded, had it not been for your friend and mine, George Galloway. After last year’s Kylie’s arse affair, you would think George would have been careful about veering into this kind of territory. But no, he seems determined to make rods for his own back. Not surprisingly, this happened once again in George’s Daily Record column, wherein the great man shares his opinions with a loyal army of Glaswegian barflies. And so George opined thusly:

Journalists sometimes ask which of them would do it for me.

The honest answer is all four of them, but it’s too dangerous to admit that.

There’s the sweet one – great marriage material.

The lawyerly red-head – sexy and motherly. Or the voracious man-eating vamp, ankles behind her ears.

But if I had to choose just one, it would have to be the eponymous Carrie Bradshaw.

She’s not the prettiest, the sexiest or the cleverest. But she would be, quite simply, the most fun.

Why is it that this sort of thing makes me cringe? I think it’s because, while you can’t censor people’s more lascivious thoughts, you don’t really need to go into print with them. Or if you do, it’s easier to justify if you have a point you want to make, or if you can do it with a bit of wit and style. I’ll confess to laughing my head off when that old sexist reprobate, the late Alan Clark, waxed lyrical about Dawn Primarolo having the best arse in Parliament. Of course, it helped that Clark was a funny man, and Primarolo has a well-earned reputation as a humourless puritan.

But George. Dear help us.

Again, this isn’t the worst thing that appears in the tabloids, far from it. The Sun employs a showbiz writer, the satirically named Gordon Smart, who is prone to write columns about his fantasies about gangbanging all five members of Girls Aloud, and even sharing with his readers the exact order he’d like to fuck them in. But Gordon Smart is just a pillock. He isn’t the leader of a progressive movement. George carries the weight of higher expectations, in exactly the way that Gordon doesn’t.

And of course, this sort of thing earns George endless amounts of stick. It’s only a partial defence that much of the criticism is in bad faith. For instance, some of it comes from people who dislike George for his better points, and will seize on any stick to beat a dog. Not to mention vast amounts of hot air from an organisation (which shall remain nameless) which a mere year ago would have defended to the death any word coming out of George’s mouth, and whose own record on gender politics is so appalling as to make George Galloway look like Gloria Steinem.

Actually, George is on rather better form when putting up a defence of himself in today’s column:

FAR-LEFT fanatics in the blogosphere, where it appears this column is widely read, have been going bananas all week about my column last week on Sex and the City, the new movie packing cinemas with working class audiences, mainly women.

This collection of Toytown “revolutionaries”, most of whom have never seen an angry foreman in their lives, and who think Swarfega is a Balearic island, scream sexism whenever anyone discusses, er, sex…

Today’s deluded leftists have morphed into Leninist Wee Frees, staunchly against sex standing up in case it should lead to dancing – which of course would put the proletariat off the revolution.

In principle, there’s something to that. But I do wish George would reflect a little before he feels the urge to start phwoaring in print. I merely put this forward as a suggestion.

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