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POSTED IN: TERENCE BLACKER

Save us from this unisex uniformity

Terrence blacker Published: 13 June 2007


It is probably a great scandal, what will be going on next month at the 125th gathering of the Bohemian Grove club. Some of the worlds wealthiest and most powerful men will be meeting in the redwoods of northern California. There will be millionaires, defence chiefs, bankers, media magnates, heads of university and, a recent innovation, one or two artists and musicians. In the past, George Bush and Dick Cheney have attended. Richard Nixon was a guest, but found it "the most faggy thing imaginable". Every year the keynote speech is made by Dr Henry Kissinger who, by hilarious tradition, is interrupted by a Mexican band as he starts to speak.

Bohos, as they call themselves, talk about world events, but also are known to run about naked in the woods, get drunk, appear in shows wearing womens clothing. At some point, a Druidic ritual known as the Cremation of Care will take place involving the burning of an effigy, which represents the cares of the world, in front of a concrete owl.

This year, the Bohos have been trying to reach the 1976 Miss Wales Sian Adey-Jones to ask whether she could send a message of support. A poster of her has been on the wall of one of the cabins for the past 27 years. Ms Adey-Jones would not be able to attend herself since the Bohemian Grove Club is all male. How should we feel about the most powerful men in the world running about naked and playing silly games in California? Personally, I rather like the idea. It seems a harmless way to let off steam, and, maybe, their ritual care-cremation in front of the Boho owl has a beneficial effect.

When men get together, they quickly become embarrassing. It is, perhaps, for this reason that the eminently sensible Ruth Kelly will introduce this year the Single Equality Bill, which will be designed to make English, Welsh and Scottish men and women mingle more equitably than at present. Tidying up the fag-ends of prejudice, the legislation will formally grant women the right to breast-feed in public, while clubs will be obliged to grant both genders the same facilities. Post-Kelly, a young mother will have the right to suckle her infant in the Members Bar of the Garrick Club.

For all its sensibleness, there is something nigglingly interfering about this legislation. The Government has not quite the nerve to take on single-sex clubs but is moving in that direction. The underlying assumption behind the legislation is that it is unnatural for men to hang out with men and women with women. Each gender becomes more evolved and civilised, the thinking goes, when it mixes with the other.

It makes sense, of course, to wallop sporting establishments, notably those drearily backward-looking golf clubs which prevent women from playing when they like and drinking at the bar, but to confuse that issue with social clubs is an absurdity. But unlike a sporting club that has control of specific facilities - perhaps the only ones in the area - a social club offers little more than a choice of company.

Far from being a paradise of equality, the unisex world of New Labour paradise sounds like a nightmare. In a feminised world, some men like to be blokeish just as some women enjoy the opportunity to be girlish together.

Now and then, each sex deserves to be freed from the disapproval of the other, even if the way they then behave may be undignified. Like the naked Bohos in California, they are having fun and adding to the colour and variety of life.

A late (but not a loft) conversion

A change of heart has taken place on a par with Graham Norton announcing that he thinks sexual innuendo is childish. Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, once the king of TV design makeovers, has confessed that convincing members of the public that a change of d?cor can transform your life was a con. Having prettier bed linen, he daringly suggests, may improve the bedroom, but it will not improve your sex life.

This is brave talk, and more controversial than it may appear. An addiction to surface change is damaging and silly, Llewelyn-Bowen has belatedly realised. People should be encouraged to make the best of the life they have. Sane and sound, this message will be a tough sell to the fantasy-merchants who run British television.

* As the ban on smoking in public places approaches, there is a whiff in the air of something rather more unpleasant than shared tobacco. It is the smell of publicly sanctioned bullying. Those who enjoy a cigarette, pipe or cigar have, it seems, become emblematic of everything that is wrong with modern life.

Once it was acceptable to take a break from work now and then for a chat; when it was described as "a smoking break", employers banned it. Nobody worried these islands are being submerged under a sea of litter until it was noticed that smokers drop stubs; this month it was announced that they will be hit by on-the-spot fines.

Now it has been revealed that the patio heaters bought by pubs to allow customers to smoke outside will be dumping carbon into the atmosphere. The inevitable rentagob has scolded smokers for their environmental vandalism. What else can we blame on smokers? Big Brother? The decline of the house sparrow? The Iraq war?


2008 03 29 17:50:55

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POSTED IN: TERENCE BLACKER

What a prim and prurient nation we've become A word from the lamp-post will be enough to head off any antisocial activity

Terrence blacker Published: 06 April 2007


How is your mindset today? At the start of a long weekend, with spring in the air, it will probably be in an acceptable state. If for some unhappy reason it is not, you will be reassured to know that there is an ever-increasing number of sincere people, concerned for the welfare of you and your community, who will able to offer assistance.

Because, once we all have appropriate mindsets in place, the world will be a less spiky, difficult and unpredictable???? ? place. Lamp-posts in our cities are soon to be equipped with cameras and loudspeakers so that people can be reminded that antisocial behaviour - dropping litter, being aggressive, smoking in the wrong places, becoming over-amorous in public - is unacceptable in modern Britain. Normally a word from the lamp-post, uttered by a caring copper watching CCTV screens at the local police station, will be enough to head off any antisocial activity. The policy is not about punishment or control, so much as a reminder as to what society expects.

Every week, more people are on hand to encourage us to adopt the appropriate frame of mind. This week, the Institute of Public Policy Research published a suggestion that those planning to travel by air should be reminded of the harm they will be doing to the ozone layer. Like health warnings on cigarette packets, these notices will not be prescriptive, but a concerned attempt to alter the mindset of those addicted to an antisocial activity.

There are many advantages to this method behaviour-management through guilt. Once the virus of generalised disapproval has been lodged in the brain, responsible behaviour becomes part of a self-corrective process. Concerned executives at the BBC, for example, do not have to be told that Benny Hill, still a hit with American viewers, has become inappropriate. "I am afraid that Benny Hill reflects older Britain and our job is to reflect contemporary Britain and the cool shows coming out," a prim corporation spokesperson has said. Soon the pervy, dimple-faced comedian will be disappearing from screens around the world.

This sort of self-regulating social disapproval is usefully contagious; once it becomes established, the need for policemen in lamp-posts is reduced. It is part of human nature that a person imbued with moral virtue will soon want to impose it on others. In 2007, the attitude of acceptably behaved citizens towards those they regard as civic deviants is fierce and unforgiving.

To take an example close to home, anyone rash enough to write in favour of, say, the rights of smokers or hunters is likely to feel the full force of this righteous rage in a way that would have been far less noticeable two or three years ago. Bullying, indeed, plays its part in establishing the right mindset - there are housing estates where communities are encouraged to report and persecute problem families, where an Asbo is a license to harass.

It is difficult to oppose this form of social persuasion. Most sane people disapprove of litter-dropping, violence, noise, public indecency. They are in favour of a responsible attitude to the environment. Mindset management merely takes that process one step further, and then another. The list of unacceptable activities and views grows longer by the day, covering food, cars, words, criticism of religion, body shape, jokes, shops. It is a campaign that cannot end until every form of behaviour deemed to be antisocial is a distant memory.

That, of course, will never happen. This contemporary version of Victorian puritanism has a paradoxical effect on the very people who behave worst. The more they are nagged by a community, the less they want to be part of it. There might be concern, in liberal quarters, that condemnation by the majority might be expressed more directly than a light "tut tut", that something akin to a lynch-mob mentality might set in. Communities that become convinced that individuals are threatening their health, welfare, security, and children may choose more robust ways of cleansing undesirable elements.

It might even be thought that this relatively subtle form of control and social guidance on the part of a self-appointed moral ??lite could eventually transform itself into something altogether less palatable. Once the idea takes root that responsible behaviour is something which can and should be imposed on others, the temptation to expand what is socially acceptable to cover the way people think an???? ?d talk and vote may prove irresistible.

We should be on our guard when good-hearted folk encourage us to adjust our mindset as we book a holiday, or switch on the TV, or when a lamp-post starts talking to us. Behind those gentle admonishments is a bully with an ever-dwindling respect for freedom and individuality.


2008 03 29 17:50:55

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POSTED IN: TERENCE BLACKER

England's green and adolescent land

Terence Blacker


Few subjects provide the English with quite so much guilty fascination as that of Englishness. Convinced that we are enigmatic and widely misunderstood by less psychologically complex nations, we tend to be boastfully modest about our national character, forever drawing attention to how self-effacing we are.

Oliver James has put us on the couch, travel writers from Bryson to Theroux have roamed about, searching ? often in vain ? for our alleged charm. Jeremy Paxman investigated Englishness in book form, and now Andrew Marr is having a go on the radio. Sound-bite insights from the usual suspects (A A Gill, P D James, E T Cetera) are corralled into a neat, mildly amusing theory. The first in the series concluded that the English used modesty as a mechanism of self-defence.

As the programmes central joke (that Boris Johnson is a modern version of Miss Marple) was repeated for the third or fourth time, it became clear that the series is likely to be too good-hearted and anxious to please to reach what is clearly a central, awkward truth about our national character ? that a central part of Englishness, particularly for those of middle age and beyond, is about being trapped in a state of unending adolescent frustration. For many Englishmen and women, love and sex are things that happen to other people and are to be viewed in a state of throbbing, yearning rage.

How else can one explain the summers leading silly season story ? one which, if it were being investigated by Miss Marple, would be called The Case of the Newsreaders Legs? It started in the middle of August when not one but two female newsreaders appeared on the BBC, showing ? please excuse my directness ? their lower legs. Both Emily Maitlis and Fiona Bruce had, in relaxed mode, sat on the edge of a desk for trailers for the news, quite clearly and unashamedly showing several inches of calf below the knee. There were outraged calls to the duty officer and the story appeared on the front page of that natural home for the sexually frustrated, the Daily Mail.

The story had legs. This week, in a two-page profile with Fiona Armstrong, the bewildered presenter was asked yet again about the scandal. She thought it was the editors decision to seat her on a desk, adding wearily that she didnt "think for a nanosecond that it was done deliberately so viewers could see my legs."

If all this seems like an old joke, then thats because it is. In 1980, Henry Root, the comic creation of Willie Donaldson, wrote a fan letter to Esther Rantzen. "Just one slight criticism of your show last night. I thought your dress was rather revealing for what is essentially family viewing. One could see your legs quite clearly. I hope you wont mind my saying this. One doesnt want to see womens legs in ones lounge-room at a time when youngsters are still up and about. Could you possibly oblige with a photo?"

How very odd it is that a rather good joke about a socially ambitious wet fish merchant, watching TV and simmering with randy disapproval, should, more than 25 years later, prove to be such a perceptive insight into the way so many of the English think and feel. Will the BBCs latest attempt to identify Englishness make the obvious point that thousands, perhaps millions, of our nation are trapped in a state of anguished, grey-haired adolescence which informs their character, politics and morality? Will Fiona and Emily be invited to express their views? Somehow it seems unlikely.

A lucrative passion for peace

Jane Seymour has been speaking movingly from her home in Malibu Beach in California of the "quintessential England" represented by the house in the Cotswolds which the actress left behind and now rents out for up to ?28,000 a week. Heartbreakingly, her neighbours have objected to a 24-hour alcohol license granted to what she calls her spiritual home on the grounds that it causes disruption. These people are guilty of "mean-spirited bullshit", she says. "By attacking a celebrity, they got to be famous." Clearly the sun, and perhaps Malibu Beach, do something terrible to the brain. What Ms Seymour loves about her bit of quintessential England is its peace ? the very peace she denies her neighbours while she is away.

* The flood of Britons, mostly middle-aged and middle class, who have settled in France over the past two decades, have just had a shock. President Sarkozy, faced with a crisis in the French health service, has found an obvious way of saving a few sous. From the end of this month, any British passport-holder who is under the age of retirement, and who has lived in France for more than two years, will lose the right to state healthcare.

The EU could undoubtedly do with a bit of consistency in the matter of health benefits for foreigners but, in the meantime, among those of us left behind who have heard rather too many tales of the many joys of life in the sun, only the most saintly will be able to resist a moments smugness. People who have used the system to sell property expensively in Britain and buy at relatively low prices in France, often opting for an early retirement on the proceeds, cannot protest too loudly when the system bites back.

Published: 05 September 2007
2008 03 29 17:38:17

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