A RAVISHING ROW

At my school in the 1960s, there were termly outings to the theatre. I expect there still are. Nothing unusual about that, you will say. Theatre-goers have long known that a Stratford matinee is only to be undertaken if one can tolerate an auditorium full of adolescents whispering, giggling, rustling sweet papers and, nowadays doubtless, texting each other when bored.

Our English master had a pretty adventurous eye for what to take us to. On one occasion, we even came down to London by coach to see a musical. The one in question had a proper literary pedigree, being based on a comedy of 1730 by Henry Fielding. It had been adapted by Bernard Miles for the opening production at the splendid little theatre that Miles founded at Blackfriars, the much missed Mermaid. The lyrics were by Lionel Bart and the music by Laurie Johnson. The show was a huge hit, the biggest the Mermaid ever had, running on and off for five years including a West End transfer.

Now, if you are surprised at our being taken to a musical, prepare to be astounded at the nature of that musical. It was called Lock Up Your Daughters and its main subject is made explicit in the title of the original Fielding: Rape Upon Rape. Can you imagine a group of teenaged boys today being taken by their school to a raucous celebration of rape?

The original vinyl album of a tuneful show

The show was tremendously lascivious in a very good-natured way – and remember that censorship was still ruthlessly imposed on theatres in those days. Nonetheless, the sight of the splendiferous Hy Hazell, legs as long as the Eiffel Tower, huskily lip-smacking her way through a naughty little number called ‘When Does the Ravishing Begin?’ was a formative experience for most of the boys on the outing.

The verb “to ravish” is not much used now. Its fifth definition in the OED, the one that concerns us here, is “to drag off or carry away (a woman) by force or with violence (occas. also implying subsequent rape”. Yet until pretty recently, this was considered to be a lark, even by women. Certainly, in my youth, rape was a good joke or, perhaps I should say, an occasion for bad jokes: “Grape! Grape!” “Don’t you mean ‘Rape! Rape!’” “No, there was a bunch of them”.

The original programme

Times have changed. In the 1990s, Chichester Festival Theatre boldly mounted a revival of Lock Up Your Daughters. The cast was led by George Cole, with whom I had worked, and Sheila Hancock, whom I had admired for more than thirty years. I persuaded The Guardian to let me interview them. No piece I contributed to the paper was ever more altered in the subbing. A persistent subtext of disdain and disapproval was injected into the published version of what I had written. I bitterly resented it but of course it was too late to disavow. One casualty was that I decided not to try to pursue a plan I had been nursing to attempt a biography of Cole.

But I went to the press night of the revival and was struck by how cruelly time had treated it. It did now seem, at best, in dubious taste. The reviews were universally damning, no one making any reference to the huge hit the show had been a generation earlier.

Ken puts his hush-puppies in it again

Since this morning, there has been a tremendous hoo-ha about an appearance by the Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke, on Radio 5 Live. I listened carefully to the programme and, for a limited period, you can too at:

http://bbc.in/8ZHTEH

If you do, you may deplore, as I do, the contumely being poured on Clarke’s head. The central problem with the programme, or so it seems to me, is that the interviewer, Victoria Derbyshire, never pays Clarke the elementary compliment of listening to what he is saying. This is a grave professional lapse and if anyone deserves to be pilloried for their performance on the programme it is her.

What Derbyshire does repeatedly is to assume that Clarke is trying to excuse or disregard certain categories of rape. In his report on the BBC’s television news at 6:00, Nick Robinson suggested that Clarke’s error was to refer to “serious rape”, with the implication that not all rape is serious. What Clarke is actually trying to do is to explain that the law as it stands discriminates between different sexual encounters. But Derbyshire cannot hear this; she is too busy being offended by the notion of a man suggesting that some rapes are more serious than others.

Victoria Derbyshire – and you are not to take the piss by gazing at her bosom

It would be interesting to hear Derbyshire’s response to Germaine Greer on rape, written five years ago. I don’t think I need to state Dr Greer’s credentials as a feminist or as a serious thinker on all aspects of sexual politics. Her view can be read here:

http://ind.pn/18LZlg

and I particularly draw the attention of readers (and of Derbyshire) to Dr Greer’s use of the term “petty rape”.

So, can there be a distinction between one rape and another? Take the case of a girl of 15 who looks and dresses like a 20 year-old and who is enthusiastically sleeping around. In law, any male above the age of 15 who sleeps with her is committing rape. That is how the courts characterise sex with a girl (or indeed a boy) who is not classed as a child but is still below the age of consent which, in Britain, is 16. This kind of rape is known to lawyers – though the phrase is not in fact enshrined in statute – as statutory rape.

Dr Greer in the days of her pomp

Now consider the phenomenon of “date-rape”. This is a fraught area because it swings so much on one person’s word against that of another and on what one person understood at the time the act took place, given that the circumstances of the act might be overlaid with the consumption of intoxicants of various kinds. This is not to say that it is a less-than-serious crime. But it often enough takes place in a situation confused by many other factors.

I don’t know what proportion of my readers would suggest that either of these examples of rape equates with the gang-rape of a pensioner or the systematic sexual assault on civilians by military personnel in a war situation. Ken Clarke, it seems to me, was trying to suggest that there are degrees of seriousness in rape cases. Who would dispute that? Would you?

For any woman who has suffered rape, such debate must be irrelevant and insensitive. The water of the 5 Live interview was much muddied by a caller being injected into the proceedings. She had been through the extended trauma of being raped by a man – I think I understand her account correctly – who was out on parole after previous convictions and who was then given a reduced sentence. She became understandably emotional in the telling.

Clarke snoozing through this spring's budget

It was unfair and exploitative of the producer to ambush Clarke with this. Very properly, he didn’t attempt to engage with the woman’s case – how could he? – but he wasn’t able to shake off the disadvantage that personal emotion of this kind lays on rational debate. Derbyshire, on the other hand, seemed to believe that the woman’s experience “proved” that Clarke was wrong.

The internet has been aflame ever since. Twitter’s 140-character limit on individual comment is apt to encourage the disobliging and the ad hominem. I have no doubt that the great majority of tweets and thread comments on the matter were not informed by actually listening to the programme, if indeed, the tweeters were any more capable of listening to Clarke than was Derbyshire.

Opportunistically, Ed Miliband called for Clarke to go at Prime Minister’s Questions. David Cameron, who evidently hadn’t heard the programme nor been briefed on it, remained studiously non-committal on his Justice Secretary’s fate and attempted, none too successfully, to steer the subject back to government policy on sentencing which, of course, is just what the discussion ought to be about. However, Cameron has quite a bit of form now in letting his ministers swing in the breeze. And subsequently all remarks released from Downing Street have been lukewarm at best. So Clarke may still perish and that would be a loss. Despite the instant judgments of internet traffic, he is one of the more enlightened of this government’s representatives.