TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENT

Through a mist of tears, I caught up with the conclusion of My Transsexual Summer, Channel 4’s four-part fly-on-the-wall series. Seven strangers, ranging in age from 22 to 52, were brought together for four weekend “retreats”. The only common factor between them was transitioning – three from female to male, the rest the reverse route. Their progress along these transitions varied greatly: from a few weeks to four years of “living as” the gender opposite to the given, from hormone treatment but with no plans for surgery to undergoing genital “correction” during the first programme.

That the seven individuals were necessarily self-absorbed was no hindrance to an immediate atmosphere of mutual support. Hugging and weeping soon became the lingua franca but that was no bar to laughter and the odd interesting undercurrent. Those of them – the youngest – who could not utter a subordinate clause without prefacing it with the syntactically redundant “like” or adding to it the rhetorical “d’you know what I mean?” may, having seen themselves on the box, attempt to eradicate this dreary verbal tic. For the viewer, it was a modest price to pay for their candour and courage.

Lewis

Putting hitherto obscure people under the media spotlight is as old as broadcasting. What has changed radically over the years is the way that obscurity is mediated. Half a century ago, producers took a disciplined, even puritanical approach to pointing microphones and cameras at people in the sanctity of their lives. Charles Parker’s wonderful and imperishably influential Radio Ballads tapped into a rich oral tradition and linked it to ordinary people’s experiences as expressed through their music – literally, folk music. Parker’s approach was pursued in television in various ways by Philip Donnellan, Denis Mitchell, Charlie Squires, Harold Williamson, Edward Mirzoeff, Paul Watson, Roger Graef and others.

These film-makers were also tapping into the traditions of documentary-making for the cinema in the Soviet Union and, in the west, by Robert Flaherty and the Grierson school. Although their methods could sometimes be suspect – staging, scripting and even faking scenes – the intention was to create the sense that the people momentarily in the spotlight were there on their own terms.

Sarah

Though there has been a surprising revival in documentary for the big screen – especially in the States where serious non-fiction seems still to be greatly encouraged by PBS and independent cinema companies – swathes of routine documentary-making for British television have descended to a bankrupt aesthetic. Commissioning editors seem to believe that the audience will accept nothing unless it is said or shown by a supposed celebrity, however self-evidently unqualified to pontificate on the subject (or indeed on anything else). The audience cannot be trusted to watch and appreciate a stranger; an introduction must be effected by someone both viewer and stranger have (theoretically) heard of, even though the viewer and the stranger usually have rather more basis for a rapport than either has with the intermediary.

Frequently, also, members of the public only earn their place on the screen alongside the “stars” by dint of their utter singularity. This is “freak show television”, epidemic across the channels. The more grotesque and humiliating the disability, the more unusual and distorting the condition, the better the commissioning editors like it.

Fox

And then there is the most unspeakable genre of all, the crassly misnamed “reality television”, whereat people both unknown and known (though not mixed) submit themselves to situations that are very far from real. Indeed, the programmes depend for their (apparent) appeal on the increasing inordinacy of both the situations and the behaviour of the participants: a diminishing prospect, they will surely discover,

The premise of My Transsexual Summer might have cast it into the “freak show” category or the fringes of “reality television”, but thankfully in practice it did not. Producer Helen Richards had contrived a mechanism that permitted sufficient freedom for the participants to learn a little about and from each other and to get comfortable with each other and with the camera. The retreat venue obviously allowed for ease of filming but did not impose its own characteristics. More importantly, the forward planning allowed for judicious moving of the production away from the communal set-up and into the individuals’ environments.

Fire-eating is one of Donna's accomplishments

This expansion added greatly to the reach of the series’ engagement with the participants. In the matter of any kind of search for identity among the young, the role of the parents is central and Richards was lucky or shrewd (or both) with her casting, which opened up a range of parental reactions and methods of dealing with their offspring’s dramatic developments. If the estranged father of Lewis suddenly found a warmth and sensitivity towards his son because the camera was on him, so much the better for the camera and for Lewis.

Those parents – and an adorable grandma – who gamely took part did themselves great credit. Others were eloquent in their absence, including the 20 year-old daughter of the 52 year-old former policeman-cum-lorry driver. Is changing sex more difficult, more testing, more traumatising – both for the transsexual and for those close to her or him – when the changer is middle-aged? Clearly the subject does not lend itself to too many generalities. It depends on the case.

Max

Even so, during the course of the series, I could not help wondering whether the transition from female to male is easier, more satisfactory, more … do I mean “natural”? … than from male to female. Among the seven we met, at least, the women became very convincing (if camp) boys, whereas the men tended to face the problem of seeming like, in the words of Sarah in Programme One, “bad drag”. Vocally, becoming female is especially taxing, whereas hormone treatment appears to lower the transitioning women’s voices considerably. And of course facial hair helps a lot.

A couple of the group spoke shrewdly about the crucial matter of moving convincingly, especially walking, and (by implication) the larger picture of demeanour, of presentation. Genital surgery clearly assists here, obliging the transgender person to walk accordingly. But both the programme and my own observations of drag entertainers and transvestite civilians convinces me that the unselfconsciously loose and informal body language of men is much easier for women to acquire than is the unselfconscious poise and subtlety of women, especially the glamorous women that men always seem to want to become.

Karen, Lewis, Max and Drew

Of the seven, the most “successful” transitioner appeared to be Donna: that is to say, the most confident and outgoing and – more important for transgender people even than for lesbian, gay and bisexual people (and, come to that, for straight people too) – the most comfortable in her own sexuality. Donna admits to having self-harmed in her teens but now, at 25, has been on hormones for two years and presents a persuasively female shape. Her breasts have developed but she knows how to present them too.

Still, she has no plans to seek surgery. For the females-to-males, chest surgery was/is part of the process and Lewis longs for a penis of his own, even if erecting it requires mechanical assistance. For her part, Donna gaily frequents bars where men go to meet transitional women who have not had surgery. She perhaps will settle for a hermaphroditic state. As a personality and a presence, the while, she appears – successfully and in many ways to her advantage – to carry off the trick of enjoying many of the advantages of both women and men.

Donna’s strongest suit is that she is not prepared to defer to anyone. She is sure of her place in the world and will fight to keep it. All the other transitioners recognised that and drew on it. We should too.

END of ROUNDED ONE

I have been reading – and much relishing – The Return of the Native. I should prefer to say that I have been re-reading The Return of the Native but, to my shame, it was a Hardy that I had never read, though (I hasten to add) I galloped through most of his great masterpieces when I was young.

Why do I say “to my shame”? Some three years ago, a friend alluded to the book in an email. He didn’t, I think, actually use that phrase that writers (critics especially) are wont to use when making reference to some aspect of a celebrated work of art: “you remember how [as it would be in this case] in The Return of the Native Eustacia … etc” but he may well have written something of the sort. The assumption – assuredly a polite and generous one – is that you of course know the work in question. In replying, I certainly confessed that I had not read the book, “to my shame”. And I determined so to do, though, as you see, I had to get through three years’ worth of other books before I achieved it.

Who of us does not – even if only without revealing it – quietly look down upon someone who has failed to do those things that we consider essential? It might be watching a particular television series or listening to a certain pop group or visiting some well-known venue or event: “Really? You’ve never been to Glastonbury/Wimbledon/The Met/The Yorkshire Moors/The Louvre … ?” After all, it’s only a short step from the disdain that we are apt to feel about any display of what we consider to be ignorance, particularly that kind of ignorance that appears to be the product of prejudice or being a dimwit or just not trying.

This is a curious area of sensibility. I don’t think I would be alone in claiming – or at least affecting – a sense of “shame” about some cultural gap. But it implies that there is almost a moral imperative involved in keeping one’s knowledge of the world and its output in good repair. We’ve all been told that we should read so-and-so or that we ought to hear such-and-such or that this or that is a must-see. The implication is that it is “for our own good”, that we are somehow deprived without this particular cultural input.

Who draws up the prescribed lists of works with which one ought to be familiar? Or rather, whence is the consensus about this derived? I doubt that many of us would feel the need to “confess” that we had never read a particular novel by, say, Bernard Cornwell or Joanna Trollope “to our shame”. Indeed, I wear the fact that I have never seen an episode of Big Brother or I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here as a badge of honour. Not all knowledge – as I am sure I would find myself pointing out to Anne Robinson if I were ever ill-advised enough to go on The Weakest Link – is equally worth having. (And mention of that particular telly quiz reminds me that it furnishes much material for the regular ‘Dumb Britain’ column in Private Eye, precisely because it is perceived that you don’t have to boast much of a cultural education to go on the programme. It is noticeable that foolish answers on University Challenge or The Book Quiz do not find themselves twitted in this column).

Keeping the focus on books, I think those volumes that attract the notion that they ought to have been read by anyone pretending to the status of well-rounded person would be those considered to have what we might call – mindful of the minefield that lurks hereabouts – “literary merit”. Since the notion of elitism went into everyday use some two or three decades ago, it has become difficult to talk about merit, quality, value and other elevated notions without being roundly barracked, with the term ‘snob’ frequently called up as an unanswerable nuclear device. We are no longer allowed to propose – certainly not in a manner that suggests that such an argument is not worth having – that, say, JS Bach might have a bit more to him than does Dizzee Rascal. If on no other count, elevating Bach above Mr Rascal is fraught with suggestions of patriarchy and racism.

Nonetheless, the cultivated know what they know and they are not about to surrender their conviction that a thoughtful, sensitive and knowledgeable person would be more likely to be familiar with Bach or Hardy than with, say, the autobiography of Paul O’Grady, not that the latter lacks for anything in the ability to divert. Diversion is a rather lower aim than erudition, after all.

A week or two ago, we were at a social event – a book launch, as it happens. A woman of our acquaintance also attended with, in tow, both her husband and her mother, neither of whom we had met before. The kind of desultory chat ensued that characterises these events. On our way home, we found that we had each remarked the woman’s declaration that, on a recent holiday in Italy, she and her husband had tasted snails for the first time. (Whether her mother had accompanied them and partaken of this unfamiliar delicacy or whether they had had a consignment of the crustaceans shipped back for her to try in the safety of home we did not register). More to the point, neither of us could fathom the precise spirit in which this intelligence was vouchsafed. Were we to marvel at the couple’s brave leap into an unknown that they imagined we must necessarily share? Or should we smile indulgently upon what they were ruefully offering as their innocent parochiality?

It seems quite plausible that they thought they were being – and that by association we would also find that they were being – pretty outlandish in tucking into snails: so unnatural, so foreign. In their circle, we were tempted to surmise, anything off the beaten track of meat and two veg in front of BBC1 or ITV would be thought to be rather raffish and liable to frighten the horses. To us, however – unbridled citizens of the world that we are, drawing from every well that we encounter with no fear of the consequence – snails were old news in our teens because nothing yet untried stayed untried very long.

So of course a well-rounded person ought to have quaffed snails just as she ought to have read Hardy. Nobody ever got a reputation as a conversationalist or as one who habitually set the dinner table on a roar by running round admitting to the things he has never done. On the other hand, there is very little satisfaction to be had if one only ever encounters people to whom mention of Hardy puts them in mind of “Kiss me, Hardy” or Laurel and Hardy or Jim Hardy of Wells Fargo or Hardy Amies or Jeff Hardy (who, I believe, is an American wrestler). And as a cultivated class of person is as endangered a species as the white rhino, the need for any of us to “keep up” is in any case beginning to be wholly academic.

Next time I read a great novel that I have hitherto unaccountably neglected, I shall almost certainly shut up about it.

BECAUSE IT’s THERE

Oh dearie me, how the world has changed in my lifetime. When I was no’but a lad, a line you heard in the playground every few minutes or so was “mind your beeswax”. This was universally considered to be an unanswerable rebuke. Those thus apostrophized would back off at once, almost certainly displaying a degree of shamefacedness. To be a “nosey parker” (possibly an allusion to a 16th century Archbishop of Canterbury who kept stringent tabs on the clergy toiling under his auspices, according to Brewer) was to be as much a pariah then as being a paedophile is now (being a paedophile then was considered little more than a harmless joke).

Nowadays, everybody is employed fulltime minding everyone else’s business. It is already established as a Fact known to us all that Britain has more CCTV cameras per head of population than any other nation on earth. Relatively large audiences – including among their number some otherwise evidently intelligent individuals – apparently watch dry-mouthed as people they do not know interact artificially in an artificially created and manipulated television environment for hours on end. And necessarily sedentary and hence overweight journalists – or their outsourced delegates -– listen jadedly to hour upon hour of mobile phone traffic between inarticulate “celebrities” gossiping about others without benefit of the protection afforded by being conscious of any need to observe the laws of libel.

Data-collection, surveillance, eavesdropping, flies on the wall – it’s the polar opposite to the world in which I grew up, where privacy and confidentially were sacrosanct, where what adults did behind closed doors was only of interest to anyone else if the law of the land was being egregiously broken and where there were certain things one just didn’t talk about in public: sex, money, mental problems, insecurity, the failings of relatives and the workings of the human body in particular.

Now the Murdoch press has been “exposed” – there’s a resonant term – as having paid a king’s ransom to hush up the evidently multitudinous occasions on which it broke the law by hacking into the private phone calls of public individuals. I fall to wondering how much salary I would require to be paid for the task of listening to the off-duty conversations of, say, Vanessa Feltz or Alan Shearer. I don’t choose to listen to such people when what they have to say is planned, edited, scripted and (theoretically, at least) to some point. How bearable could it be to take on an indefinite listening brief as they bitch about Arsène Wenger (Feltz) or decide what to eat at Pizza Hut (Shearer; I think I have that the right way round)?

This indeed raises one of the most perplexing aspects of all this surveillance: it’s so expensive. The capital investment is minimal. What it must be really heavy on is that most costly of ingredients, man power. Some mutt has to trawl through all that closed circuit footage trying to find the car that might match the car that might be in another camera’s collection. Some other mutt has to wade through all the empty but serrated-edged bean tins and the swine flu-infected tissues in the celebrity’s rubbish bin to find that clinching receipt that confirms that the celebrity recently paid the Priory. It’s a dirty job and … um … nobody actually has to do it.

Here’s another aspect of this depressed, depressing and depressive culture that addles the brain. The British are uniquely useless at maintenance. We install things with a flourish and then disappear five minutes before they cease to function (Terminal 5, anyone?). You only have to clock the public clocks that stopped or became unreliable years ago and never got corrected to see how lackadaisical we are in this area. Or listen to the “music” – almost impenetrable pop or synthesised baroque – that telephone systems inflict upon you while you’re on hold. You listen but nobody from the enterprise on whose system you are held has bothered to listen to the “music” loop since it was installed, so they have no idea how distorted the sound has become. The chances are that when you walk past a CCTV camera, the image of you that it harvests will reveal only a fuzzy shape who could be you or equally could be the Incredible Hulk.

So, put together the ingredients of the hacking of a phone call by The News of the Screws. The celebrity – relaxed, unguarded and believing the only pair of ears into which the chatter goes belongs to a trusted friend – talks (shall we say?) loosely. The hacker is exhausted and bored and, being a journalist, almost certainly the worse for drink. The equipment on which he listens is unreliable, the signal distorted and fitful. The editorial pressure is on him to deliver something in some way juicy. Who imagines this to be a worthwhile, dependable, authoritative, let along a legitimate exercise?

And even if the whole shebang were not festooned with incompetence, how dare, how bloody dare these low-lives watch and listen as we go about our innocent – and even our not so innocent – business. It’s not as if much of this nosing is for any particular purpose. They do it on the off chance and because they can. We have let this happen because we have lazily collaborated in our own subjugation, by not protesting vigorously and continuously against the growth of databases and electronic checks, spying devices and so-called security sweeps. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil” Burke should have observed, though never quite did, “is that good men do nothing”.

We can get back at them if we bend our minds to it. Rupert Murdoch – I say nothing here that is not already in the public domain – has a fondness for a drink. Any journalist will tell you that the quickest way to get under a quarry’s guard is to give him a drink. To hack into Murdoch’s inner sanctum of communications ought to be a relatively simple matter. Go to it, boys. But don’t ask me to come too.

ARE WE ALL MAD?

The Guardian today (May 29th) seems packed with straws in the wind, small examples of how disordered the world has become. A woman appointed by the Polish government to guard the rights of children has accused a British television import, The Teletubbies, of “homosexual propaganda”. Evidently one of these fabric creatures that entertain toddlers carries “a lady’s purse” even though he’s “a boy”. I imagined they were sexless fantasies but there you go.

Quite how insisting on gender stereotypes helps to protect children escapes me. And how exactly is the term “propaganda” being used here? If a “boy” carries a “purse” without it exciting comment among his peers, what is that propagandising for? Tolerance? I do wonder what this busybody is doing to protect the rights of Poland’s children who are themselves homosexual.

Skipping west to Holland, we find the latest gruesome entry in the base world known jocularly as “reality television”. A terminally ill woman is to choose which of three patients who are waiting for transplants should receive her kidneys when she dies – which she presumably will do during the programme. Needless to say, viewers will be invited to offer their own opinions, medically qualified as they all so clearly are. What a sweet idea! I wish I’d been a fly on the wall when they pitched that to the programme commissioner. And what’s next? A mother choosing which of ten homeless drug addicts should get to fuck her six year-old daughter? Why not? Admit it, you’d watch that.

In Brighton, police have backed off from their stated intention to apprehend all those taking part in a mass bicycle ride on June 8th and 9th to publicise climate change and other similarly important causes. “Why pick on cyclists?” I hear you cry. Ah, but all these are going to cycle naked. I don’t understand this spreading desire to fling your clothes off and join a crowd. The great majority of people look even worse unclothed than they do clothed. And the very least a mass of naked cyclists is likely to do is to cause a snarl-up. So I do think the police should move them on. And is there an offence of riding a bicycle naked while in possession of an erection, I wonder?

Back in the wacky world of the goggle box, our own dear Channel 4 has been fending off justly outraged attacks on its plan to screen footage shot at the Diana, Princess of Wales death-crash site in Paris. C4’s spokespeople are downplaying the explicit nature of the images but there is no justification for revisiting this story in any form, however mindful of public and private sensibilities the channel claims to be. Guardian columnist Michele Hanson quotes Channel 4 – presumably from a written press release – as referring to “a genuine public interest”. I guess this is as opposed to the mendacious claims for public interest that are usually cited as justification for an otherwise morally bankrupt programme idea. What the channel really means is that it expects to catch viewing figures comparable with those for Ugly Betty. I commend to them my reality television notion alluded to above. There’d be genuine public interest in that, as there would be in relays of dog-fighting, public executions and hard core porn. Its genuineness could be measured in the ratings figures.

Channel 4 is in a bad place just now. It is a bit like a football team that is sliding towards the relegation zone with everybody saying that the manager is a wally. C4’s chief executive is one “Andy” Duncan. Yes, he does sound like a presenter of children’s programmes, doesn’t he? If only he dressed like one. Mr Duncan wears “informal” attire rather than the suit and tie traditionally favoured by television executives. This really is a grave mistake, a palpably misapplied attempt to present himself as a free spirit. A certain amount of sport was had at the expense of President Bush recently when he appeared as shifty as a bird-dog in full evening dress to entertain HM the Queen, unimaginably the very first formal dinner of his presidency. Your impression that Bush is just playing at being a public figure was once again confirmed in spades. Mr Duncan ought to pay attention and notice how important dress codes are when you’re in a position of power (as he surely is).

If he presented himself like Hamlet, as “the glass of fashion and the mould of form”, that would be just dandy. Tragically, Mr Duncan appears to amass his wardrobe at Asda. He is not just casually dressed, he is cheaply, shoddily, crappily dressed. Not surprisingly, he gives the impression that he looks unimpressive because he is unimpressive. He must get mistaken for a second assistant director twenty times a day. C4’s founding father was Sir Jeremy Isaacs, an elegant, forceful, charismatic character who always had a ready answer delivered with wit and punch. He looked the part. It is as though the job has finally passed down to the boy in the post room.

Andrew Duncan – I refuse to pander to his meretricious demotic – used to be head of marketing at the BBC. Well, there’s a surprise. No, I mean it. How could someone who looks as though he just popped out to check the barbecue before the arrival of the guests he met in an internet chat-room land so influential a position in the present market-led broadcasting ecosystem (to revive a notion Peter Fiddick coined back in the 1970s)? Now, what with the ham-fisted handling of the Big Brother crisis – and make no mistake, this was a crisis – and the easily dropped ball of the Princess of Wales programme, Duncan is increasingly exposed for what he is, an over-promoted lightweight.

Oh yes, gentle reader, we live in disordered times. And what shall we do about it?

The DOWNLOAD PATH

As you may know, the world has degenerated into a sorry place – a loud, thuggish environment in which, with a few honourable exceptions, the race goes not to the swift but to the steroid-enhanced; the spoils go not to the victors but to the party donors; and history and philosophy are written not by historians and philosophers but by comedians, soap opera actors, day-time chat-show hosts, ghosted footballers and people who have thrust themselves onto what is laughingly called “reality television”.

In such a world, out-dated qualities such as expertise, modesty, kindness, wit, knowledge, reticence, honesty, irony, patience and understatement go not so much unrewarded as incomprehensible to the decision-makers and opinion-formers.

It follows that having had three books previously published is no passport to the publication of a fourth. After a long and disheartening struggle, I have elected to offer my latest volume as a free download to anyone minded to dip into it. The book is called, somewhat combatively perhaps, Common Sense. It is a tour d’horizon of the world as seen by a baby boomer for whom the age of 60 is just around the next corner.

You need be no whiz kid of the computer to access this text. Simply go to the sidebar link on the right above that says

COMMON SENSE: The BOOK

This links you to my website; just follow the instructions you find there. You can readily download the book and its index onto your own desktop: the book occupies 2.7MB of space and the index (which itself, I suggest, is a diverting dip) 352KB. The thumbnail device on the left side of the Adobe reader will facilitate finding the page you want (the Chapter Headings will be found on page 3 of the volume).

Creatures that inhabit the ether survive by word of mouth or, I suppose I mean, word of keyboard. If you find anything in the text that engages, enrages, amuses, enthuses, mystifies, edifies, horrifies or revivifies you, please direct the occupants of your address book to the download. Who knows? – perhaps one day some lame-brained publisher will come to rue the day she failed to project a whole book from a sample chapter or, more common still, he declined to read it at all.

Thank you for your indulgence.