Television
Men's troubles
Harry Eyres
When Foucault wrote Apres la mort de dieu la mort de l'homme; I assume he meant that the notion of humanity cannot survive without an idea of the divine. Tele- vision certainly tends to break humanity down by gender and class: 'man' means the poor forked creature with the dangly bits.
Television has been worrying a great deal recently about 'men': a spate of pro- grammes has drawn attention to our dire state of physical, mental, moral and even economic well-being. The physical side I quickly pass over: one look at a programme about prostate and testicular conditions would have me rushing to the doctor, a stressed-out fundholder whom we know should not be bothered with mundane questions about health. I also pass over A Bad Time to Be a Man (BBC 2, Wednes- day) because of its risible title. But A Man's World (BBC 2, Wednesday), subtitled 'An oral history of masculinity', is one of those things which television does beautifully: a discreetly edited gathering of the testi- monies of men who grew up in the first half of the century.
One centenarian recited Kipling word- perfect and with rampant militaristic glee, but most spoke of feelings which had been suppressed under regimes designed to pro- duce tough soldiers. None was more mov- ing than Geordie Todd from North Shields recalling his mother's death when he was 11: 'Three parts of my life went. I wanted to cry but I couldn't. I just had the big lump in my throat and no tears. I didn't know how to do it.' Another held and read a letter he had written to his mother 65 years ago from prep school, a love letter. Had he ever written one more full of feel- ing since then? In the eyes of these men, including Wilf Page who led a schoolboys' strike against corporal punishment in Nor- folk in 1923 was the expression not only of sadness but also of a deep and indestruc- tible humanity.
By contrast Mistresses, part one (BBC 1, Thursday), was both silly and depressing. As quicker-witted contributors pointed out, the programme was based on a crashing false premise. British men don't have mis- tresses, they have covens (Alan Clark), wifelets (the Marquess of Bath) or more commonly, and revealingly, bits on the side (perhaps 60 per cent of the rest). Most depressing was the relentless emphasis on quantity rather than quality: Lord Bath, a latter-day Bluebeard dressed in a cardigan like a psychedelic giraffe-skin, showed us round his collection of 62 wifelets (mostly wall-reliefs, only one of the real things). More duplicitous was a man called Seng- Gye sporting a Fu Manchu beard and a green false eye. He seemed saddened by some people's view that 'I might be having my cake and eating it', referring to his ménage-ti-trois with wife Rose and mistress Morrigan. Rose and Morrigan's view that `when you have two women sorting things out together it's a little bit irrelevant what the man wants' did not in any way contra- dict the fact that Seng-Gye is having his cake and eating it.
After this the world of insects explored in Alien Empire, (BBC 1, Thursday) seemed both less claustrophobic and far more human (not to mention divine). Last week's episode concentrated on insects as international travellers. Nothing I saw all week was more beautiful than the gather- ing of Jersey hawk moths in a wooded val- ley in Rhodes and the migration of the monarch butterflies down the Pacific coast of the Americas, or more awe-inspiring than the survival of crickets among blast furnaces and lava flows.
Tony Parsons is a survivor too, not uncricket-like in his ability to adapt to all environments and pop up in unlikely places. There was something creepy about the way, in Parsons on Class — On Your Uppers (BBC 2, Thursday), he smarmed up to a family of slightly down-at-heel toffs (his manner towards a local tyre magnate was decidedly sharper). The Gordon-Duff- Penningtons may be charming folk but their juxtaposition with Parsons reminded you that nowhere but on these islands is the cultivation of particular vowel sounds considered more important than the sub- stance of what you say. Parsons is a kind of Basildon inversion of the upper-class-twit — no wonder he thinks the aristos deserve preservation (though the feeling may not be mutual).
For true class you need look no further than Wheeler on America (BBC 2, Sunday). The patrician vowels are beside the point. What matters is the urgent and eloquent telling of a supremely important story the story of an experiment in democratic humanity and where and how, from the 1960s to the 1990s, it has gone wrong.
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