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- The Guardian,
- Monday August 7 2000
With long-banned films certificated and certain states of arousal seen on screen for the first time, British cinema has been liberalised by the current board of film censors with remarkably little media objection. It's television that's become the bedroom battleground.
Channel 5 is frequently criticised for giving the green light to scenes which would be prefaced by a red light on the streets of Amsterdam. The other terrestrial channels have suggested a loosening of the "watershed" which forces erotic content towards the later parts of the evening. Even Prince Edward - whose production company Ardent has previously specialised in plodding documentaries about his ancestors - is reported to be producing a show about the use of sexual surrogates by the disabled. A coupling of programmes this week - neither of them produced by the institutionally lubricious Channel 5 - shows the extent to which the hemline of the schedules is being raised.
BBC2's Tinsel Town is a 10-part Scottish drama series which fills the slot recently vacated by repeats of This Life and which has clearly taken sex lessons from that series and from Channel 4's Queer As Folk. The opener is set around the club scene over a Glaswegian weekend. Jittery camera-work and whited-out images mirror the young, druggy feel of the cast of twentysomething characters.
There's so much sex that the traditional BBC disclaimer - "some scenes may offend viewers" - should probably be amended to "occasional scenes contain no shagging". There's straight sex in a lavatory cubicle, gay sex on a dancefloor and in a living room. A female character removes her knickers as an alternative to saying hello. Much of the conversation involves the sexual performance or possibilities of other characters. In both frequency and detail, the introductory episode of Tinsel Town must rank as BBC2's most explicit drama.
My objection to this is not moralistic - the easily offended should not be watching BBC2 in the lead-up to mid night - but artistic. Agony aunts always counsel that sex is much better if you care about someone and, whether or not this is true in life, it certainly applies to drama. Sex scenes in dramas about adultery - Hearts And Bones, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary - work because the acts have dramatic consequences. The narrative significance justifies explicitness.
Casual encounters are a problem in drama because the fucking becomes merely punctuation. It's even more of a difficulty in an opening episode in which the characters are as unknown to us as they are to each other. In Tinsel Town, the characters are inside each other's bodies long before their names have penetrated the viewer's head. Sudden anonymous sex may be true to the Glaswegian nightclub scene but, in a drama, you want them to chat you up a bit first.
While BBC2's erotic come-on this week is modern and fictional, the main rival channel's is old and true. Channel 4's The Duchess And The Headless Man revisits one of the great British sex scandals, the 1963 divorce case in which the evidence against Margaret Duchess of Argyll included Polaroids of fellatio in which the image of the man being given head lacked a head. This is Channel 4's second recent bite at this subject, having previously screened the Thomas Ades/Phillip Hensher opera Powder Her Face, which musicalised the same scandal.
When William Jefferson Clinton was sworn in as US president back in January 1993, he probably dreamed of lasting influence in many different areas: healthcare, education, the middle east, Ireland. But as he approaches the end of a second term, it seems increasingly clear that his major achievement has been to liberate public discussion of oral sex. In the confidence with which it reports the court evidence (and with which it screens or reconstructs those crucial Polaroids) this is very much a post-Monica documentary.
As Charles Bruce's film shows, the judge hearing the case in 1963 could bring himself to refer to fellatio only as "sexual association". The documentary is best in such details of historical speech and behaviour. Whereas most previous accounts have depicted the Duchess of Argyll as a victim of sexual experimentation, this film emphasises the extent to which her downfall resulted from a desire to experience new technology. Polaroid cameras became a status item for the rich in the 1950s. And where many affairs had been exposed by the cameras of private detectives, the Duchess was trapped by her own snaps.
The most frequent irritations in television documentaries these days are overly clever music cues and jokey voice-overs. The Duchess And The Headless Man escapes the first charge through the luck that its subject featured in Cole Porter's You're The Top (as "Mrs Sweeney", a previous married name). But a mock-Movietone commentary - in fusty, fussy aristocratic tones - not only chafes but roots the material in the past when it has many intriguing parallels with more modern controversies.
The documentary's climax is the first naming of the headless man. This was withheld from preview cassettes, but Channel 4 promises that our mouths will fall wide open like the Duchess's on that fateful evening. Certainly, my own sexual preference is for this over Tinsel Town.
Tinsel Town, tonight, 11.20pm, BBC2 Secret History: The Duchess And The Headless Man, Thursday, 9pm, Channel 4.
Green streets
When critics coined the word "docu-soap" to describe series observing the daily lives of real people, they meant it as an insult. Executives, though, hoped it would grow into a compliment. Soap is television's most durable and powerful form. A successful soap holds an audience forever.
But whatever the shared narrative methods of soap and docu-soap, the factual version has noticeably failed to emulate the longevity and addictiveness of the dramatic form. Critical derision has trimmed back commissions of a genre which briefly filled the schedules, and you feel that the fourth series of Paddington Green (Tuesday, 10.20pm, BBC1) is approaching our homes with the welcome expectations of a Jehovah's Witness.
However, by surviving so long, Paddington Green becomes the first docu-soap to ape one of the signature moments of soap drama: the central character leaving the series. Posh Camilla - who combines the name of the heir to the throne's lover with the regality of his mother - is going to LA after business failures.
Apart from durability, the main area in which factual soap has struggled to compete with the fictional kind has been the level of incident. No civilian life contains the quantity of catastrophes and cliff-hangers that's now demanded from the cast of peaktime serials.
Yet Paddington Green has one storyline which would seem cheap and exploitative if invented by a scriptwriter: gay ex-singer Denny, blind after an accident, has a friend who was injured in the Soho pub bombing. In the genre of soap, truth may not be as durable as fiction but, at its best, offers moments like this which rise above the plot-twisting artificiality of the false thing. Even so, people will remember Albert Square and Brookside Close long after Paddington Green is scratched out of television's address book.
