(no subject)

While having a shufti at the telly this monring, chanced on "The Heaven and Earth Show", and a debate entitled "Bad to be Gay?". Of all the responses they had received, the one that struck me most was:

"I think it is bad to be gay, because no other animal engages in homosexual activity".

Leaving aside the fact that the opinion may be factually wrong, the view expressed is one of the most interesting fallacies kicking around the common human experience. And, like most of them, it has been brilliantly discussed at some point by Stephen Fry.

Animals don't engage in homosexual activity - OK, if you insist. Animals also don't practise altruism except for their own ends (safety in numbers etc), don't exercise any form of justice, and don't show tolerance toward those other than themselves.
Some animals eat their own young.

The above is an equally biased account, I admit, but the point is still that the blaind admiration of the "natural order" of animals over all else is one of the most stunningly stupid misapprehensions around. The animal kingdom as a whole works (or did, till we blundered into it), but that doesn't mean that both many of the constructs we added to society, and many of the practices we removed, are not better the way we have them.

And (with the possible exception of dolphins) no other animal has sex for pleasure.
Admittedly, that tends to apply to the kind of people who think homosexuality is an abberation too...

And another thing...

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I'm reading a book about television called "Mrs Slocombe's Pussy", by Stuart Jeffries.

Given the popularity both of television and nostalgia, why isn't it better known, I hear you cry? Well, apart from the blatant shock-jockery of the title, it's biggest problem is that, like many other "not-quite-there-yet" prose writers, Jeffries has a tendency to let his ideas peter out without being properly concluded (cf Tim Moore, or Tim Bradford even more so). He also occasionally allows his anger to over-ride common sense - for example, describing Billy Connolly as a poisonoous reactionary comedian and the last relic of the "comedy of hate" simply shows that the writer hadn't listened to morew than a couple of minutes of his material.

The point I wanted to make, however, related to Jeffries' treatment of Brideshead Revisited. Like most writers viewing this most lauded of TV adaptations, and especially writers with working-class roots, he gets sucked into the trap of using Brideshead as the launch-pad for a class rant. This neatly ignores the fact that the millions who tuned in were not forced to by some upper-class Government diktat, but because they wanted to, and because they instinctively recognised a fine piece of dramatisation. Yes, Brideshead Revisited oozes class stereotypes, but it also oozes fine acting, engrossing storyline, and exceptional televisual technique. It is, in all senses of the term, a class act, and to let all that be lost in a whinge about misbehaving aesthetes is, in the end, just misses the point.

The other thing from the same section which intrigued me was the author complaining vociferously about how, when he was at Oxford, his West Midlands accent drew mockery from some of the public-school types, and failing to pass him a glass/glarse of water.
Those who know me will know that I don't have much of an accent of any kind, and that's pretty much the way I've spoken all my life. Well I went to school on Teesside, and I can tell you that my accent attracted a lot worse than missing glasses of water. I never got beaten up for "being posh", but you can bet your bony arse that my life was made damned uncomfortable at times because I didn't sound like Chubby Brown.
I remember a few years ago meeting some people in the local to where I then worked, on Finchley Road. As soon as they arrived, they were completely on edge, about how snooty they thought everyone was, how they thought everyone was looking at them, and how they didn't want to stay there, and why didn't we all go to a pub on Caledonian Road that they knew. I was in a suit, and knew that in a spit-and-sawdust joint round Kings Cross, that could earn me a lot worse than a condescending smirk.
All I'm trying to say, in my roundabout way, is that I sometimes get a little tired of endlessly being asked to boggle at the snobbery of the upper classes, while at the same time it is considered very bad form to point out that far worse things happen to people whose accents or manners clash in the opposite direction.
Yes, the upper classes should know better, yes the middle classes have more than enough compensations to put up with a little ragging, but my experience as a schoolboy whose accent was a source of venomous opprobrium from many of my classmates is no les real because it happens not to be the trendy way round.