'Loop the fuckin' loop' – Shirley Valentine is a fab film

Shirley Valentine is a constant in my top 20 films – a revisit today, when it cropped up on Channel 5, was a welcome reminder as to why.

Adapted for the screen by Willy Russell from his own play, it tells the story of the unfulfilled, titular Liverpool housewife Shirley, who has lost a sense of herself, as she has been submerged (drowned?) in the traditional roles of wife to Joe and mother to Millandra and Brian.
 
Joe runs his own business in Liverpool and is clearly successful, as the couple live in a very middle-class part of the city, where it seems clear that Shirley feels a lot of imposter syndrome, being from a working-class background. Accent tells us a lot in this film.
 
When her flamboyant, feminist (no accent) friend Jane wins a trip for two to Greece, Shirley is persuaded to accompany her – without Joe knowing, as he has always refused to go abroad.
 
The trip sparks a reawakening for Shirley – a “holiday romance” with herself – as she finds the strength to be herself and live life for herself.
 
First released in 1989, it remains strikingly on point on class, snobbery, sex and how women are policed into certain specific and restrictive roles.
 
The film includes some of Shirley’s school experiences – where she is belittled in front of her fellow pupils by the headteacher, while the poshly-spoken Marjorie Majors is very much teacher’s pet.
 
Years later, she bumps into Marjorie again – and finds that her old enemy has become a high-class prostitute. It’s one more step toward Shirley herself asserting her own agency.
 
This is a cracking ensemble cast. Bernard Hill is very good as the clueless, Joe, saying he’s ready to forgive Shirley’s fling with Greek tavern owner Costas as just something silly that women going through “the change” do.
 
Joanna Lumley is a delight as Marjorie. The scene in the hotel, when she tells Shirley what she does, is a comic joy.
 
Alison Steadman is great as the hypocritical Jane – again, class features in her attituds toward Shirley.
 
George Costigan and Anna Keaveney as a working-class Manchester couple on the same holiday to Greece are a hoot, while Cardew ‘The Cad’ Robinson and Honora Burke add another dimension of English small-mindedness as a posh, elderly couple from London. The latter, turning their noses up at kleftiko – ‘lamb with oregano’ – prefer Shirley’s offer of egg and chips.
 
There are neat cameos from Julia McKenzie (no accent), as a posh neighbour who asks Shirley to feed her vegetarian bloodhound while she's away, and Sylvia Syms (no accent) as the bullying headteacher.
 
If there’s a problem with the film, it’s in Tom Conti’s incredibly hammy performance as Costas. It wouldn’t happen now – not least since it’s in sharp contrast to other Greek characters in the film who are portrayed in a much more authentic way.
 
Yet I could argue – and will (just about) – that the artifice of the performance works on a certain level, given the context of an essentially sexist stereotype. Conti’s cartoonish performance perhaps because it is a comment on the generalised attitudes of men in general rather than explicitly Mediterranean men. But it’s not a hill I’m going to die on.
 
However, Shirley recognises what a fake he is, accepts it and engages with it in a way that meets what she needs.
 
And of course, then there is Pauline Collins in the title role. A fabulous performance, which deservedly saw her win a BAFTA and an Evening Standard award. Never lapsing into sentimentality, it is a beautifully nuanced portrayal of a working-class, northern woman.
 
As I said at the top of this – I love this film. And writing this on a rewatch has helped remind me of just some of the reasons why.

Outrageous! Section 28 as a warning from history

Outrageous! The story of Section 28 and Britain’s battle for LGBT education by Paul Baker manages to be both a detailed history of the notorious, homophobic legislation and a memoir that is often very funny, recounting how the author grew up under what, before being passed into law, was Clause 28.

It was a badly drafted clause in the Local Government Act in 1988, banning local authorities – which have responsibility for local state schools – from ‘promoting’ homosexuality and the “acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.

That ‘promoting’ bit was a major difficulty – did acknowledging homosexuality exists equate with ‘promotion’? If you played pupils a bit of Tchaikovsky, would that amount to ‘promotion’?

In the House of Commons, Labour MP Tony Benn put it like this: “... if the sense of the word “promote” can be read across from “describe”, every murder play promotes murder, every war play promotes war, every drama involving the eternal triangle promotes adultery; and Mr Richard Branson’s condom campaign promotes fornication. The House had better be very careful before it gives to judges, who come from a narrow section of society, the power to interpret ‘promote’.”

Then of course, there was the whole idea that an LGBT relationship was a ‘pretend’ one. Baker points out that the pace of social change since the 1960s – decriminalisation of homosexuality (albeit with strictures in place) only came in 1967 – had left many older people struggling in such a rapidly shifting landscape and in what many saw as ‘the permissive society’.

The process of how something comes to be on the statue book is explained in a good bit of civics showing how the Westminster Parliament works in terms of both houses.

Baker uses interviews with key figures, including Sir Ian McKellen, Angela Mason and Lord Chris Smith, to recount what happened, together with many quotes from speakers in both the House of Commons and the Lords when the subject was being debated.

Many of those quotes still have the power to shock now, with their brazen and even violent hatred. The usual names come up – Mary Whitehouse, Lord Longford, Malcolm Muggeridge … together with ones that will be less well known to the wider audience, such as Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman, who was Baker’s MP when he went to work at Lancaster University, and mine too when I lived in that area.

She was a sort of handbagging Margaret Thatcher clone on ’roids – a deeply unpleasant woman that I personally had contact with when writing to her in the 1980s about Campaign for the Arts. It might have been a non-party campaign, but that didn’t stop her snotty reply effectively accusing me of being a ‘loony lefty’. I was barely getting over having started my political life, courtesy of my background, as a Tory, but she helped me further along that road.

Baker takes great care to be as understanding as possible of the motives of many who so strongly backed Section 28 and never falls into the easy trap of simply lambasting him, though is less obviously forgiving of their friends in the media who peddled a diet of hate to their readers.

But central to the book are the stories of those whose lives were negatively affected by Section 28 and the homophobia that it enabled. It had a lasting impact for many.

However, brought together disparate parts of the LGBT community to fight back against and, in the process, build the case – and support for – greater equality, with a campaign including some incredibly inventive, non-violent protests.

Following the repeal of the clause in devolved Scotland in 2000, it finally came off the books elsewhere in 2003.

Reading this today feels like having a premonition.

Toward the end of Outrageous! Baker says that “Tristan Garel-Jones, the deputy chief whip for the Conservatives, apparently called it [Section 28], a piece of meat thrown by Mrs Thatcher to her right-wing wolves”.

I finished the book the same day on which reports leaked out that Tory Party leadership frontrunner Liz Truss had said – according to her supporter and former party leader Iain Duncan Smith – that she regretted her involvement in the Bill to ban conversion ‘therapy’.

Duncan Smith – a Catholic convert who once used the word “sin” in a discussion on unemployment – suggested that she would like to bin the legislation altogether.

This was subsequently denied by her team, according to North London Tory MP Mike Freer, who told his local newspaper that he had asked.

Other reports have suggested that, if elected as Tory leader (and thus prime minister), Truss would also elevate the culture war loving, LGBT+ despising Kemi Badenoch to her front bench.

This is, of course, precisely the sort of raw red meat that Garel-Jones mentioned. The Conservative Party had a maximum membership of 180,000 as of 2019 (the party is not open about its membership) as opposed to 47.6 million Parliamentary electoral registrations in the following year.

Those who will select the new Tory leader/PM are a tiny minority of the electorate as a whole and, on the basis of their likely preferred news reading being the Telegraph, the Mail and the Express, they are still being fed a toxic diet of homophobic – and particularly transphobic – bile.

 

The first two of those, together with the Sun, have been cited as the biggest new media defenders of Section 28.

In the last couple of days, Suella Braverman, the attorney general, has stated that schools that talk about gender change could face Ofsted sanctions. Nothing like Section 28 at all, then.

Yet even within this constituency of the Conservative Party membership, YouGov polling has shown that just 8% of those members want “combatting the woke agenda” prioritised, so it’s difficult to see who is being appealed to here. A wider constituency of far-right voters that switched from the likes of UKIP and helped the Conservatives to a massive majority in 2019? Religious fundamentalists from across faiths who hate anything that isn’t heterosexual marriage? Groups that might vote for the Conservatives at the next general election?

 

It’s difficult not to feel deeply concerned about what the coming period will bring in terms of equality and for the LGBT+ community. Or not to feel that, once again, campaigns and protests might need to be organised.

 

Baker’s book is a salutary reminder of the harm of such intolerance – but also of how the fight back can succeed. It is very much worth a read.

• Outrageous! The story of Section 28 and Britain’s battle for LGBT education by Paul Baker is published by Reaktion Books

 

21st-century hysteria, click bait and the absence of common sense

It’s a sorry state of affairs when something that should be blindingly obvious that it requires no comment demands digital column inches to point this out.

It appears that veteran Channel 4 news reader Jon Snow dared to admit that he had thought about colleagues in terms of S.E.X.

This provoked an outcry – not just on Twitter, but also in the Spectator and, inevitably, in the pages of that bastion of hypocrisy, the Daily Mail.

Such was the response to this admission of being, err, a human being, that Felicity Morse penned a short piece on the topic for the Independent, pointing out that this is entirely normal for a normal human being – we are sexual creatures, after all – and adding that not only is he hardly the only one who has entertained such thoughts, but that … wait for it … women have too.

Of course this also comes at the same time that a certain organ (fnar, fnar) was berating the performance of singer Beyoncé at the Grammy Awards.

Oh My God! She wore something that wasn’t as modest as a burka! She gyrated! Alongside her husband! Our boys will be turned into rapists and our girls into sluts!

I bet you won’t be able to guess which media outlet was leading the charge on that one, will you?

Of course you will.

It was indeed our old friend the Mail that shrilled: “Is this really what little girls should aspire to, Beyoncé? Parents attack ‘vile’ display at Grammys”.

Apparently they found one parent was quoted anonymously, plus a couple of the professional ‘won’t-somebody-think-of-the-children’ brigade, Pippa Smith of SaferMedia and Vivienne Pattison of Mediawatch-UK.

Let’s clarify this: the Mail is the same rag that publishes lashings of pictures of women in as little clothing as possible – mostly to point out that they have put a bit of weight on/lost a pound or two/got cellulite.

The pages of the dead tree edition are bad enough: the online version sees this obsession squared.

And on top of that, as I and others have illustrated previously, it uses its website to publish pictures of underage girls with creepy, sexualising captions and stories alongside – describing an eight-year-old child as “a leggy beauty” is but one of the more notorious examples.

It’s so depressing to have to point out that Morse’s piece is common sense.

It’s equally depressing to point out that Ally Fog’s latest Guardian article, in which he called on people to stop pretending all teenage boys are becoming violent because of porn, is another example of a situation of there being an apparent need to state the bleedin’ obvious.

Fog uses the article to press the case for serious reform of the sex education situation in the UK, where some schools are still using materials related to the homophobic Section 28, and where others are censoring what they tell the children on the basis of religious beliefs.

It’s difficult to understand who would consider it progress that such articles need writing – primarily as a response to plenty of idiocy in a media that is increasingly given to straightforward sensationalisation in order to sell copies or as click bait, and in the case of Fog, he acts as a bit of a counterbalance to the extremist voices of the likes of Julie Bindel and her misandrist, transphobic friends.

How on earth do they get away with it?

Is the British public at large really so puritanical (when not consuming and being scandalised by vast amounts of titillating gossip) that it actually considers it abnormal or surprising that their fellow humans might look at other people and consider matters sexual?

Or that they think that Beyoncé’s dancing will turn their daughters onto a path of sexual promiscuity?

Or that all teenage boys are internet-porn addicted abusers?

But then, there are apparently parents around who do not want their children to have an open and proper sex education.

Part of the problem, though, is that spouting the sort of bile and myth that in these pieces was being rebutted, is irresponsible, and risks giving a sense of justification to bigotry and intolerance and sheer stupidity.

Only yesterday, I read of a court case where two men escaped prison after beating a trans woman in her home, with their lawyer telling the jury that they were “having a laugh”.

The likes of the Mail, when it lets Richard Littlejohn spout transphobic bile and the Guardian, when it let’s Julie Burchill et al do the same, do nothing to stop a culture of seeing trans women (because it usually is trans women) as ‘odd’ and, therefore fair game.

And that leaves us with a pretty sad state of affairs: both that such articles need writing and that at least some people do believe all these sort of myths and more.

It's raining men – or because of them?

It's raining men

In the last few days, many in the UK have been mightily entertained as a result of the publication of a letter in a local paper.

In the Henley Standard, UKIP councillor David Silvester stated that he had warned Prime Minister David Cameron, but that the recent storms and flooding were a direct consequence of the plans to allow gay (equal) marriage.

Initially, a UKIP spokesperson stated that Mr Silvester was entitled to his opinion, but a day later, it was announced that he had been suspended, while party leader Nigel Farage promised that certain UKIP candidates would not be standing again for election.

It is, of course, rather amusing to see that Mr Farage has realised the potentially negative impact at the ballot box of some of his loonier members.

There’s a spot of irony in the fact that – if you took the Telegraph forums at face value at least – people were deserting the Conservative Party for UKIP on just that issue only a year ago, in between promising that there would be mass “civil disobedience” if those gays were allowed to get properly hitched.

After all, UKIP itself had made it quite clear that it considered plans for equal marriage to be “illiberal”, making it odder yet that it now meets such illiberality with, err, illiberality.

And it’s interesting that a party that prides itself on not being politically correct has decided that freedom of speech is actually negotiable and that image matters more than said freedom of speech if you’re hoping to win votes in just a very few months.

For what it’s worth, my personal opinion is that Mr Silvester didn’t so much say anything offensive as simply barking. And the one is not the same as the other.

There’s no question of incitement that I can see in either his letter or in his subsequent TV comments.

And much as I personally consider that his comments are bonkers, there’s something that should concern us all when we see people being, in effect, censored for daring to voice their opinions in an entirely polite manner – let alone by a party that was entirely happy to play to and welcome people of his opinion until only very recently.

We do need to remember – or get our heads around – the idea that nobody has a right to not be offended.

Without that, free speech falls. And, of course, honesty falls with it.

Dictatorial regimes kill free speech. Theocracies kill free speech. Religions try rather hard to kill free speech. And overt political correctness kills free speech.

At the moment – not entirely coincidentally – I’m engaged in a debate with someone on a newspaper forum, after they objected to my question of when heterosexuals ‘chose’ to be straight.

I don’t know the person, but the discussion suggests he’s male and religious.

His objection is based on his apparently having chosen to be not gay where he once was.

As of now, he’s still refusing to say when he chose to be gay. After all, if he had to choose to be straight – in compliance with god’s law or even a perception of nature – then he must, at some point, have equally chosen to go against god’s law or nature.

The more I think about it, the more I feel for this individual. I get a sense – I could be wrong, of course – that this is a daily struggle with his natural and inherent self, because somehow he has become convinced that his natural self is inherently wrong … that it is bad and sinful and must be changed and controlled.

There’s something awful and destructive and life-denying in that, and I wish it on nobody.

But if one were to pursue a theological line of reasoning, that wouldn’t help either.

After all, if you couldn’t say when you chose to become gay in the first place, you’re left with the knowledge that you just are. And if you believe in a god, then that leaves you wondering why that god made or allowed you to be gay in the first place, when that same god is explicitly opposed to gayness.

With Judeo-Christian tradition, god is omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent: from the beginning of time, he knew everything that would ever happen, when and how. And since he created it all in the first place, then he created human sexuality and what some call ‘sin’, and the paths that individuals would themselves take.

Such religion logically allows no room for freedom and for individual decisions. The two are like oil and water.

Perhaps it’s a matter of ‘the sins of the fathers’?

Now there’s a phrase that I really detest.

Can you seriously imagine a single, sane, un-brainwashed, decent human being suggesting that society should punish an entirely innocent person for something that their father or their grandmother or great-granduncle did?

Would any civilised person consider that a good basis for society?

I rather doubt it.

It would be like saying that collective punishment is suddenly okay.

So if god created human sexuality – for Catholics at least, the idea of any other being having the power of creation is heresy – then that same god punishes people for precisely what he created.

Yeah. I can see why people would be cool with that.

I mean, even if such a god exists, why would you want to worship such a being?

You wouldn’t accept any equivalent in real life, so why would anyone accept it from their idea of a god?

People are entitled to their beliefs and unless they make statements that break existing law on incitement, they should continue to be free to make those statements.

There’s no evidence that Mr Silvester, for instance, ‘hates’ gays – just that he’s three stops short of Upminster, which ain’t a crime, the last time I checked. He should no more be censored for that than I should for expressing my opinion on his lunacy.

None of this means that I’m not having a damned good old laugh at much of the satirical (but not censoring) response to Mr Silvester’s comments.

Indeed, even as I write, I’m listening to that great disco classic, It’s Raining Men.

And just think: if we censor such people, we don’t destroy the beliefs or the arguments, we merely drive them underground and risk making martyrs of them.

Forget foodbanks, we've got another porn panic

Grande Odalisque, Ingres. It's Art – okay?

The latest brouhaha about pornography broke out last week, as the Daily Mail set its hypocritical sights on WH Smith.

The unfortunate retailer’s crime? It found itself in the line of fire after an online cataloguing error meant that pornographic or erotic ebooks were spotted near titles for children.

The Mail, which doesn’t include the titillation of its audience as one method of making sales; which doesn’t include and comment on as many acres of female flesh as possible on its own website, and which doesn’t – oh no, sirree – use creepy language to sexualise underage girls in that very same part of cyberspace, has apparently read every one of the naughty ebooks that were available to buy and announced that the subjects include rape and incest and beastiality and, and … well, won’t somebody think of the children (but not the way Mail hacks do)!

Lawyer Myles Jackman has adroitly dismantled some of the Mail’s inaccuracies, showing how it misunderstands – or misinterprets – the law, for instance.

But unfortunately, the Mail was not alone.

The Guardian, for instance, was in spectacularly disingenuous form.

First, it effectively admitted that it hadn’t bothered doing any actual investigation itself: “At least 60 pornographic ebooks – some featuring rapes and bestiality – were available on the company’s online store, and could also be found on Amazon, Waterstones and Barnes & Noble … according to the Mail on Sunday.” [my emphasis]

That’s cool: just rely on the always-reliable Mail family of newspapers to feed you the details of the story. After all, this isn’t the Mail that has a record of ‘exaggerating’ on such matters, is it?

It’s not the same Mail, is it, that published an article by one Amanda Platell, claiming that she had searched for and easily found images of child abuse online? It turned out that she had found no such thing and, if she had, she would have broken the law in attempting any such search.

But let’s move on. A few paragraphs later:

“The National Crime Agency warned on Sunday that books appearing to legitimise child abuse ‘might feed the fantasies of paedophiles and in some cases encourage child sexual abusers to commit contact offences’.”

Woah! Where’s the child abuse thing come from? Where is there even a suggestion that some of the ebooks – which are self-published, apparently – include anything “appearing to legitimise child abuse?

Of course, the mere mention of kiddy fiddlers is enough to send half the nation into a state that includes the shut-down of their reasoning skills.

Odalisque with Magnolias, Matisse. Not erotic. At all

As it happens, other sources say that some of the books do contain themes of abuse, but if that’s the case, let’s have it mentioned in the article, without the sudden jump to the subject of paedophilia, which simply looks like a conflation of child abuse and pornography/erotica.

But this is entirely in keeping with the sort of knee-jerkery that is increasingly coming to inform the debate on whatever someone or other decides constitutes porn.

After all, in what passes for that debate in the UK, claims of the untold harm to women and children caused by pornography dominate, without a shred of actual evidence for that. Yet it has become accepted unquestioningly by many that it is simply true.

Say something often enough …

And the Mail and the Guardian are among those publications that are culpable on this count. Which should tell you something.

Mind, since we also apparently live in a world where a convicted and time-served criminal can herself state that most women commit crimes because of men, perhaps certain people do need ‘protection’ from anything that might ‘deprave’ them?

Maybe the Victorians were correct in believing that only respectable men of a certain class (which class presumably ensured the aforementioned respectability) could be trusted to look at dodgy images?

After all, women are obviously so clearly weak, aren’t they?

Well, that seems to be the theme of Vicky Pryce’s comments, as she continues to look for ways to blame her former husband for her own crime.

After all, stealing a load of designer handbags is all the fault of men, isn’t it?

Or when a woman is guilty of animal cruelty to her dogs, which also kill a child, it’s obviously the patriarchy behind it.

Or when a woman enters the home of an elderly person and sexually abuses her, that’s the fault of the patriarchy too.

Olympia, Manet. Entirely respectable pic of a prostitute

All of this – every little bit of it – plays to a censorious, reactionary agenda on women: one that is entirely happy to see womankind as vulnerable and as a perpetual victim, and to shoehorn womankind as a whole into a particular and limited template for ideological reasons.

At its extreme – its logical conclusion, one might say – is the likes of the Taliban.

Unfortunately, many people who would claim to be progressives buy into it and blithely aid the growth of a culture of victimisation, which demonises men and happily portrays women as eternal victims of ‘the patriarchy’.

And then, in response, we get the victimised white male routine.

This is all at a time when the populace as a whole is under attack from yet another government that readily does the bidding of the neo-liberal supra-national corporatocracy – and in this case, uses the result of the 2008 financial crash to batter the majority and set them against each other.

Against such a background, playing at divisive politics is not even intellectual masturbation, but far worse, it’s utterly counterproductive in terms of rallying and uniting people around the key issues, which have sod all to do with sex/gender and what turns people on, and everything to do with economics and actual politics.

And if anyone starts spouting off along the lines of: ‘if we only had more women in Parliament’, respond with two words: ‘Margaret’ and ‘Thatcher’.

The idea that somehow there’s some sort of unified feminine niceness out there that’ll solve everything is, at best, a misguided fantasy.

Even a cursory glance at history would suggest that, when women have power, they behave no better or differently to how men behave.

But that’s okay – because if we take on board the narrative of a certain type of feminism, then women don’t have to take personal responsibility because it’s all the fault of ‘the patriarchy’.

Which brings us back to the point where, if you continue to argue that, then you effectively argue that women are inherently weak – in which case, why, rationally, should they be considered equal within society?

The porn ‘debate’ is just one part of a wider war being waged by a number of protagonists with some slightly differing perspectives.

James as Odalisque, Niki Grangruth. Still Art

Other aspects of this war include, for instance, the male-dominated campaigns against abortion and the right of a woman to control her own body.

But if we believe that a woman should be able to have complete control of her own body, then it is inconsistent to patronise, condemn or exclude women who, for instance, work in the sex industry.

Do those who do that condemn the rent boy equally? Or what about the female ‘escort’ who provides services for other women?

The ‘debate’ is so up it’s own metaphorical arse that you will, even now, hear spectacular claims such as the famous one that ‘all porn damages women’. What? Even the gay stuff?

It’s also indicative of that divisionism: conflating all womankind to a single version. There is no female or feminist consensus on these subjects, no matter how much Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has apparently allowed himself to be told by the merry little band of misandrists that he continues to give space to.

You don’t have to like porn yourself to see this. That’s not point. But get caught up in the rhetoric, without understanding that, and you become just like the Daily Mail itself or the Guardian.

And don’t forget: there is – as I’ve mentioned before – there’s also the small matter of class.

Ask yourself: would the campaign against page 3 exist if it wasn’t in a working-class publication?

Leather Crotch, Robert Mapplethorpe. Not sex. Art

If you think so, why is there no comparable campaign against odalisque paintings that hang in open galleries? Perhaps because visiting galleries is considered a rather middle-class thing to do? And, when it’s in a gallery, it’s Art anyway, isn’t it?

If there are issues about how availability of pornographic materials is affecting young people, then perhaps the answer is proper education?

However, given the generally parlous state of sex education across the UK – not least because governments still cravenly kowtow to religious groups, schools and parents in allowing them to opt out of proper sex education – it’s easy to see why a spot of ranting stupidity appears to be the preferred solution for some.

The thing is, porn’s a nice, easy target, because few people will defend it, so bound up are we ideas of sex as still rather dirty – certainly if it’s lust and not lurve – and because the moment the ‘won’t somebody think of the children’ soundbite gets bandied around common sense is bundled out of the room.

Now just imagine if the Mail in particular brought as much concern to the news that the Red Cross is now handing our food aid in the UK.

As I said: a useful distraction – and not for the good of women or men as a whole.