Gay pride and prejudice

Channel 4’s major weekend offerings asked how far we have come since Lord Wolfenden’s recommendation in 1957 that adult homosexual acts should be legalised. A Very British Sex Scandal, Saturday’s spectacularly wooden drama-documentary, told the story of how Lord Montagu and journalist Peter Wildeblood went to jail for absolutely nothing, an injustice so flagrant that it helped the Wolfenden committee to reach its conclusion. It would have left us quite smug about living in the present had not Kevin Elyot’s Clapham Junction come along yesterday to argue that British homophobia is as irrepressible as homosexuality – a contentious point that threatens, you may think, to lock gay men into a closet marked “Victim”.

In Clapham Junction – actually set around Clapham Common (as played by Tooting Common and Highbury Fields) – there was only one gay bloke you wouldn’t call a victim. He was Will (confusingly played by Richard Lintern, one of Sex Scandal’s dapper barristers). We met him as he was marrying a virtuous hospital doctor named Gavin (Stuart Bunce). At the reception, Will speed-seduced a waiter named Alfie (David Leon), and, in a slightly forced piece of plotting, handed him his wedding ring.

Alfie was later brutally killed on Clapham Common by two thugs, even as a middle-class dinner party, filled with repressed homosexuals, was taking place yards away. The ring later ended up in hospital on the finger of another gay-basher who, with some inevitability, was treated by Dr Gavin, who spotted the ring and . . . Well, it’s not a great start to married life.

Things were little easier for the drama’s other homosexuals. Screen-writer Robin (Rupert Graves) could not get his series commissioned by Channel 4 because “this gay thing” was “no longer an issue” (a bit rich that). His friend Roger (Tom Beard) was, after 20 years of heterosexual marriage, desperate for gay sex but felt trapped. Roger’s friend Julian (James Wilby), married to homophobe Marion (Samantha Bond), was a covert gay who had just shown his willy to Robin in the local gents on the way to dinner.

Elyot, who 13 years ago tackled Aids among the dinner party set in his play My Night with Reg, was careful, then, not to present his gay characters as either virtuous or brave. But he was passionate about his message that whether or not it is legitimate to go “sniffing around in dark places” for sex – the play’s phrase – no one deserves to be physically attacked doing so. The play was inspired by the murder of Jody Dobrowski on Clapham Common in 2005, killed by homophobic thugs. Elyot made his central villain more interesting than them. Played with sinister aplomb by the former EastEnder Paul Nicholls, Terry was the kind of maniac who is kind to his granny, a thug who had turned revulsion at his own homosexuality into a vendetta against practising gay men. Terry, it was suggested, was a victim of society’s attitudes, too.

Elyot’s hardest sell for our sympathy, however, was for Tim, a convicted paedophile (Joseph Mawle), who lived in fear of both his council estate neighbours, who had firebombed his kitchen, and his own libido. He was seduced by 14-year-old Theo (Luke Treadaway), son of yet more dinner party guests. I confess I was rather more on Theo’s mother’s side than her liberal-minded husband’s when she bawled Tim out. There is no such thing as an untameable sex drive.

Together, the programmes provided a picture not only of the history of attitudes to homosexuality but the halting progress of TV drama. Sex Scandal was shot in a studio on tape, with bright overhead lighting that bounced off the actors’ Brylcreemed heads. Its production values were so antediluvian that, combined with its hammy legal scenes, Sex Scandal recalled Crown Courtcirca 1972. In contrast, Clapham Junction showed us how far TV has come, at least in one respect: feminism may have put paid to the once-common sight of gratuitous female nudity, but the “gaying” of British television since Queer As Folkin 1999 now permits in Clapham Junctionthree penises to be waved at us. This compelling, glossy, bloody piece of work also took us back, beyond even Crown Court, to the days when a Wednesday Play would try to challenge the prejudices of the residents of those large and enviable houses whom it so often depicted.

Out of the box

— BBC Two’s Dragons’ Den: Where Are They Now? tracks the show’s importunate entrepreneurs’ fortunes once they leave the lair. But is the BBC’s economics editor, Evan Davis, making a fortune out of Dragons’ Den now he is one of the Beeb’s most recognisable faces? It turns out that he does the programme as part of his duties as a BBC staffer, his only rewards a modest bonus and free on-screen suit – “mainly,” he tells me when I check, “because they can’t trust me to buy a satisfactory one of my own”.

— Watch these spaces: FX has poached Nip/Tuckfrom Sky; the Dr Who spin-off Torchwood is moving from BBC Three to Two; and David Gest is going nowhere. Says ITV’s controller Simon Shaps, who’s cancelled his reality soap: “There will be no new deal and no new projects. I’m not sure what he’ll do next.”

andrew.billen@virgin.net

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