TV review

  • The Naked Civil Servant (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Jack Gold (1975)

    Getting on for fifty years after it was first broadcast (Wednesday 17 December 1975), The Naked Civil Servant remains a special piece of television film drama.  More than twenty years after his death, Quentin Crisp seems even more remarkable a figure than in his lifetime.

    The man himself introduces The Naked Civil Servant, adapted by Philip Mackie from Crisp’s autobiography of the same name (first published in 1968).  Crisp says that he suggested to the film-makers the opening image:  himself as a child (Stephen Johnstone), wearing a cloak and crown, watching his reflection in a mirror.  Cut to the twentyish Quentin (John Hurt) doing the same thing, though more prosaically costumed and less impressed with what he sees.  Jack Gold follows him through the next forty years of his life.  From early adulthood, Quentin appears in public in outré clothes.  He also wears face make-up, nail varnish and his henna-dyed hair in a decidedly unmasculine style.  He’s frequently jeered at, sometimes beaten up.  As he stands at a bus stop in sandals exposing his painted toes, the man ahead of him in the queue stamps on his foot as hard as possible.  Over the decades, Quentin earns a crust as a male prostitute, a commercial artist and an unqualified tap dance instructor (he manages, he explains, to keep one step ahead of his lone pupil (Annette Badland)).  A former art student himself, he gets more enduring employment as a model for art-college life classes, for which he’s paid by the Ministry of Education.  Hence the title.

    At the outbreak of war in 1939, he attends an army medical examination, peered at and questioned by a succession of men in uniform, each one glowering and scandalised until a psychiatrist (John Cater) arrives on the scene.  Smugly imperturbable at first, he’s soon bamboozled by Quentin’s eccentric logic and candour about his sexuality.  In a bid to have the last word, the shrink resorts to biblical quotation:  ‘Male and female created he them’.  ‘Male and female …,’ Quentin replies, ‘created he … me’.  He’s exempted from military service on account of sexual perversion.  Although frank about his homosexuality, he takes care not to get arrested – ‘Never looking at anyone unless they demand I look back, never speaking unless spoken to‘.  Until, that is, two plain clothes officers (Peter Sproule and Robert Gary) arrest him in the West End on a trumped-up charge of soliciting.  In a speech to the court, Quentin impresses the curious, not unsympathetic magistrate (Martin Boddey).  Friends from the bohemian London world that accepts Quentin – an actor (Harvey Ashby) whose hurried goodbye to him on the street has been used by the police in evidence against him; the ballet teacher (Patricia Hodge) whose Chelsea flat Quentin minds and lives in for years; the loyal friend from art school (Liz Gebhardt) who eventually becomes a nun – appear as character witnesses, and he’s acquitted.  In the closing scene, the sixtyish Quentin is accosted by a group of teenage boys (including a sixteen-year-old Phil Daniels) who threaten to report him for ‘fiddling with us’ unless he gives them a quid each.  ‘You can’t touch me, I am one of the stately homos of England,’ declares Quentin, who continues on his way.

    Mackie’s script skilfully distils the episodic narrative into a sustained, extraordinary character study.  Gold’s direction is masterly.   The action is punctuated by title cards reiterating the key Crisp aperçus proclaimed in John Hurt’s voiceover – ‘Exhibitionism is a drug!’, ‘There is no great dark man!’ etc.  With its silent-movie associations, the device evokes the era in which Crisp grew up, as well as reinforcing the impression of a sui generis rites-of-passage story.  The use of voiceover is peculiarly effective.  It conveys the sense that Quentin Crisp, along with viewers of the film, is observing his life – with a degree of incredulity and from a retrospective position of safety he has seldom experienced living it.  Carl Davis’s music perfectly captures the protagonist’s distinctive qualities – a witty yet wistful individualism, a resilience rooted in dismay at what his existence has to be.  The plucky melancholy of the occasional trumpet solo is especially expressive.  Echoes in Davis’s main melody of ‘Little Man You’ve Had a Busy Day’ are touchingly apt.

    As well as making a celebrity of its subject, the film took to a new level of recognition the screen career of the actor playing him.  John Hurt had done good work as Richard Rich in A Man for All Seasons (1966), created a brilliant portrait of Timothy Evans in 10 Rillington Place (1971) and, in the film version of David Halliwell’s Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs (1974)[1], reprised the title role he’d played on stage.  But The Naked Civil Servant made the difference, especially in raising Hurt’s international profile.  He does full, hugely entertaining, justice to Quentin Crisp’s flamboyance and practised theatricality.  He also shows – more than Crisp the autobiographer is prepared to do – his vulnerability, and in surprising ways.  Quentin, always physically at risk, uses words as mordant, cynical armour.  The throaty reverberations sometimes heard in Hurt’s voice suggest a depth of feeling Quentin doesn’t mean to expose.

    The innocent wonder in Hurt’s eyes when Quentin is first approached in the street by Norma (Shane Briant) – who introduces him to other queer habitués (Roger Lloyd Pack, Adrian Shergold) of the Black Cat Café in Old Compton Street – is beautifully tentative.  Quentin’s first co-habitation after his rent-boy period is with a querulous office worker (Colin Higgins), known as Thumbnails, who chides Quentin for his domestic indolence and cosmetic experiments.  They bump into each other years later, in a crowd celebrating VE Night.  ‘You look terrible,’ scowls Thumbnails, vindictive and vindicated:  Hurt makes the silent distress in Quentin’s face very poignant.  In the film’s penultimate scene, one night in Portsmouth, he’s approached and surrounded by a group of five sailors.  As he explains in voiceover:  ‘It was the first, last and only time when I’ve ever been in a crowd of people where I was the centre of attention without feeling I was in danger. …  Nothing sexual happened, nothing was going to happen.  It was what I had always longed for and never elsewhere found.  A flirtation, an evening’s entertainment …’   Hurt’s luminous rapture eclipses the stars in a stylised night sky – the amusingly artificial backdrop to this singular, euphoric scene.

    Not only is the lead performance wonderful.  Gold also works wonders to orchestrate the variety of acting styles in the supporting cast that complements it.  These range from virtual caricatures – Quentin’s no-nonsense father (Lloyd Lamble) and feebly protective mother (Joan Ryan), for example – to the more natural (and affecting) playing of John Forbes-Robertson as a civil servant very different from the title character.  Sober-suited and bowler-hatted, he routinely turns up for sex at Quentin’s flat until neighbours’ complaints to the police of what they see through the uncurtained window drive the man from the ministry fearfully away.  Among the bohemians, Stanley Lebor is memorable as an overbearing Polish émigré, although ‘Mr Pole’’s decline from (heterosexual) concupiscence to paranoid schizophrenia occupies too much screen time.

    After Thumbnails, comes Barndoor (John Rhys-Davies).  (It will be clear that few characters have forenames or surnames, more have nicknames.)  A labourer type, he shares with his white-collar predecessor a boyish naivete when he’s content with Quentin and a childish petulance when the relationship, which lasts much longer in Barndoor’s case, sours.  For Quentin, life with him yields insights both philosophical and practical.  He’s proof that Quentin’s desire to be loved by ‘a great, dark man’ is doomed to failure (in giving this love, the great, dark man diminishes his own masculinity).  Barndoor’s physique teaches the lesson ‘Never share a narrow double bed with a wide single man’.  Colin Higgins and John Rhys-Davies are further illustrations of, respectively, cartoonish and more naturalistic acting in The Naked Civil Servant.  The film is remarkably able to accommodate both without strain or a sense of contradiction.

    It’s not surprising Quentin Crisp became persona non grata with gay rights activists like Peter Tatchell, who claimed in an Independent interview in 2009 that Crisp became homophobic because embittered by jealousy – ‘He resented no longer being the only queer in town’.  It’s easy to understand why Crisp may have felt that gay men of a later generation had things comparatively easy, after changes to the law and because there’s (relative) safety in numbers.  Not that the physical brutality regularly inflicted on him was the usual fate of British homosexuals even pre-1967:  he was a deliberately unusual gay man of the period, determined to express himself – and as an effeminate homosexual.  The Naked Civil Servant features a scene in which Quentin is told to leave a clandestine gay club because he threatens to ‘spoil it for the others’.  The manager (Michael Bangerter) explains that, if the police put in an appearance, his clientele will claim they’re members of a straight gentleman’s club.  With Quentin in their midst, they’ll never be believed.

    Crisp, who had outraged people for half a century simply by being himself, evidently felt compelled to keep on outraging once he was famous for it but his lifestyle no longer considered beyond the pale.  His one-man stage show in America always included a Q&A.  One night in 1983, in Chicago, an audience member asked him to comment on AIDS.   His notorious answer – ‘Homosexuals are always complaining of one ailment or another.  AIDS is a fad, nothing more …’ – was offensively stupid, even if it was tongue in cheek.  Although Tatchell’s characterisation of Crisp isn’t fully convincing, it is striking that their only meeting occurred as early as 1974.  According to Tatchell, the gay liberation badge he was wearing ‘prompted Quentin to retort: “What do you want liberation from?”  He continued in a similar vein, dismissing the idea of gay pride:  “What is there to be proud of?   I don’t believe in rights for homosexuals.”’   These remarks are more likely than the AIDS putdown to reflect Crisp’s real feelings because of when they were made – a few years after the publication of The Naked Civil Servant but before the screen version had brought him to wider public notice.  That said, Gold’s film suggests he always had a penchant – and flair – for shocking epigram.  The young Quentin informs his art-student friend that ‘I regard all heterosexuals, however low, as infinitely superior to any homosexual, however noble’.  She immediately says, ‘You don’t mean that’, and he admits as much:  ‘Well, infinitely luckier:  It’s always easier to be a member of the majority’.

    Crisp told the Times in 1997 ‘that he would advise parents to abort a foetus if it could be shown to be genetically predetermined to be gay: “If it [homosexuality] can be avoided, I think it should be.”’  Although this is another of the knowingly unspeakable pronouncements of his last years, its more sincere subtext may be that Crisp’s own homosexual existence was, for most of his life, hellish enough for him to wish he’d never been born.  While that doesn’t excuse the remark, it explains it as something more than glib provocation.  Crisp’s ‘What is there to be proud of?’ question to Peter Tatchell can’t be dismissed in those terms either.  It may be hard for present-day gay sensibilities to understand – emotionally, at any rate – that a queer man of Crisp’s vintage couldn’t be immune from the moral pressure of the time to be ashamed, rather than proud, of his sexual nature.  Quentin talks in the film of deciding to deal with the ‘problem’ of his homosexuality by ‘turning it into a cause’.  In what he said to Tatchell, Crisp may also have been questioning the validity of what’s become (especially in the period since Crisp’s death) a tenet of identity politics – that you can, indeed should, take pride in who you happen to be.

    He might have had greater sympathy with transgender people to the extent that they face a tougher path to self-expression, even if not as tough as the one he pursued.  In The Last Word: An Autobiography, written in the last two years of his life and published posthumously, Crisp wrote that, ‘The only thing in my life I have wanted and didn’t get was to be a woman.  It will be my life’s biggest regret.  If the operation had been available and cheap when I was young, say when I was twenty-five or twenty-six, I would have jumped at the chance.  My life would have been much simpler as a result.’  He then instantly clouds the issue by adding that, once he’d become a woman, he ‘would have told nobody.  Instead, I would have gone to live in a distant town and run a knitting wool shop and no one would ever have known my secret’.  This seems to imply that a sex-change operation would also have eradicated Crisp’s inveterate appetite for attention, allowing him to be content with mousy anonymity.  More likely, though, these two remarks were closely juxtaposed to ensure that, to the end, Quentin Crisp kept his audience – that’s surely how he determined to see the world – guessing.  He wanted to leave us, as all the best performers are supposed to leave an audience, wanting more.

    12 November 2020

    [1] The film’s title is Little Malcolm.

  • The Virtues (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Shane Meadows (2019)

    Accepting BAFTA’s Fellowship at their TV awards ceremony last month, Joan Bakewell hailed today’s ‘golden age’ of television.  It’s an era too in which the tradition of film-going, thanks in no small part to streaming services, is disintegrating and in which more than one director who made his name with theatrical releases has turned increasingly to television – or his back on cinema.  Whereas Steven Soderbergh seems to keep changing his mind about this, Shane Meadows hasn’t made a non-fiction feature since Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee in 2009.  The four-part drama The Virtues on Channel 4 is Meadows’s first work for television that isn’t a continuation of the This is England story that started life in cinemas in 2006.  Each of the three TV series that it spawned felt necessary.  Like Meadows, we could never get enough of the characters he and his actors had created and whose lives and personalities he continued to explore.

    Persisting regret that he’s no longer making cinema films has made this viewer alert to how Meadows exploits the additional screen time available to him in a mini-series.  Like This is England 90 (2015), The Virtues runs a total of 270 minutes minus commercial breaks (and with the last of the four episodes ninety rather than sixty minutes).   This new work makes such continuously compelling viewing that it doesn’t seem protracted as you watch.  On the other hand, there’s no doubt the story, in terms of plot, could be told in two hours or less.  Of course that’s not the essential criterion for how long a drama should be but in this case I think Meadows does over-extend things.  He’s so rightly confident that his lead actors can keep sustaining the tension and interest of their one-on-one exchanges that he lets a few of these go round in too many circles, run on beyond the point at which they’re still imparting something new.

    The protagonist is fortyish Joseph (Stephen Graham), who is battling alcoholism and depression.  He has a Liverpool accent but lives in Sheffield.  When his ex-partner Debbie (Juliet Ellis) emigrates to Australia with their nine-year-old son Shea (Shea-Michael Shaw), and her new partner David (Vauxhall Jermaine), Joseph buys a ferry ticket to Ireland.  He goes there less to start a new life than to try and make sense of his past.  He turns up at the home of Anna (Helen Behan), the sister from whom Joseph was separated as a young boy, when he was put into care.  He ran away from the care home, made his way to Liverpool and was never heard of in Ireland again.  Anna, now married to Michael (Frank Laverty), who runs a small building business, and with children of her own, has spent most of her life assuming her brother is dead.  (I wasn’t clear how he knew exactly where to find her.)  Anna and her husband welcome Joseph into their home:  it’s an even fuller house with the arrival of Michael’s unsettled younger sister Dinah (Niamh Algar), who also needs – not for the first time – a roof over her head.  Joseph starts work for Michael, another of whose building team is Craigy (Mark O’Halloran).  He too has a chequered history and he seems to recognise Joseph.

    From an early stage in the drama, Joseph experiences flashbacks to his time in the care home.  My impression was that these increased in number and duration once Joseph was back in the vicinity – rather as Lee Chandler, returning to his home town in Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea, finds the traumatic memories of what happened there several years previously increasingly hard to suppress.  The revelation of Joseph’s childhood trauma is longer coming, however, than the revelation of Lee’s more recent torment and the nature of the trauma relatively predictable.  In a care facility in Ireland in the 1980s, the only question is by whom the nine-year-old Joseph was sexually abused.  Midway through the last episode, he learns that the offenders were two older boys, young teenagers.  The person who confirms their identity is Craigy, also resident in the care home and Joseph’s predecessor as the brothers’ choice of victim.

    It was only after I’d watched The Virtues all the way through that I read Miranda Sawyer’s interview with Shane Meadows, which appeared in The Observer a week or so before the first episode was shown and in which ‘The director speaks for the first time about the horrific event from his childhood that inspired his new TV drama…’  As a nine-year-old, Meadows too was violated by two brothers, one about the same age as him, the other a few years older.  The background to the assault, which took place in woods behind a public park in Meadows’s home town of Uttoxeter, was much more specific than the setting that he and Jack Thorne, who shares the writing credit, have given The Virtues.  While it’s understandable, to put it mildly, that Meadows didn’t want to replicate the circumstances of his own trauma, his decision to root things in Ireland runs the risk of making Joseph’s ordeal more representative than specific – especially once, halfway through part three, Meadows and Thorne introduce another character’s tragedy.

    Dinah and Joseph, soon attracted to each other, have something else in common – a son of similar age.  (As will be clear from the above, nine-year-old boys resonate through The Virtues and what inspired it.)  Dinah gave birth at fifteen and was forced to give up the child.  Learning of Joseph’s recent separation from Shea, she’s impelled to try and make contact with her boy, through the case worker (Niamh Cusack) who arranged his adoption as a baby.  In the final episode, it emerges that Dinah’s son wrote letters and sent drawings to his birth mother several years ago.  She never replied, the child was very upset and his adoptive parents don’t want him upset again.  Dinah didn’t reply to the letters because she knew nothing about them.  They were intercepted and destroyed by her devout Catholic mother.

    In the climax to episode four, each of Joseph and Dinah pays a call on the person who has so damaged their life.   Joseph learns from Craigy that one of their abusers is dead and where the other is living.  Joseph doesn’t think the name is right until Craigy reminds him that, in the care home, the boy in question was known by his name’s reverse spelling:  Joseph remembers Nomad all right.  When he turns up at his house, Joseph finds Damon (Liam Carney) bedridden and quite unrepentant.  Being subject to repeated abuse himself, Damon says, made him immune to receiving and inflicting pain.  Both he and Dinah’s mother (Deirdre Donnelly) wear crucifixes, although Damon, when Joseph asks about this, pronounces God, if He exists, ‘a fucking evil bastard’.  The crucifix image which stands in place of the ‘T’ of ‘virtues’ in the series titles now acquires a more particular significance[1].  It also confirms the Catholic Church as – as usual – the villain of the Hibernian piece.  I’m not suggesting this is wide of the mark but it does feel that Meadows is using it as a convenience – a tried-and-tested framework for his story.

    Meadows’s cross-cutting between the two climactic encounters tightens their grip but also sharpens awareness of how schematic The Virtues has by this stage become.  The main problem with this is the imbalance of power between the Joseph and the Dinah aspects.  Although Niamh Algar gives a highly committed and convincing performance, Dinah doesn’t have anything like the textured backstory that Joseph has.  It’s hard not to be aware that Meadows is using her to complement his main character – and eventually contrast with him.  The threat of lethal violence hangs heavy in the confrontation between Joseph and Damon but materialises only in Dinah’s visit to her mother.  Joseph tells Damon that he forgives him and walks away.  Anna, after a frantic drive to try and intercept her brother’s taking revenge, arrives at Damon’s house as Joseph emerges.  He gets into his sister’s car.  The last shot of The Virtues shows him asleep in the passenger seat as Anna drives them home.  This is a fine image and, once you realise the depth of Shane Meadows’s personal involvement in Joseph’s story, an even more eloquent one than it first seems.  But it also confirms the core of the drama.  So too does Craigy’s suicide, whereas the aftermath of Dinah’s matricide is conspicuous by its absence.

    Stephen Graham is marvellous.  In the first episode, Joseph, after a farewell meal with Debbie, David and Shea, is so miserable that he goes on a bender.  Graham brings to the succeeding phases of Joseph’s getting drunk the most startling realism.  His presence throughout is irresistible, whatever the character’s mood.   The fury within Joseph often makes him formidable.  At other times, he’s so vulnerable you think he might break.  Graham uses his stockiness and his smallness to reinforce the sense of threat and fragility respectively but you never see his technique:  his acting is as interior as it’s expressive.   Although they’re facially very different, he and Lee Pepper, who plays Joseph as a child, have a spiritual continuity.  All the cast are good although there were times, especially in the last episode, when the expletives and repetitions developed the ring of strenuous improvisation.  (I felt particularly that Helen Behan, as much as Anna, was reduced to saying ‘fuck’ every second word as the crisis came to a head.)   It’s churlish to criticise the quality of the acting, though.  Its quality was emphasised by The Virtues being scheduled by Channel 4 in the same slot as Stephen Poliakoff’s expensive-looking, clumsy and stilted Summer of Rockets on BBC2.   Regardless of my reservations about what Shane Meadows has done here, it’s still far ahead of most TV drama.  Cinema’s considerable loss is television’s great gain.

    15 May-5 June 2019

    [1] According to Wikipedia, ‘Traditionally, the seven Christian virtues or heavenly virtues combine the four classical cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and courage (or fortitude) with the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity’.

Posts navigation