Blue Light Spells Danger:Blue Lights.

"There's enough bad things in life that'll come looking for you. You don't need to go looking for them" - Gerry Cliff 

"Police and thieves in the street fighting the nation with their guns and ammunition" - Police and Thieves, Junior Murvin

Yet another gritty police drama! You'd think that after three series of Happy Valley, six series of Line of Duty, and one of The Responder our appetites for cops, both bent and decent, and their messy lives would have been well and truly sated. But ... it seems it hasn't.

Blue Lights (BBC1/iPlayer, created by Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, directed by Gilles Bannier) doesn't particularly alter the formula we've become familiar with - but it is a very well made, gripping, thrilling, take on it. It's a great watch.

Three rookie police officers are on probation on the mean streets of Belfast. It's not going particularly well for any of them. Grace (Sian Brooke) is an English woman who's lived in Belfast for twenty years. A single mum, her son Cal (Matt Carver) is having a hard time because he's mixed race but Grace can't see that because she's so immersed in her work.

An ex-social worker she's idealistic and caring but is that perhaps a little naive in the context of being a police woman in Northern Ireland? Stevie (Martin McCann) who's tasked with showing Grace the ropes certainly seems to think so. Although Stevie doesn't give much away about himself except that he's fan of The Bonnevilles and that he likes eating gravadlax for lunch.

Annie (Katherine Devlin) is younger than Grace. She turns up to work with a hangover, she's streetwise, and she's even a little bit cynical. But then she's a Catholic who competes at hurling and Catholics who compete at hurling don't, as a rule, join the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The one that used to be called the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

The third of the rookies is Tommy (Nathan Braniff). Tommy is university educated (he studied criminology), academically minded, and very eager to succeed but he's a terrible shot with a gun and if he can't improve his shooting he won't pass his probation. His mentor is hard bitten but kind and generous Gerry Cliff (Richard Dormer), a big fan of Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash. Two artists Tommy has never even heard of.

Then there's Jen (Hannah McClean). The daughter of a senior officer who is being fast tracked into a senior police position. She's selfish and lazy and she's also a coward. She'll do almost anything not to get involved in proper police work preferring to stay in a nice warm office filing reports. It's hard to like Jen and her sense of entitlement but over six hour long episodes her character is, eventually, fleshed out and you begin to understand her motivations a little better.

As well as the usual police issues of drunkenness, domestic abuse, and people waving knives around in the street, the Belfast of Blue Lights is a city that lives in fear of the McIntyre family, a republican criminal gang in every sense. Headed up by Eric Cantona lookalike James McIntyre (John Lynch) with his son Mo (Michael Shea), a truly nasty piece of work - sometimes too much even for his own father, and young joyrider/petty criminal Gordy Mackle (Dane Whyte O'Hara) acting as his enforcers.

The McIntyres seem untouchable. They attack police and claim to be victims, they administer 'punishment beatings', they deal drugs, and they even shoot up their own houses to distract police from more serious wrongdoings elsewhere. When Gordy's mum Angela (Valene Kane), a woman with mental health issues, starts worrying about Gordy's involvement with the McIntyres the police dismiss her and her family as 'frequent flyers', people who so regularly in trouble with the law that they are essentially beyond help.

Some of the police, like Sergeant Helen McNally (Joanne Crawford) who takes Annie under her wing, are essentially good but others seem a little too up themselves. Inspector David 'Jonty' Johnston (Jonathan Harden) being a prime example. Jonty seems to be forever in the process of dishing out a bollocking and he doesn't take any shit from anyone.

Or at least not from anyone below him in the food chain. It's a different matter when we see him meet with MI5 officer Joseph (Nabil Elouahabi). Joseph's not happy about something but we're not sure exactly what that is. He makes demands of Jonty, threatens him, and stops him from being able to carry out his job properly. Has he got something on him? What does he want from him?

Something is clearly afoot higher up. What are the 'sneaky beakies' (undercover police) from the mainland doing in Belfast? Why is the palace (a centre for kids coming out of care which acts as a stepping stone back into society) so quiet? There's a lot of strange stuff happening and soon a lot of new characters start to appear which help tell the story but as I'm not in the business of spoilers I won't go any further.

Of course there are balaclavas, whiskey, and appointment shootings (all the Irish cliches ticked off pretty easily) and there are car chases, drug overdoses, and women being punched in the face - and spat on - by men but there's also a story of a cop who shat himself at work when a firework went off and was so mortified he resigned immediately and moved to Australia and there's even a very brief blast of Where's Me Jumper by The Sultans Of Ping FC.

There's tension between the uniformed police and the sneaky beakies and there are more than a few references to the sectarian nature of Northern Irish society. The police check under their cars each morning for bombs, young lads on pushbikes call them 'peelers', kids throw bottles at police cars in predominantly Catholic housing estates, and then there's the murals and a framed photo gallery in the police station containing images of OUR MURDERED COLLEAGUES.

There are good supporting performances from Andi Osho as desk Sergeant Sandra Cliff (Gerry's wife), Packy Lee (Peaky Blinders' Johnny Dogs) as a man whose son the McIntyres come for, and Alan Jenkins as a damaged, but well meaning, local eccentric called Happy Kelly. There's been talk recently about shows like Happy Valley being 'copaganda' (trying to promote a positive image of the police when recent high profile cases have shown the Met, particularly, to be riddled with rapists and murderers) but I don't think you could accuse Blue Lights of copaganda. The police in Blue Lights are nuanced, human, and fallible as much as they may be idealistic, officious, or conflicted.

Pushed along by Eion O'Callaghan and Elmo Orkestra's haunting score, Blue Lights is tense, even paranoid in places, it's sometimes eerie, it can be moving and sad, and, at times, it can be utterly horrific but it's never ever boring. As things move on it turns out that almost everybody in it is in some way interlinked in ways that are not initially obvious. As well as police and thieves it looks at racism, bullying, nepotism, parental pressures, and loneliness and it never offers answers. It always asks questions.

Questions about the cultural differences between different age groups and classes, questions about how some people seem to be above the law or at least how the law is applied differently to different sections of society, questions about how police decisions at every level of the hierarchy are subject to endless compromise, and questions about how the spectres of a violent history of an area can be passed down through the generations and how the sins of the father are eventually played out by the son. A blood oath written in Belfast's very unique, and tragic, history. 

 

Heartbreak Motel:Nolly.

I remember Crossroads. But I don't remember much about it. I remember the theme tune by Tony Hatch, I remember it was on at 6.30pm (which seemed to fall between children's TV and 'proper' evening entertainment and when I did watch it it was probably while eating my tea on a black and white portable in the kitchen), I remember Benny in his woolly hat and his presumably unrequited love for Miss Diane, and I remember a smoothie called Adam Chance.

That's about it. I don't actually remember Noele 'Nolly' Gordon being on it at all. Even though she was the most famous thing about it. Nolly (ITVX, written by Russell T Davies and directed by Peter Hoar) tells her story, at least some of it, and it tells it in a very enjoyable, and ultimately quite moving, way.

The year is 1981 and Nolly (Helena Bonham-Carter) has been the star of Crossroads since its inception in 1964. She played Meg Mortimer, owner of the Crossroads motel in the West Midlands somewhere. With fifteen million viewers per episode, Nolly has become such a big star that fans queue outside for her autograph. On the news she's referred to as "the Queen of the Midlands", she wears fur coats and bosses around the producers and though she claims that everyone has "equal status" and that "the star of the show is the motel" she clearly doesn't actually believe that.

She changes the scripts if she doesn't like them, she changes where people stand to deliver their lines, and she tells actors not to do Brummie accents and instead to use RP. One of these is new cast member Poppy (Bethany Antonia), who plays Honour - not a genuine Crossroads character but a plot device employed by the makers of Nolly, who nearly makes the fatal mistake of sitting in Nolly's empty chair in rehearsals.

Nolly takes Poppy under her wing - to a degree - but it is Tony Adams - not that one - whom she has the closest relationship. Adams (Augustus Prew) plays the aforesaid Adam Chance. He is Nolly's friend and confidante and together they drink wine, gossip, go on late night shopping sprees, and wonder if they've become "old fashioned". Nolly also appears to be close to Jane Rossington (Antonia Bernath) who plays her on-screen daughter, Jill. Rossington sometimes calls Nolly mum and that's not the only time in Nolly when the blurring of real and imagined lives happens.

Though Nolly acts the big star in the studio, her home life is shown to be quite lonely. She lives alone and turns the television off in anger when the (more successful) Coronation Street comes on. Coronation Street from the Fred Gee era too. Classic Coronation Street.

The ever reliable Con O'Neill plays Crossroads producer Jack Barton and it is he that Nolly over-rides the most. Nolly's agent Michael Summerton (Max Brown), a man who once played a dalek in Dr Who, goes to ATV's Head of Programming (ATV being the makers of Crossroads) Charles Denton (Tim Wallers) to try and broker a better deal, more pay and more holiday, for Nolly but Denton's answer is not what he expects. Denton's decided he's going to sack Nolly.

She doesn't take it well. She's distraught, devastated, and heartbroken. She goes to the press, tells them she practically invented daytime television and announces, with no little drama, that "the star of the show has been sacked". So much for the motel being the star.

Sackloads of complaints, however, roll from fans outraged at Nolly's sacking/Meg's forthcoming exit. But, as with all controlling people, when they can longer control others they try to control the narrative and, in this, Nolly is no different. She wants to have a say in how Meg exits the show. She particularly doesn't want Meg to be killed off. But Barton, sensing a new era in soaps, wants a moment to compete with "who shot JR?".

That all happens in the first forty-five minutes. For the next hour and a half we find out what does, eventually, happen to Meg, what does eventually happen to Crossroads, and, most importantly, of all, what becomes of Nolly herself. There will be no spoilers from me on that but it'll come as no surprise that, as comes to us all at a certain age, there's a lot of looking back and a lot of wondering about the lives we've lead and the lives we could have lead. A lot of considering what's the best way of using the time left.

Nolly, of course, doesn't go out quietly. There's a great scene where she sits with Larry Grayson (Mark Gatiss obviously relishing the role and excelling in it) backstage and the two of them open up about the changing nature of show business, about reaching their sell by dates, and what they think is the best way to deal with that.

There's quite a bit of that in Nolly. It's set in a Britain that doesn't quite exist anymore. It's greyer but it's also more innocent looking (though that could just be because I was still a teenage boy when Nolly was axed from Crossroads) and the way the Crossroads actors treated each other almost like a second family reminded of a time when work places could be like that. Before heavy data, KPIs, and fake brand value bullshit took over.

Of course it wasn't always great back then. Sexism, racism, and homophobia were rife, health and safety was virtually non-existent (people smoked in offices), and there was a booze culture that no doubt cut short more than a few lives. But Nolly is a show that looks back through rose tinted spectacles and it's all the more charming for that.

There are references to Rentaghost, This Is Your Life, Derek Nimmo, Game For A Laugh, Brideshead Revisited, Jimmy Tarbuck, and VHS videos for us kids of the eighties to savour, the real Tony Adams makes a cameo, and many of the original Crossroads characters are recreated. Some of which it turned out I did remember after all. 

There's Richard Lintern playing Ronnie Allen who played David Hunter, Clare Foster as Sue Lloyd who played David's wife Barbara, and of course there's Paul Henry's Benny, played in Nolly by Lloyd Griffith. Miss Diane too, played in Crossroads by Susan Hanson who in turn is portrayed by Chloe Harris. There's even an appearance of the chef Shughie McFee. Played in Crossroads by Angus Lennie who is played in Nolly by Gordon Kane. Shughie is the character responsible for my mate Shep's brother nickname, Shoey. Shoey, like Shep, comes from Cumbria but when they moved down south as kids people thought he sounded like Scottish Shughie McFee so he was given the nickname Shoey and it's stuck until this day.

I digress. By watching Nolly, I learnt that Noele Gordon was the first woman in the world to appear on colour television (in 1938 as part of John Logie Baird's (John Mackay) first ever colour transmission) and that she was the first woman ever to interview a British PM in the form of Harold MacMillan (Nicholas Gecks).

The best line of the show was given to O'Neill's Barton (as he tells Nolly about his past work, he recalls working at a circus "backstage with clowns. That's savage") and there's even a little dig about people not being able to afford to put their heating which chimed all too loudly with those undergoing the enforced and conscious cruelty of our current government but mostly it's an enjoyable romp through an era that though only forty years ago appears much older.

Prew is deliciously camp as Adams but it is of course Bonham-Carter who commands the screen. She plays Nolly not as a monster, that'd be too easy and it'd also be unfair, but as a complex and nuanced individual struggling to find a place in a world that is moving on regardless. Towards the end, things got pretty emotional. As they tend to when people find themselves untethered and unmoored. It is to the great credit of Russell T Davies, Peter Hoar, and the entire cast of Nolly that those feelings came over so affectingly. 

Free As A Bird:Trailblazers:A Rocky Mountain Road Trip.

I'd never heard of Isabella Bird. She is just one of many many women who have been more or less written out of history and, in recent years - finally, is being written back into it. She was a fascinating character. Born in Yorkshire in 1831, by the age of 41 she was suffering with a bad back and a general 'malaise'. Advised to get some fresh air she headed off to the Rocky Mountains in America in 1873 and from there she never looked back.

On horseback, she rode eight hundred miles across the Rockies in three months. She met pioneers panning for gold, she helped cowboys wrangle cattle, climbed 14,000ft high Longs Peak (in men's shoes three sizes too big for her and a dress), faced down grizzly bears, and ate cherry kernels from the stomach of a dead bear when there was no other food to be found. She even fell for a one eyed alcoholic ruffian called Mountain Jim. She was four foot and eleven inches tall.

In Trailblazers:A Rocky Mountain Road Trip (BBC2/iPlayer), Ruby Wax, Mel B, and Emily Atack tell her story while going on their Rockies road trip (though in a Jeep rather than horseback). At the same time they manage to uncover a few obvious, and a few less obvious, truths about American society both then and now as well as tease each other relentlessly and muck about a far old bit.

It's educational, sure, but more than that it's heart-warming and charming. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Their journey starts in Cheyenne, Wyoming for a look at taxidermy and a meal of Rock Island deep fried oysters which, spoiler alert, are not oysters at all but bull's testicles. Yum.

The rest of the journey, apart from one brief stop in Utah's Moab (the red rock desert where Thelma and Louise died), is all in Colorado. They travel from Estes Park (9,000ft high peaks with "health in every breath of air" and now a tourist destination") to the gambling mecca of Central City (once the site of a gold rush and nicknamed the richest square mile on Earth) and on to Aspen, a ski resort and billionaire's playground where rich divorced men come to meet young attractive women and where there's a ludicrously priced hat shop (a mere hat band may set you back $6,000) with an attached cocktail bar.

In Aspen they learn about something called the 'paradise paradox'. Despite all its wealth many in Aspen are very unhappy and the city has a very high suicide rate. The bluegrass festival in Durango looks much more fun and life affirming and the people living off the grid in the desert ghost town of Cisco seem much happier in their lot. Atack describes the former railway town as looking like an "abandoned Alton Towers".

Ruby, Mel, and Emily visit Colorado's spiritual centre, home of Native American ceremonies, and - this is America - UFO hotspot, Crestone and when they attend a festival with the indigenous Ute tribe (all bear dances and talk of sweat lodges) they learn that the dream for them is not ever increasing wealth but, quite simply, self-sufficiency.

It's quite telling. Being in America, we obviously touch on guns, God, and a greedy destruction of nature (which, admittedly, is hardly unique to the US) and equally obviously we take in some of the most awesome and breathtaking scenery the planet has to offer but we keep coming back to that thorny old concept, the American Dream.

For many the American Dream seems to be tied up with consumerism and worship of money. It's been such an powerful driving force in US history that entire forests were cut down, millions of buffalo were slaughtered, and it ultimately resulted in the near genocide of all 'Indian' people. On the day that Donald Trump has been indicted and is suspected to use that to stir up hate and division in the country this seems as relevant now as ever.

But Ruby Wax, Mel B, and Emily Atack aren't Simon Schama, Ken Burns, or Adam Curtis and they're not here to get political. They're in Colorado to have some fun and try new experiences while they learn about Isabella Bird. We see them horse riding, rock climbing, fishing, wandering around in snow shoes, off roading, trying rodeo, allowing wolves to lick their faces, drinking Bourbon with pickle juice chasers, sasquatch hunting, and 'stumbling' on an old mining town, Gold Hill, which looks like a Wild West Hollywood film set.

They even make a mural of Isabella Bird. While some of the pranks appear to be staged the chemistry between the three presenters comes across as genuine. They sing Wannabe in the Jeep, when Ruby drives (terribly) Mel B becomes a very persistent back seat driver and Emily even takes time out to swipe on celebrity Tinder halfway up a mountain. She's big with the selfies too and has a very crude, very British, sense of humour. Giggling at a horse's multi-coloured dick and barely able to control herself when she's introduced to a musical instrument called a growler.

Set to a soundtrack of Johnny Cash, Blondie, Steppenwolf, Shania Twain, Lil Nas X, Woody Guthrie, Whitney Houston, LeAnn Rimes, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Cyndi Lauper, Creedence Clearwater Revival, John Denver, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, First Aid Kit, and Doc Watson's wonderfully evocative Freight Train Boogie, it's all great fun.

A fun way to learn. I warmed to all three presenters. I didn't really know anything about Emily Atack beforehand but she seemed to go on the biggest mental, and emotional, journey of all three. Obviously I know who Mel B is (she was one of The Spice Girls for FFS, she even reveals here that Geri and Emma were her two favourites) but despite being ironically scared of lots of things she seemed a good sport and it was hard not to laugh when she mixed up the words yeti and jetty and then, later on, flagellation and flatulation. For some reason, I'm not sure why, I've never been a fan of Ruby Wax but she won me over here by singing the Beverly Hillbillies theme tune and telling stories of being the daughter of Austrian immigrants and being bullied at school for speaking German. All three of them were great but Isabella Bird? She was a bad-ass.

Chasing Rainbows:Murder In The Pacific.

I remember the sinking of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior back in 1985. I was sixteen at the time. That's nearly forty years ago so, perhaps understandably, I don't remember much detail about the event. Murder In The Pacific (BBC2/iPlayer, directed by Chloe Campbell) has received good reviews so I thought I'd give it a look.

I must admit though. I wondered how they'd stretch it out for three nearly hour long episodes. Quite easily it turned out. By telling the story pretty much day by day, by using reenactments and dramatisations, with archive televsion footage, with scores of talking heads (from Guardian reporters and other journalists to deck hands and the captain of the Rainbow Warrior - Peter Willcox, from various Auckland police to Michael Hesltine (then UK Defence Secretary) and Malcolm Rifkind (then a junior minister in the Foreign Office) and even a lady from a car rental company), and powered along by Raphaelle Thibaut's dramatic score, Murder In The Pacific was a lot more interesting, and intriguing, than I'd expected.

Even moving in places. Back in 1985, in Jacksonville, Florida, Greenpeace are getting a former North Sea trawler ready for its journey across the world's largest ocean. It's got a predictably hippy vibe on the surface but there are experienced sailors on board too. As well as journalists and photographers to tell the story. The Rainbow Warrior even had a dark room.

The plan was to sail to Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands where the US had been testing nuclear bombs, some larger than those that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since 1946. After being awarded the Marshall Islands following the end of World War II, the US were supposed to be looking after them but, instead, it appeared they were ruthlessly exploiting them.

Though testing had ended by the time the Rainbow Warrior set sail the legacy, in the form of contamination - both of the land and of the people, was still very much in evidence. Nuclear fallout in Rongelap had caused islanders hair to fall out, to suffer severe pain, and every single islander had a scar on their neck where their thyroid had been removed. Some children had suffered stunted growth and one baby was born without a single bone in its body.

We hear US reports from the time that refer to the Marshallese as "amenable savages" but some on Rongelap were savvy enough to get in touch with Greenpeace and ask for their help in moving to another, less contaminated atoll, about one hundred and fifty miles away. Greenpeace agreed.

When, on 17th May 1985, the Rainbow Warrior reached the "extremely beautiful" island they were welcomed with a song and then roughly three hundred of them, and all of their stuff, were relocated to the island of Mejetto. The fishing wasn't good there and the soil wasn't fertile but at least it wasn't full of nuclear contamination. The community remain there to this day.

The next mission for the Rainbow Warrior and her crew was to try and stop the French carrying out a nuclear test in French Polynesia. They'd been testing at Mururoa Atoll since the sixties and, unlike the Americans, were still doing so.

The plan was to head to New Zealand and spend a fortnight there resupplying the Rainbow Warrior before heading to Mururoa. On the 10th July a party was held on the boat for someone's birthday but later that same night two explosions happened on the Rainbow Warrior. Peter Willcox had been asleep but when the bombs woke him up he quickly called for all to abandon ship.

Within forty seconds the Rainbow Warrior had sunk. With one crew member on it. A young parent. Dedicating your life to Greenpeace, Willcox says now, shouldn't mean giving up your life.

It soon became apparent that it had been no accident but who had bombed the Rainbow Warrior? Suspects were many. Greenpeace had made lots of enemies. A homicide inquiry began. A big one. One of the, possibly the, biggest New Zealand had ever seen. It was headed up by "dour Scotsman" DSI Allan Galbraith who, interviewed then and now, comes across as decent and methodical.

The final two thirds of Murder In The Pacific are dedicated to that homicide inquiry and police investigation and it's quite a ride. It takes in dinghies, yachts, camper vans, a motel on Norfolk Island, Interpol, secret agents, and, possibly, state terrorism. Eventually all the evidence starts to point in one very clear direction but will the New Zealand police find the culprits, the killers, and, if so, will they be made accountable?

Murder In The Pacific reminds us of a time when photocopiers and fax machines were impressive and bamboozling bits of kit but it also reminds us of a time when those on the right thought that Greenpeace were KGB stooges either intentionally, or unintentionally, helping the Kremlin. It also shows that powerful people are very hard to bring to justice. More than anything it reminded me of what amazing work Greenpeace did back then. It remains a crime that someone died for trying to make the world a better place. 

Send Me A Postcard:Execution Postcards.

"They're selling postcards of the hanging" - Desolation Row, Bob Dylan

We've all sent and received a postcard. What do you think of when you think of the image on the front? A beach? A historic castle or palace? Some beautiful scenery? What about somebody being garrotted in Mexico or an Italian firing squad shooting someone dead?

Last night I joined the London Fortean Society at The Bell in Whitechapel for The Brutality of Spectacle:A Brief History of the Execution Postcard to hear a little about these grisly, and seemingly once popular, artefacts. I wasn't sure if it would be particularly interesting, it is a little niche, but it turned out to be a great evening. Although one that is hard to capture in blog form because it was highly discursive.

I'll give it a go. The speakers, historian Jennifer Wallis and conceptual artist John B Bernard - a couple who met and got together, when he showed her his etchings/execution postcards, began by outlining how death and photography had long gone hand in hand. In the early days of photography, it was not uncommon to take a photo of a dead family member to remember them by.

That's something we'd probably blanch at now - preferring to remember people in life rather than after death - but it didn't seem to worry the Victorians. Even that though is hardly comparable to sending a jauntily written postcard to a friend, family member, or sweetheart with a cover image of a bandit gang stoned to death in Afghanistan, a Chinese strangulation device in operation, or black men being lynched in America.

Some are in the form of illustrations but it's the photographs that disturb the most. The lynching photo shows a joyful crowd of white folk, some in their Sunday best, gleefully celebrating both the lynching and the photo op. They're not ashamed to be there. They're proud. It's a family event. As the Chinese prisoners are gradually strangled by horrific torture devices a seemingly unbothered crowd mills around a market stall in the background. 

As if it's absolutely no big deal. That's what happens with othering and dehumanisation. The French philosopher Georges Bataille noted that some people, on the point of execution, seem to appear both in extreme agony and almost somehow joyful. In the case of the Chinese victims of lin-chi (where you have your body slowly cut up into about hundred or more pieces, the death by a thousand cuts) that may be because they've been given opium before execution so that they don't die too quickly and can fully experience the pain of their own death.

Families of some of those subjected to lin-chi would bribe executioners to make a stab in the heart right at the start so that they at least die quickly. Albert Camus observed not so much the "joy" of the victims but how much the gathering crowds who watch these grim spectacles seemed to get off on it. As long as humans are fascinated by death, to an almost pornographic degree, there's always a danger of this happening.

Wallis and Bernard are looking at creating both an exhibition and an academic book on these execution postcards but they admitted they had moral qualms that they had not yet fully squared. Some of the images shown were cropped and there was a lot of talk of gatekeeping, positionality, and how an image of, for example, a lynching may be viewed very differently by a black person than it would be by a white person.

During the Q&A, I was tempted to ask a question wondering if there were ever any British equivalents to these postcards and then I looked around the pub I was in. It was in Whitechapel so they were selling Jack the Ripper t-shirts and promoting Jack the Ripper walks (on the way to and from the pub I passed the controversial Jack the Chipper fish and chip shop) and I soon realised that we're not really that different.

We're all fascinated by death but I'm certainly glad that most sane countries in the world country have got rid of the death penalty and we no longer gather in crowds to watch people die and then send postcards to celebrate the experience. Thanks to Dewi, Jade, Michael, Tim, Paula, and Jackie for joining me last night, thanks to David and the LFS for hosting, and thanks to Jennifer and John for a fascinating talk about a very grim subject.

Abortion.

I don't have a view on abortion. It's not my place to. I'll never be pregnant. I'm a man. I think it's up to women themselves to choose and not for me to tell them. If, and this is a highly unlikely scenario, I'd ever impregnated somebody I would hope they would at least discuss it with me before making a decision but that decision, ultimately, would be theirs.

In that respect, that means I'm 'pro-choice' rather than 'pro-life' but I don't think those terms really help anybody. A lot of the pro-life brigade seem to think life ends at birth. They fully support policies that ensure infant poverty and often they are vehemently in favour of having no restrictions on gun ownership. They don't seem very pro-life then.

Last night's Skeptics in the Pub - Online talk, The Social and Cutural Factors Influencing Attitudes To Abortion, was not about whether or not abortion is morally right or morally wrong. Both speakers, Dr Lora Adair (a senior lecturer at Brunel University in Uxbridge) and Dr Nicole Lozano (an assistant professor in psychology at Angelo State University in Texas), were firmly pro-choice and they were there to talk more about what influences people's attitudes on abortion.

After all, lots of women have abortions, it's estimated that one in three of the female population of the UK will have one, but very few speak about the experience and even fewer speak about it publicly. You almost certainly know somebody who has had an abortion and hasn't told you.

The evening kicked off with a story about a woman called Diamond. Diamond became pregnant as a teenager. She was quite naive and she didn't know who she could talk to about it. So she spoke to her mum. Her mum told her that if she had an abortion she'd never be able to have kids. That simply isn't true. It's a popular abortion myth to go along with the oft told lie that having an abortion can give a woman breast cancer.

But Diamond believed her mum and she had the baby. Though Diamond, now, does not regret bringing her child in to the world she does regret that she was not told the truth when she was pregnant. When Diamond became pregnant for a second time, this time better informed, she chose to have an abortion.

The reason for telling this story is because it's one that illustrates how people's attitudes about, and knowledge of, abortions affects whether they choose to have one or not. Dr Lozano's research has been primarily carried out in rural Texas and her takeaways have been that denying women access to abortions can create many problems.

These mothers may face economic hardship for years and years, they may have their credit scores lowered and be forced into debt, and having an essentially unwanted child may force them to stay with violent partners. Violent partners who may indeed insist on yet more children. Unsurprisingly, the development and well being of the children involved is often affected too.

Abortions are relatively safe procedures nowadays. Being forced to give birth is far more dangerous. For some women, it is life threatening. Yet some women still feel stigma and shame about accessing abortion services. Some people tell them that by having an abortion they're killing a baby and nobody wants to do that.

But why should one person care what one other person does with their uterus? Dr Adair proposed, quite controversially I thought, that judging and controlling other people has, historically, been quite useful for human society. Spitting indoors and poor food hygiene being things that society has deemed socially unacceptable and if you were to spit indoors or run a disgusting kitchen you'd be looked down upon. This, in a way, forces people not to do those things and makes life safer for everyone.

Reproductive rights are less clear and in trying to look at how people form their attitudes on abortion, Dr Adair first looked at which kind of people, broadly speaking, disprove of abortion. She found it was mostly older people, mostly men, mostly people of a religious persuasion, mostly less well educated people, and mostly more conservative minded people.

Obviously there is much nuance and there are many exceptions but, on the whole, those findings won't be a major surprise to most of us. On a country level, studies show that anti-abortion attitudes are more prominent in very religious countries and countries with very restrictive abortion laws. Of course there's a big, almost pregnant, bulge in the middle of that Venn diagram.

In March 2022, a survey was taken on attitudes to abortion. People were surveyed in four countries (UK, USA, India, and Mexico). Roughly 50% male, 50% female, 87% heterosexual, and with a wide range of political views and an average age of forty-one years old. The countries involved have huge differences in the amount of gender inequality (the UK is the most equal, India falls very far behind) and very different attitudes about casual sex.

But gender inequality didn't seem to affect attitudes as much as perhaps some people would expect. The graph was very confusing but it seemed pretty much to confirm everything written in the previous few paragraphs. In both the UK and India it is easier to access an abortion than it is in either Mexico or the USA and, whaddya know?, survey respondents in India and the UK had more liberal attitudes to abortion than those in Mexico and the USA.

So it seems that a country's laws don't just change how viable it is to access a safe abortion but how people in those countries feel about it. That's why the June 2022 reversal of Roe v Wade by the US Supreme Court is so pernicious. Abortion is now fully banned in thirteen American states and they're not all in the south. They stretch from West Virginia to Idaho and from Wisconsin to Texas.

When laws change it changes how people think. In some cases it gives them permission to entertain thoughts they may have already had in the back of their heads. This is dangerous for women and it's dangerous for society and it's where the talk ended because time was running out. It was interesting even if it had not been particularly conclusive.

But then how could it be? This is one hot topic that's not going anyway any time soon. The Q&A took in anti-vaxxing, bodily autonomy, benevolent sexism (!), the United Nations, human rights, some more Roe v Wade for good measure, and The Satanic Temple of Salem, Massachusetts which looks fascinating and had me thinking of signing up. Especially as they don't actually worship Satan but instead work together to promote broadly progressive causes. 

Including reproductive rights. I'd like to thank Dr Lora Adair and Dr Nicole Lozano for an interesting and informative talk and also to thank Kat Ford from Merseyside Skeptics and her cat (which is called cat, Kat's cat Cat) for hosting and, as ever, Skeptics in the Pub - Online for making these fortnightly Thursday evenings something to look forward to. 

 

Fleapit revisited:Sex On Screen.

"If you were asked to do something, especially by a man, you did it" - Jane Fonda

"The Hollywood machine is something to be survived" - Rose McGowan

Sex On Screen (directed by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, part of BBC4's Storyville strand and currently available to watch on the iPlayer) tells a story that won't surprise many. It tells a story of female actors sitting topless, or naked, in large airy rooms surrounded by fully dressed men, it tells a story of women told that if they don't take their clothes off their careers will flounder, and it tells of male actors and directors exploiting that situation to satisfy their own desires.

It is, of course, quite depressing. When the director Angela Robinson talks about how everyone learns how to behave, sexually and otherwise, from the movies I felt seen. Sex education at school was rudimentary and medical, my parents are certainly not the type to sit their kids down and give them a talk about the birds and the bees, and if I believed the kids in the school playground I'd think some men have 12ft long penises and that vaginal openings were perfectly spherical.

So I stayed up late watching Channel 4 'red triangle' films hoping to see some sex or at least some nudity. As many my age did. In the 1990s, The Bare Facts Video Guide listed the exact minute in several films where you could see boobs, bums, fannies, and willies. Teenage boys and young men soon became masters of the pause button. Masturbators of the pause button too.

But all of this was for men. As the film maker Karyn Kusama correctly points out in Sex On Screen, there are lot of people, a lot of women and girls especially, who are not catered for by these films. Films where the men 'act' and the women are looked at. Some women interviewed talk of once desperately wanting to be the 'object' of desire. Wanting to be objectified.

Sex On Screen doesn't have a traditional narration. It lets the women involved, along with a few men, tell the story from their own personal experience. So we hear from the likes of Fonda, McGowan, Kusama, Robinson, Rosanna Arquette, Lauren "Lolo" Spencer, Sheryl Lee, and David Simon as well as body doubles, film scholars, visual effects artists, writers, and producers. As well as lots of other female actors I probably should have heard of but haven't.

There are clips from a wide range of films and television shows and they all have, of course, one thing in common. Showgirls, Basic Instinct, Fifty Shades Of Grey, Body Of Evidence, Midnight Cowboy, Barbarella, The Sex Lives Of College Girls, The Deuce, Jennfer's Body, American Psycho, Boogie Nights, Gone With The Wind (!), The Color Purple, Game Of Thrones, Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Cafe, Live And Let Die, Pretty Woman, Psycho, Coffy, Carnal Knowledge, and, er, Ace Ventura:Pet Detective come at sex in a number of different ways but all help to build up a picture of an industry, and a county - USA, that finds it easier to come to terms with violence than it does sex.

It tells a long history of showgirls. Of literally showing girls. It talks of a long history of young male writers who don't know, and don't want to know, a woman's perspective on sex. But limited imaginations result in limited choice and the sex we see on screen is often the sex we, we men, like to imagine. Idealised, prettified, and not very real.

Perhaps surprisingly, it wasn't always this way. In the late twenties and early thirties, about 50% of films were written by women. The likes of Mae West, Greta Garbo, and Bette Davis are described in Sex On Screen as both "naughty" and "dangerous".

They had agency. But the Hollywood Production Code, or Hays Code, changed that. Film makers were banned from suggesting sex outside of marriage, there was to be no interracial kissing, no kissing at all that lasted longer than three seconds, and married couples would be shown to sleep in single beds. Interesting or nuanced women's roles in films had been all but destroyed.

But when sex returned to the silver screen things had changed. When censorship was severely eased, Hollywood went from showing romance without sex to showing sex without romance. Female actors were told, often by male directors, that appearing nude on screen would be empowering for them. Some female actors believe it was and still is. Others don't and talk of leaving their body or going into 'blackout' when having to act out a sex scene. It is to Sex On Screen's great credit that both voices are heard.

Of course, sex was still primarily shown as something to titillate men. Particularly white men. That meant lesbian scenes played out as male fantasies. That meant very few women of colour were shown to have active sex lives. Overweight, and disabled, people fared even worse and trans people? That's a whole other debate and one that films, historically, have either steered clear of or got painfully wrong.

With the advent of the Internet and social media in recent decades, nude scenes don't disappear quickly either. They're made into GIFs and uploaded to websites like PornHub and AZNUDE and, often, people are free to make whatever comment they like beneath them. As prurient, as hurtful, or as abusive as they wish. Imagine having reviews of your body and your (perceived) sexual performance stored online for anyone to view whenever they want.

The body double Marli Renfro describes how, during her career, she was treated "like a chicken dinner:- bring out the legs, bring out the beast, bring out the thigh". Things are improving now and we see scenes of an intimacy co-ordination training class (how to mime a blow-job, watching some very sadistic sex scenes in older films) and a part about how agreements now work.

They're quite involved. An actor may agree to show side boob but not nipple or set a limit on how much bum crack can be shown beneath a slipping towel. In the past many men involved in the film industry simply demanded nudity and sacked female actors who refused to provide it. Blake Edwards and James Franco don't come out of this film looking very good.

Others, of course, went even further. We all know about Harvey Weinstein - current home the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles, but I'd never heard of Kip Pardue who sexually violated the actor Sarah Scott on set and seemed to believe that in doing so he was simply enjoying the 'perks' of the job.

Sex On Screen does a good job of naming and shaming individuals who deserve to be named and shamed but it also takes in a whole range of things. From the Victorian photographer Eadweard Muybridge to merkins and modesty garments, from the rise of hardcore pornography to Andy Warhol and the sixties and seventies sexual revolution, and from blaxploitation films to #MeToo and Time's Up. Most of all it tackles an unrelenting, and often squalid, male gaze.

There's a telling moment very early on in Sex On Screen when one interviewee talks about how winning an Oscar means you don't have to get naked anymore. When I Googled to find out who I could attribute that quote to I couldn't find an answer but I was directed to "15 Oscar-Winning Nude Scenes" and "Actresses that got COMPLETELY NAKED onscreen" which, I think, tells you how far we've still got to go.

Sex On Screen does end feeling a bit more positive about how desire and sexuality are now being portrayed on screen but I rather suspect this journey has only just begun and there will probably be more than a few wrong turns along the way. At least it seems like there's a map now.