A story of love and hate
UNSURPRISINGLY, there wasn’t much to smile about in THE ROAD TO PALMYRA (BBC4). But there was an unexpected moment as the two presenters sat on the circular steps of the famous Syrian monument.
All around were the ruins of an ancient treasure, smashed to rubble by modern-day fanatics. Their journey to this point had been fraught with checkpoints and the sound of distant shelling.
The very theatre steps they sat on had been used not long ago as part of the Isis travelling atrocity circus. “Maybe this is all beyond words,” said historian Dan Cruickshank. “Maybe we should sit in silence for a bit.”
His colleague, war photographer Don McCullin, almost interrupted him. “Yes. I would welcome that.”
It was impossible to ignore the differences between the two men, who were old friends. Dan talked, constantly, words tripping over themselves in high emotion, plainly experiencing Palmyra’s destruction as a personal wound.
A lover and scholar of ancient buildings, he picked up carved lintels and fragments of pillars from the rubble, veering between despair at the people who could do this and hope of some kind of reconstruction. For him, the brutality of Isis towards people, cultures and buildings seemed unimaginable.
It wasn’t clear whether his friend, who’d been documenting wars for 60 years, felt the same. A man of fewer words, Don McCullin seemed haunted.
As the octogenarian clambered up fallen walls and squatted on tin roofs to get the perfect shot, he kept mentioning his own frailty, apologising for it, being angered by it.
Who wouldn’t feel frail when something as solid and long-lived as Palmyra has been turned to dust? As much as this was a film about Palmyra, it was also about two old friends taking a last look at a place they loved, wondering where love had gone.
Where there was once LGB, there was LGBT, then LGBTQ, then last, but probably not finally, LGBTQIAPD. This acronym stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer/questioning, Intersex, Asexual/Aromantic, Pansexual/ Polysexual, Demisexual.
You don’t need to be an expert to see that many of these identities have little in common with one another. That might have been the thinking behind GENDERQUAKE (C4) in which a group of people belonging to various parts of today’s sexual identity spectrum share a house and get drunk a lot.
Unlike the old blokes who obligingly provided a bit of outrage in the pub scenes, I’m not convinced the sexual spectrum is a fad. As 22-year-old housemate Saffron pointed out last night, the path of being non-binary, transsexual etc is so tough that no one would do it as a hobby.
What’s new is the business of trying to pin down the unpin-downable and turn it into an us-versus-them situation. Things got ugly when another member of the group refused to talk about having been born as a girl.
He’d had surgery to become a man which, in his view, made him a man, not a transsexual. It seemed that, to some of his fellows, every personal choice was valid and right, except that one.
It felt like the cause of all these healthy, attractive young folk getting so hot and bothered was politics rather than sex. If that’s true, the human race is doomed.