Lucy’s legs ... and the march of a #MeToo generation

MICHAEL Parkinson was right on one thing about the 1975 interview with Helen Mirren in which he was unwise enough to ask if her ‘equipment’ undermined her credibility as a serious actress.

‘It was good television,’ he said recently. Compelling, in fact, for it vividly portrayed two cultures colliding – the casual sexism hardwired into powerful men in 1970s Britain and the icy contempt of educated young women who were not prepared to take it any more.

‘Serious actresses can’t have big bosoms, is that what you mean?’ challenged Mirren.

I thought about that exchange this week as another male television host was accused of ‘unbelievable’ sexism towards a weather presenter who had shown up for work in a denim minidress.

We should establish straight away that this was not good television. Even the protagonists would probably vouch for that.

It was ITV’s Good Morning Britain and this bit was the inconsequential chit-chat that someone has decided must pass between the hosts and the weather person before every forecast.

‘Loving the denim look,’ Susanna Reid told weather presenter Lucy Verasamy, who seemed pleased.

‘It’s a bit Dolly Parton,’ confided Miss Verasamy, adding: ‘I’m worried it’s going to shrink in the rain.’

Told you it was dull. Who’d have imagined such tedium could be whipped up into a media storm?

It didn’t take much. Just an idle contribution to the fluff from the male of the species – in this case Miss Reid’s co-host, Richard Madeley.

‘You should pop outside at once and test it out,’ he chirruped, catastrophically forgetting that this is 2018 and what once passed as innocent badinage between the sexes is now, in the eyes of our snowflake moral arbiters, tantamount to sexual abuse.

Snowflakes

‘Thanks for that, Richard,’ laughed the apparently unfazed Miss Verasamy – what a total pro in the face of such effrontery – but I assume she has now been offered some form of trauma counselling.

As for Mr Madeley, or ‘that creepy perv’ as snowflakes have taken to calling him, what are we to do with the neolith?

Will a fortnight’s unpaid equality training be enough?

Should Ofcom do something? What about the police? Millions, after all, have now heard the offensive remark.

The answers to those questions may depend on the extent to which we are prepared to be tyrannised by the #MeToo hysteria which calls out ever more innocuous examples of male/female interaction as utterly beyond the pale.

As I understand it, Mr Madeley was making a mildly flirtatious joke towards a fellow presenter who, for all I know, he finds quite attractive.

I think what he was saying was something like, ‘Yes, Lucy, go out in the rain because if you do and your minidress does shrink you will show an inch or two more thigh than the six inches you are letting everyone see already’.

I think it was Richard Madeley’s way of saying that Lucy Verasamy has nice legs.

I do not think he was asking whether having nice legs made it difficult for her to be taken seriously as a weather forecaster.

Should viewers of Good Morning Britain be troubled by what he said? Or should the mirthless social media censure of the tiniest snippet of playfulness by an ageing TV host trouble us more?

Your answer may show your age. It may show that you remember Bruce Forsyth inviting his wife, Anthea Redfern, to ‘give us a twirl’ on the Generation Game every Saturday night.

It may betray that you are on nodding terms at least with the kind of innuendo which made Barbara Windsor do her naughty giggle and tell Sid James: ‘Ooh, saucy!’

Guilt

It may establish your guilt in thought crimes like smiling inwardly at the double entendre in that Bellamy Brothers hit, If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me?

Perhaps you also remember and enjoyed the running gag Terry Wogan had in the 1980s with the succession of screen goddesses who would reach over and touch his knee.

If you are a man and my age you may remember Kate Bush or Debbie Harry and the awakening of something in you that Adam Ant or Simon Le Bon awakened in our female contemporaries.

You may recall that it was quite normal back then not just to think these people had nice legs but also to be in love with them and dream, some day, of marrying them.

Yes, if you think Mr Madeley may not be the devil incarnate after all for revealing he is a bit of a leg man, perhaps you remember some of that.

Alternatively, those last few paragraphs may have read to you like the lives of barbarians. (What? The poor woman actually rotated to order through 360 degrees as a nation gawped at her gown? Savages!)

You may recoil at the objectification of artistes such as Miss Harry or Mr Ant by teenagers with bedroom wall space to fill and convince yourself no #MeToo-compliant teenybopper would dream of entertaining impure thoughts about pop stars today.

If you do, what a joyless, paranoid, fun-free world yours has become.

There’s a difference between sexism and paying a member of the opposite sex a compliment. If we don’t recognise what it is soon then prepare to be deeply confused in future about how romance works.