These hoodies didn’t want to be hugged by Grayson
Grayson Perry is the most unlikely TV success story of recent years – an insightful interviewer who elicits extraordinary confessions while communicating with his subjects in a rather oblique way. Having already examined class and identity, Perry’s latest threeparter, All Man (Channel 4), excavates another great British preoccupation: masculinity. The second episode took him to the Lancashire town of Skelmersdale, where it was hinted he would take on a dual analysis of the police and their quarries.
This never quite materialised, which felt like a missed opportunity, especially as politely expressed tensions between Perry and the police were apparent from an early stage. “It was a good day, wasn’t it?” reckoned Sergeant Billy Matthews of a dawn raid which saw the apprehension of a small-time drug dealer at his own home. “I was quite upset by it, actually,” Perry replied.
Perry’s focus fell instead on a group of disenfranchised young men, mostly conducted either in prison cells or in anonymous underpasses. He found, predictably, braggadocio and obsession with honour and status, generally exercised through violent territorial disputes with rival estates. They were looking after family, they claimed, frequently in the absence of their own despised fathers.
Despair would have been an understandable response, yet Perry was able to finesse his observations into something meaningful. His discovery of a 1971 film, Grow with
Skelmersdale, a public information film which promoted the town as a place of industrial growth provided a poignant counterpoint to today’s economic reality. Now, the only outlets for the masculine urges of those on once-aspirational estates were destructive ones.
The works created by Perry to represent these interviews – a fetish sculpture entitled King of Nowhere and the Digmoor Tapestry, a cartographical representation of doomed, cyclical turf warfare – lacked the emotional impact of previous series’ triumphs. Yet in a sense, the fact he was bothering to make these “altarpieces to parts of my society that aren’t talked about or articulated” was enough. Certainly, the subtleties seemed lost on some of the subjects themselves. Some of those brought into custody dodged Perry’s diligent fishing for an emotional response, and instead made lame cracks about joints and knives.
Not once, however, did Perry lose track of his central arguments and, ultimately, found common ground with the boys. Then, with the end titles came the sucker punch: Stuey, an elder statesman who had seemingly reformed, later committed a violent assault and was convicted of two related offences. Even art and a sympathetic ear have their limits.
Watching series about rich people fretting about their millions, or in the case of Sky Atlantic’s new drama Billions, can be a tough ask. It’s just as well, then, that Damian Lewis and Paul Giamatti made relatively light work of their duelling alpha males Bobby Axelrod and Chuck Rhoades, in a series where complex financial malfeasance and occasionally undercooked dialogue were leavened by both their star power and the sheer, unapologetic soapiness of the action.
Axelrod was the hedge-fund giant whose insider trading and dubiously acquired wealth is matched only by his ego and grandiose public philanthropy; Rhoades was the attorney determined to bring him down – but only on his own terms. “A good matador doesn’t try and kill a fresh bull,” he declared in a drama drenched with so much testosterone that the set must have smelt like a locker room. Fine actresses including Maggie Siff and Malin Åkerman (as Rhoades and Alexrod’s spouses) weren’t able to make much of an impression in this prizefight. The former was also the in-house performance coach at Axelrod’s firm: an absurd twist undeniably ripe with dramatic potential, even in a script that wobbled more than once on the tightrope between analysing and lionising its subjects.
Scenes bookending the drama, in which Giamatti was walked over and then urinated on by a dominatrix later revealed to be his wife, felt tacked on and gratuitous – a frantic attempt to add a sense of mystery to an otherwise pretty straightforward hour of television. Yet time spent in the company of Giamatti or Lewis is seldom wasted. No piece of scenery will be safe over the next 11 episodes.
Grayson Perry: All Man ★★★★ Billions ★★★