Proof that the love of a good man is still a holy grail
The before-and-after trajectory of gay history is a gift for storytellers intrigued by time. Following a template laid down by Kevin Elyot’s plays and Alan Hollinghurst’s fiction, Patrick Gale’s drama Man in an Orange Shirt (BBC Two) was a well-crafted and moving dialogue between past and present.
The first episode was set in the prohibitive Forties, when the starkest choices open to gay men included the prison of a straight marriage or actual prison. The second episode advanced into a here and now which, Gale’s script was careful to insist, is by no means a never-had-it-so-good sunlit utopia.
Where his grandfather Michael (Oliver Jackson-cohen) closeted himself in a sexless marriage, dishy orphaned vet Adam Berryman (Julian Morris) was the slave of supposedly sexually liberating dating apps. As a result, he was terrified of attachment (in the interests of balance, in Top of the Lake: China Girl the BBC is currently depicting young heterosexual men with the same affliction).
Adam’s nocturnal adventures, graphically enacted, amounted to an acidic critique of the gay dating apps Grindr and Scruff (here amalgamated as Grufff). It seems you really can have too much of a good thing. Detox took the form of nice designer Steve (David Gyasi), who restored not just his distressed cottage’s interior but Adam’s psyche, which was in a similar condition.
This is the second time Joanna Vanderham and Vanessa Redgrave have embodied younger and older incarnations of the same character. The woman they played in The Go-between pays for a surfeit of illicit passion. Here they played Adam’s grandmother Flora, racked by an aversion to sex. Redgrave brought heart and integrity to a woman coming to terms with lifelong regret (although it was a tall order to imagine her as a nonagenarian).
Perhaps the dominoes of the plot all toppled a little too tidily, but there was a poignant cameo for the unposted letter written all those years ago by Michael for his beloved Thomas (James Mcardle). This solid contribution to Gay Britannia argued that happy-ever-after romance is not the preserve of soppy heteros. Fifty years on from 1967, the love of a good man is still a holy grail.
In the Seventies, there was fun to be had watching a show called Mr & Mrs, in which couples were quizzed on how well they knew each other. That was an innocent age when light entertainment quaintly supported such oldfangled concepts as love and harmony. Its very distant descendant is Make or Break? (Channel 5), in which relationships are crowbarred apart for the nation’s viewing pleasure.
The locale is, inevitably, a paradise island, all blanched sands, turquoise seas and palms flapping horizontally in out-of-season gales. The recruits have been dragnetted from gyms, bronzing salons and eyelash bars, or maybe just a dump bin of Love Island’s cast-offs. They were lured thither, you can only guess, by the thrill of testing the bonds of their love in front of thousands (not millions, this being Channel 5).
The couples were instantly and sadistically split up and re-paired with others, triggering an hour-long cacophony of milksop wails and moggy caterwauls from distraught untrusting persons of limited vocabulary. My favourite was Nikita, a stripper by trade, a pocket powder keg by personality who admitted to having what she called “a dramaticness problem”. Che, her beau, is nothing like his revolutionary namesake.
At one point, a woman called Ellie said something articulate about the berserk awfulness of the scenario and the clocks practically stopped. She’s mostly absent from the edit, not being a conflict magnet.
The host presiding over this bedlam is someone called Paul Dolan, billed as a “behavioural scientist”, one of those odd job descriptions like horse whisperer and cat burglar. Those white specs say it all. Therapy was on hand for the ladies from a sexpert coaching them to – and I merely quote – “let your vagina blossom”.
I’m a big fan of Anglo-saxon, but this cohort make dockers and fishwives sound like fervent disciples of Mrs Whitehouse. Imagine a drinking game where you have to replace every second word with “f---”. A particular low point found one verray parfit gentil knight addressing his lady love, who had displeased him, as a “c---”. The Roman Empire crumbled with less of a degenerate clatter. Repellent.
Man in an Orange Shirt Make or Break?