This effective look at gender should be compulsory viewing
There was a telling
moment in No More Boys and Girls: Can Our Kids Go Gender Free?
(BBC Two) when Dr Javid Abdelmoneim stood outside the school gates as parents delivered children of Lanesend Primary. None would stop to inspect his array of T-shirts with gender reinforcing messages.
Eventually a tiny gathering was corralled together to listen to his message about apparently harmless slogans like “Here Comes Trouble” and “Forever Beautiful”, which have a butterfly effect eventually resulting in phallocratic self-aggrandisement, low female self-esteem and society-wide unequal pay.
The small audience seemed persuaded. Will the bigger audience watching at home make the simple, effective changes he wrought in a small class of ethnically and culturally homogenous children on the Isle of Wight?
Not every conclusion that Abdelmoneim came to felt rooted in proofs, and some of his conclusions have an element of hit and hope. But the experiments with the children offered compelling evidence that boys can get a kick out of sewing and girls can conquer geometrical puzzles. The one line in the sand was unisex loos. Perhaps some parents need to teach their sons to wash their hands and flush more.
Abdelmoneim is a natural communicator in front of the camera and with the children, who were the real stars – and not just in their genderneutral poem performed at the end-of-term assembly. The boy with the biggest story arc was Riley, who learnt “it’s better to talk than strop”. At the football on the beach, where he was first to propose mixed teams, he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the words, “We Are the Future”. It would be lovely to hope that first-person plural as gender-inclusive.
It was repetitive at times, to ensure the messages got home. But No More
Boys and Girls should be compulsory viewing in schools up and down the land. It would also be a great boon to the equality revolution if the bottom could be persuaded to fall out of the market for pink. “I know I can be anything I want to be,” said the previously shy Maisie, whose princessthemed fashions and accessories were bagged up and confiscated. In someone older that would sound like an empty bromide. In one so young it had the gleam of conviction.
Celebrity Masterchef, which has been stirring both into a pot since 2006, may be yesterday’s mashed potatoes to everyone else, but it’s freshly served nouvelle cuisine for me. The first blindingly obvious thing to say is that the standard of cooking seems remarkably competent.
My Gradgrindian kitchen credo is that if you can read you can cook. It’s a unintuitive mantra that would get you nowhere in Celebrity Masterchef. The format deprives contestants of crib sheets, and obliges them to conjure up a meal out of a short shopping list of ingredients.
I’d have been inclined to suspect that they get some advanced word of those ingredients. But Debbie Mcgee, who has clearly watched Masterchef as often as I have, hadn’t even taken on board she was required to cook only one dish.
As a package, the programme has a well-oiled formula, but I found myself wanting to watch the bits they didn’t show. What was the look on the face of the customer who sent back the cold duck breast cooked by Tyger Drewhoney (who was eventually eliminated)? How many hoops did Rachel Stevens have to throw herself through to get from “my husband does all the cooking” to pan-fried duck on a bed of shiitake mushrooms, green beans and quinoa? And how many of those sous-chefs in the posh Italian restaurant will still be here after Brexit? (Radio 1 DJ Dev was offered a job there any time he wants.)
In an alternative formula there would be a live feed, as in Big Brother, where you could watch the tedious reality of celebrities laboriously chopping for an hour. It’s not really about the perfectability of the dishes, is it? It’s about the carefully planned interplay of Olympians and superannuated starlets, of actors and magician’s assistants (Mcgee, the widow of Paul Daniels, was billed as a “performer”).
On this occasion, the ingredients were on the bland side. Everyone was on the best and humblest behaviour. Chefs, traditionally, can be brats and bullies. A bit more of that would add spice.