Last night on television Jasper Rees A comprehensive and fun tour of a little visited subject
First, a nerdy note: Tolkien, introducing The Hobbit, insisted that the correct plural is dwarfs. “In this story ‘dwarves’ and ‘dwarvish’ are used, but only when speaking of the ancient people to whom Thorin Oakenshield and his companions belonged.” Tolkien was not mentioned in Dwarfs in Art: A New Perspective (BBC Four). But if you listened closely, the incorrect plural could be heard on more than one tongue.
This seems worth pointing out because, as was argued in this efficient sprint through a little-visited corner of cultural history, pejorative epithets have been to slow to disappear. Indeed, people with dwarfism have had to put up with a lot, from lampooning on grotesquely endowed Greek figurines through to Mini Me in the Austin Powers films. Along the way, a quite extraordinary array of Old Master portraits depicted a proud aristocrat possessively placing a hand on the head of a pet dwarf.
The articulate Australian actress Kiruna Stamell, who stands at 3ft 6ins, put it best: disability is all about “facing other people’s b-----ks,” she explained. “Literally in my case.”
Presenter Richard Butchins, who introduced himself as a polio sufferer, explored cultural representations of dwarfs. The pinnacle was Diego Velázquez’s humanising portrayals. Null points for Arthur Rackham’s sinister caricatures in caps and beards: “It’s like we want to hive off the darkness in ourselves,” reasoned an Oxford academic, “and give it to some other group of people.”
Peter Blake made his second BBC Four appearance in a week (he also popped up to remember the artist John Minton). As a young man he drew circus dwarfs but only latterly, he admitted, came to “find beauty in the difference rather than be frightened of it”.
This documentary was about humanity going on the same journey through the work of Diane Arbus and, especially, the dwarf photographer Ricardo Gil, who of necessity would shoot his subjects from a low angle and, to make a point about his perspective, sometimes crop heads. He insisted an exhibition of his work be hung at a height convenient to dwarfs. Butchins asked him where the art movement for people with restricted growth was heading? “I really don’t know,” he said. “And I really don’t care.” Which rather pulled the rug from all the preceding scholarship.
The celebrities in Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC One) tend quite naturally to scan their ancestry for pre-echoes of their own experience. For Jonnie Peacock, the Paralympian sprinter who lost a lower leg to meningitis at the age of five, this meant looking for forebears with the grit to overcome adversity.
He found examples on both branches. On his mother’s side, he encountered Isaac Roberts, a greatgreat-grandfather who worked as a docker in Liverpool and was felled by anthrax poisoning in the early Thirties. A hospital record noted that he lasted longer than anyone else admitted with the same symptoms, which was enough for Peacock to deduce steely determination.
On his father’s side, in rural Cambridgeshire, there was his great-great-great-great grandmother Louisa Voss, whose early life found her working in an agricultural gang, being punitively fined for theft of vegetables and cited as “a reputed bad character” in a local pub where she participated in what was coyly abbreviated to “for” (as in fornication). Her four children were the illegitimate products of possibly brutal liaisons, but twice in her life she took men to court, making her in Peacock’s eyes “a strong independent woman”.
The awful stories of the direst poverty, of children dying of disease, had a familiar ring to them – this series necessarily specialises in the cruelty of yesteryear before the NHS and social security. The deeper the trouble ancestors get into, the more evidence lurks in the archive. This was quite a sedentary edition, with Peacock sitting like an innocent young tabula rasa as historians pulled up more and more shocking documents to tell him what happened next and why.
His delight in discovery was infectious. And for good measure there was a sporting forebear: his grandfather John Roberts, a prolific goalscorer, was denied the chance of a career in professional football. In sport, reasoned Peacock, one thing can go wrong and the dream vanishes. For his ancestors, everything went wrong. Dwarfs in Art: A New Perspective ★★★★ Who Do You Think You Are? ★★★