Danny Dyer looks for answers about what’s ailing modern men
DANNY DYER: HOW TO BE A MAN ✸✸✸
When it was announced in 2013 that Danny Dyer was joining EastEnders, many people probably rolled their eyes.
The assumption was he’d be playing nothing more than a variation on the stereotypical hard men he’d portrayed in Nick Love’s knucklehead geezer-gangster Britflicks The Football Factory, The Business and Outlaw.
They couldn’t have been more wrong. Dyer’s character, new Queen Vic landlord Mick Carter, was a kind, sensitive family man. He stayed with the soap for eight years, becoming one of its most beloved presences.
You underestimate Dyer at your peril. He’s made a habit of confounding people and their expectations of him. He’s appeared on stage in the West End, most notably in three plays by the late Harold Pinter: Celebration, which transferred to New York, and revivals of No Man’s Land and The Homecoming (Pinter and Dyer became friends).
He also won acclaim as Sid Vicious opposite Endeavour star Shaun Evans as Kurt Cobain in another West End play, Kurt and Sid.
He’s presented game shows and documentaries, and, in one of the most celebrated episodes of Who Do You Think You Are?, discovered he was related to two kings.
But I’m guessing there might still be the odd eye-roll at the prospect of Dyer fronting a two-part documentary called Danny Dyer: How to Be a Man (Channel 4, Tuesday & Wednesday).
The title suggests one of those larky, list-based shows celebs sometimes present when their agent doesn’t have anything better on the table. In fact, it’s something altogether more thoughtful and nuanced.
As the opening footage of Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan suggests, something is rotten in the state of manhood, otherwise why would a pair of creeps like these have captured a huge audience of young men prepared to hang on their every revolting misogynist word?
“Has masculinity become shameful, is there really a war on men?” Dyer wonders aloud. “F**k knows!”
But he’s off on a mission to find out. Or as he puts it: “Channel 4 bunged me a few quid to travel the country, talking to geezers, to find out what’s going on.”
He doesn’t have to travel too far for the first segment of the opening episode, just to the Custom House area in East London to meet up with his younger brother Tony. The Dyer boys grew up there, in a community where “all the men were alpha”.
By the sound of it their father was among the most alpha: he got drunk and was physically abusive to his sons and their mother. The old man walked out on the family when Danny and Tony were nine and seven, respectively.
Dyer describes his father as “narrow-minded”. He, on the other hand, is open-minded and curious as he tries to get to the bottom of just what’s bothering so many young (and not so young) men. Whatever it is, Dyer recognises that the likes of Tate has found something to tap into, and social media has given him a means to feed off it, exploit it and amplify it.
“If there was no social media, there would be no Andrew Tate,” he says. And if there was no Andrew Tate, there definitely wouldn’t be an Ed Matthews. Twenty years old and living with his
‘Underestimate Dyer at your peril. He’s made a habit of confounding people’
parents, Matthews uses the family garage to parrot Tate’s line in his TikTok posts.
Dyer struggles not to laugh as Matthews spouts recycled guff about all men being “oppressed” and how a woman who’s had five or more sexual partners is not worthy of anyone’s attention. “I feel he’s gonna learn the hard way, this kid,” he says as he departs.
Dyer casts his net far and wide, talking to a group of schoolboys, some of whom admit to watching Tate’s videos, though none can really say why; meeting controversial MP Ben Bradley, who suggests what’s needed is “a minister for men”, and visiting Britain’s very first men’s refuge, set up — by women — 20 years ago in Wales, where he hears the harrowing story of a man whose abusive first wife gained custody of their son, and then murdered him.
His final port of call in last night’s first part was Brighton, where he met the local men’s gay choir. “I love being around gay men,” he says. “They’ve had to fight a lot to be accepted in society. To see a group of men expressing themselves like that is f***ing beautiful.”
Dyer should set up his own anti-Tate online channel.
The second part of Danny Dyer: How to Be a Man airs on Channel 4 tonight at 10pm