Last month I was in the ancient English University town of Cambridge, scrubbed up in black tie, having been wined and dined at high table surrounded by bright young things hanging, naturally, on my every word, looking incredibly important against the Westminster-effect leather-timbered décor of the Cambridge Union’s neo-Gothic debating chamber while proposing the motion ‘This House Believes Modern LGBTQ+ Activism Fails Its Community’.

Well, I would have been if I hadn’t been at home, in shorts and stitches, propped up on my pleather sofa, leg elevated above the hip, munching painkillers.

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Desmond Morris, the globally-famous British zoologist, author, TV presenter, and populariser of socio-biology - whose 1967 book ‘The Naked Ape’, surfed the wave of the 1960s sexual revolution was translated into at least 27 languages and sold a stonking 20 million copies - died last week, aged 98.

You can read his BBC obituary here, and a longer Times one here, which include the (new to me) information that he was a well-regarded surrealist painter, encouraged a chimpanzee called Congo to paint, and had his “work” exhibited at the ICA - which Morris directed at the time. And that in the late 1990s the famous man-watching zoologist was approached by a TV production company about an idea for a new reality show called ‘Big Brother’:

‘Morris was initially attracted to watching captive human interaction on such an industrial scale but, put off by the game-show element, he turned them down. “Silly me,” he later said.’

I read The Naked Ape in York Reference Library as a teen c. 1980, mostly for the dirty bits - he dubs the human animal “the sexiest primate alive”. But I also appreciated its anti-Establishment, secular “bent” - bringing humans down a peg or three. And of course his refusal to regard same-sex acts as unusual or unnatural, his advocacy for tolerance of homosexuals (although “aberrant” in their exclusive same-sexing), and for acceptance of difference and human variety. (You can read a recent re-assessment of its claims, including a feminist critique, here.)

So you’ll understand why, being a somewhat well-known ‘man watcher’ myself, his 2008 book The Naked Man: A Study of the Male Body (and its cover) called to me, and why I reviewed it (below) for the Independent on Sunday (21/01/08). It even turned out to include mentions of my pretty progeny, metrosexuals.

But, as you can see, I found it a terrible, teasing disappointment - and gave Mr Morris a sound spanking: mocking his tendency to present his own mid-C20th male prejudices and tastes as timeless sociobiological truths. (Though, in fairness, this is sort of the point of being a sociobiologist.)

I’m sure he was used to much worse treatment from critics, and that his sales were a highly efficacious salve for any spankings, however sound. Or bitchy.

Every child wants to be a zookeeper when they grow up. To run a place where everything is in its place, and has nothing to do but eat, shit and breed - to your timetable. Maybe it’s a yen for revenge on the parents who brought them into the world without asking their permission first, or maybe it’s just because children are all little dictators with a peaked-cap fetish.

Most though abandon these zoo fuehrer dreams when they actually grow up. Not so Desmond Morris. Impressively, this former curator of mammals at London Zoo, doesn’t make do with animals: with best-selling books such as The Naked Ape and Manwatching, this world-famous zoologist has managed to become head keeper at his very own human zoo.

And to be honest, the world evoked in his latest book The Naked Man, ‘a study of the male body from head to foot’, sounds like a place I’d quite like to visit - but only because I’m something of a nostalgic.

Morrisland isn’t just a zoo, you see. It’s also a historical theme park. In Morrisland, millions of years of evolution, red in tooth and claw, have brought us right up to... the suburban 1950s (the decade Morris graduated). In Morrisland ‘long-term pair bonding’ is the universal norm and there’s no need for a Child Support Agency or Asbos or turkey-basters since: ‘Powerful paternal feelings are unleashed the moment a human father holds his new baby in his arms and in the years ahead he will devote a great deal of time and attention to the rearing of his offspring.’

In Morrisland, where everything happens according to the zoo-keeper’s plan, women are 7% shorter than men so that their nose will reach inside a man’s hairy armpit, because sniffing his manly, rugged ‘pheromones’ makes her happy and want babies. And, of course, no Western man would shave his armpit. Only ‘members of the homosexual community or the bondage/sadomasochistic communities’ would do that.

By far the biggest attraction in Morrisland is sexual certainty. Within this fenced-off space the distinction between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’, is unclouded by all those unnatural modern trends. ‘As nature intended’ is a favourite phrase, one which appears above the entrance gates. In Morrisland, men are men - and there’s a strict golf club dress code.

‘Acceptance of male earrings still tends to be limited to those worn by the younger, more flamboyant males, largely from the world of sport, music and showbusiness,’ you’ll be glad to hear. Male bracelets are simply effeminate. And men only shave their legs - ‘sacrificing their masculinity’ - to swim or cycle faster.

In today’s fallen world, an older man might be called a ‘slaphead’ by unruly yobs - but safe inside Morrisland you’ll find yourself properly respected: ‘it is obvious that baldness is a human display signal indicating male seniority and dominance. It typifies the virile older man...’ (There’s no author photo on the dust-jacket, but a quick Google search confirms that Desmond is completely ‘virile’.)

There is trouble in the Garden of Desmond, however. ‘A few men - narcissist or masochists - have opted for nipple rings.’ But at least it’s only ‘a few’ - and they’re all deviants. Meanwhile, serpent-like ‘Gay designers’ ‘ignoring male preferences’ attempt to introduce ‘effeminate new leg fashions’. Fortunately, these fashions prove as sterile as the gay designers themselves: ‘they may have looked amusing on the catwalk, but they have never made it to the high street. Crumpled trousers and grubby jeans still reign supreme in the world of the manly male.’

In Morrisland there does exist however something called a ‘”six-pack” chest’ - though ‘few are prepared to make the effort to create it.’ Perhaps because a ‘six-pack chest’ would require not just regular visits to the gym, but also substantial surgery.

Surprisingly, that terrifying 21st Century male phenomenon I’ve been blamed for siring myself - metrosexuals - are allowed in Morrisland. But only those whose heterosexuality is beyond question and ‘are well-known as tough, masculine sportsmen and as famous celebrities... so, for them to become fastidious and fashion-conscious creates no confusion.’ Well, that’s a relief.

Non-celeb metrosexuals don’t exist in Morrisland, because ‘if an unknown heterosexual male were to display over-groomed, narcissistic tendencies, his sexual preferences would be automatically misread by anyone who met him.’ Which would, it goes without Mr Morris saying, be the worst thing that could possibly happen to a man and would render him completely emasculated and ridiculous. ‘This limits,’ explains the human zoo-keeper, ‘the metrosexual category to famous celebrities who are already publicly recognised for their heterosexuality.’

Clearly, not many of those High Street sales of male cosmetics which have increased by 800% since the year 2000, have been made in Morrisland. Though I do worry that the cover model for Morris’ book, an anonymous, headless, naked, smoothly muscular, young male photographed from behind in that sensuous-shadowy advertising sex-object way - offering us his arse - has been bingeing on metrosexual products. I sincerely hope his heterosexuality is already very publicly recognised.

As you may have guessed, Mr Morris has a problem with homosexuality. Throughout his book ‘manly’ means ‘heterosexual’, unmanly means ‘homosexual’ - and vice versa.

But it’s not a personal problem, it’s a scientific one, you see. In a final chapter called ‘The Preferences’ devoted not in fact to the preferences but rather to explaining/pathologising male homosexuality, he writes, ‘Viewed purely from an evolutionary standpoint, there is only one valid biological lifestyle for the human male and that is heterosexual.’ In other words, evolution, like zoo-keepers, doesn’t like waste and wants you to reproduce early and often.

But I can’t help but wonder why, if God/Darwin/Morris didn’t want men to get shagged, why did he give them such itchy prostate glands? And if every sperm is sacred, why did he put their hands at crotch level?

Des’ explanation for exclusive homosexuality (exclusive heterosexuality needs no explanation apparently - and bisexuality isn’t discussed) is, like much else in his book, charmingly mid-Twentieth Century: at puberty some boys fail to move out of the long all-boy social phase of childhood - and also boy-boy ‘sex play’ - and switch into dating girls and home-making, because they have become ‘too attached’.

Personally, I don’t mind the arrested development explanation of homosexuality: I think it rather romantic. (Like Morris, I attended a boy’s boarding school). I’m not entirely sure though that I’m that much more immature than someone who never gave up wanting to be a zoo keeper.

In conclusion, Morris makes a final impassioned plea for tolerance and acceptance of difference and human variety: ‘Isolating homosexuals as though they are members of some exclusive club does them no favours’.

So true. Unfortunately, this is exactly what the The Naked Male does. Morris’ human zoo separates ‘homosexuals’ and ‘heterosexuals’ with barbed wire - and electrifies the fence.

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I was gladdened and tickled to see that my old mucker the performance artist, seer, prophet, avant garde DQ, interpretative dance sensation, and leggy legend David Hoyle has been appearing a series of hilarious and really rather stunning viral social media spots for the edgy French fashion house Mugler.

They appear to have been shot in a style referencing of his late-night, late-1990s, low-res, C4 cult TV show, The Divine David Presents.

The social media spots manage to be entirely true to David’s art and ‘alternative’ sensibility, with no sense whatsoever that he’s “sold out”, to use that quaintly old-fashioned phrase. Rather the impression is that fashion has, quite understandably, and admirably, totally submitted to him. It took several decades, but Mr Hoyle finally won his argument with the world.

More importantly, he looks absolutely fantastic.

David officially killed off his The Divine David persona - on-stage and on-ice - way back in 2000, in an act of self-preservation (as well as Bowie fandom). But the DD’s anarchic, surreal spirit clearly lives on - albeit in a more modulated, less personally costly form. If in more expensive frocks.

David is interviewed here by Dazed about his 2026 Mugler campaign. Below are a couple of pieces I wrote about him three decades ago in his full vengeful “Divine” fury phase - first, a profile for Attitude magazine in 1996, and then in 1998 introducing him to/terrifying a wider audience with a review for the Independent newspaper of an RVT show in which he pretends to “go corporate”.

In both, he managed to prophesise and viciously satirise the 21st Century we now find ourselves squatting in.

An Audience With The Divine David

(by Mark Simpson, Attitude, October 1996)

‘Also sprach Zarathustra’ by Richard Strauss, the theme from Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, thunders on the P.A. Lights strobe. An unearthly, apocalyptic creature, tall and skinny, in a rubber Eva Brown-esque outfit, a wig like Liza Minelli’s hair after four weeks in the bottom of a dumpster, and with mascara that reaches down to his artistically pronounced cheek-bones (bones inspired, no doubt, by David Bowie c. Diamond Dogs) giving his large round eyes the look of a Medusa on meth, stalks to the edge of the stage and raises his arm in a mock fascist salute.

So, just another crowd-pleasing traditional comedy drag mime act, then.

‘Good evening, ladies UNT! gentlemen,’ he announces in a voice that is part we’re-all-friends-here-tonight working men’s club cabaret, and part Bette Davies in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (third reel). ‘Thank you for coming,’ he says, enunciating ev-ve-ry syllable. ‘I would like us all to remember that we are all beau-ti-ful. Each and every one of us is beau-ti-ful. Every single living creature is beau-ti-ful. Even you madam, at the back there with your dayglo sandals, yes you. You’re beau-ti-ful too.’

‘Do you like the way I’m dressed?’ asks The Divine, gesturing to his alarming apparel. ‘I’m hoping to meet a neo-Nazi and get shagged by his Nazi cock so I can feel really gay and really live with myself in the morning. And, after all, being gay is so fulfilling. How nice it is to meet a gay man and discuss life and the world: “What do you think about the situation in Bosnia?” [putting on a growly butch idiot voice] “I go to the gym, like, one day, like, and then the next I don’t go, coz that’s my day off when my muscles grow, like.”’

‘”What do you think about child prostitution in Thailand?”’

‘”I go to the gym, like, one day, like, and then the next day I don’t go, coz that’s my day off when my muscles grow, like.”’

A legend on the Manchester cabaret circuit for a number of years, Divine David, the most important and original performance artist of his generation has now descended on London, the capital of gayness and shitey heartlessness with his smash hit show VIVA VIVA APATHY! at the Market Tavern, Vauxhall.

And, make no mistake, he’s come to hold us all to account, to hold up a mirror in which we can see our own grotesque, Boyzy, brainless reflection. It’s Judgement Day for poofs and you better get nervous.

In the flesh, minus the scary mascara and bedlam wig, David is an attractive, fair-haired, blue-eyed man in his early thirties with twinkly eyes and a manner so warm, gentle and attentive that I can’t help but fall helplessly in love with him by the third cup of sweet tea. He is, quite simply, a born star. We may all be beau-ti-ful, but David is the most beau-ti-ful man in Britain.

But why is he so bitter?

‘It’s interesting isn’t it?’ he says, clearly over-familiar with this charge. ‘Because you love life and you want to improve it – because you’re passionate – you get accused of being bitter. I’m not bitter; I’m angry. Angry about dehumanisation. About a gay world which is as deep as a layer of lycra. I look forward to the day when the music stops. A man will walk down Compton Street and into one of the bars and see someone sweeping up in silence. He’ll asks him, panicking, “What’s going on, where is everybody?”

‘”Didn’t you know that tonight is the night when it’s all over?”, will come the reply. “Now we have to be people and have conversation.”’

‘And it would be wonderful, wouldn’t it?’ enthuses David, his eyes flashing. ‘Instead of standing around ogling one another, trying to look look colossal and insensitive you could be putting stamps in a stamp album: “Oh, this one’s from Antigua, isn’t it pretty?” Someone else could be making a Spanish galleon out of matchsticks: “It takes a lot of patience, but I think it’s worthwhile in the end.” Wouldn’t that be nice? I think that all this energy going into being a sexual animal 24hrs a day is hysterically funny, don’t you?’

No one who has seen him perform his song ‘Being Gay’, where he sings over and over with increasing hysterical over-investment, a la Yoko Ono, ‘BEING GAAAAAAAAAAY!!!’, before finishing with the snarled ‘Is a waste of time!‘, could disagree.

All the same, why doesn’t he do proper drag and put his make-up on right?

‘Because I don’t believe in gender. I’m very into the circus. To wear false tits and perfect make-up would be to endorse a controlling consensus I don’t subscribe to. People say, “Hey, you look bloody a mess, you do.” I say, “I’m sorry, I thought I looked beautiful.” My face is a canvas; I’m into 1920s German expressionism, Otto Dix, that sort of thing. It’s like when I cut myself on stage at Viva Apathy! – it was just a rock ‘n’ roll cliché, a show-business cliché. And there are a lot of performers I’d like to see cut themselves a bit more, a bit deeper. The entertainment they give people is a form of euthanasia. Frankly, they should just stab themselves to death on stage,’ says David, giving his trademark throaty, gurgling, disturbing laugh: slightly ha-ha-that’s-a-joke!, and slightly ha-ha-you-think-I’m-joking?

Yes, that’s all very well, but a lot of readers, I’m sure, would like to know why he doesn’t go to the gym and beef up and buy some sportswear get himself a boyfriend and be happy?

‘I have to say it doesn’t make any sense to me,’ says David. ‘Funnily enough, I don’t want to be loved for my pectoral muscles or an impersonation of a moron. I know I’m too skinny to be loved by my gay brothers, but I prefer to be self-reliant. Yes, I am essentially an incurable romantic, but I’ve learnt that it’s ultimately wasteful to condense your energy into a single laser beam that pierces only one heart - much better to be a mirror ball splashing light everywhere, I say.’

‘Of course, I do feel sorry for young people coming onto the scene. They won’t experience much compassion or conversation. That’s why I go to gay bars and stand in the middle of the floor and sing,’ (putting on his perfect Northern cabaret vibrato): ‘I wanna know what love is/ I want you to show me...’.

Divine David, real name David Hoyle, was born in the show business mecca that is Blackpool in 1962. His mother worked in his grandad’s chemist shop and his father was a merchant seaman, away for nine months of the year. ‘I missed him very much,’ he confesses. ‘I remember when I was about seven, coming home from school and this man coming up to me and spinning me around. “Don’t you know who I am?” he asked. “Er, I’ve got to go into the shop and buy some sweets,” I replied. I didn’t know what else to say. It was what you might call a difficult moment.’

David was raised for the most part by his grandparents. ‘They were from a generation whose heyday was the twenties and thirties, Fred Astaire dancing on tables, satin ball-gowns and the like. I appreciated that. Their house was calm and peaceful; I could read and draw to my heart’s content – I drew the whole time. My mother’s house, on the other hand, was straight out of a sixties kitchen sink drama – shades of Cathy Come Home, if you will.’

His mother had a hard time and David is forgiving about any shortcomings. ‘It’s funny,’ he says, looking wistful, ‘you go through life as an adult looking for love in all the wrong places, rejecting family and all that because you’re queer, and then you realise that, flawed as it was, you never quite match the love you got as a child. My mother was doing the best that she could as a Northern working woman with an absent husband. She always said that she had to be a mother and a father to me. I think she felt a little guilty, as mothers do. I remember her saying, when I told her that I was gay, “I knew I should have made you play with that Meccano set.” ‘

At school David’s unnatural talent began to shine forth. He remembers dressing up in the Princess’ outfit in third year infants, ‘an evening dress arrangement with clear plastic high-heels. One girl hissed at me: ‘”You can’t be the Princess! You’re a boy!“ and pushed me into the wicker dressing-up basket. But I didn’t want to be the princess, I just wanted to be beautiful.’ David also liked to run around the playground wearing his grey duffle-coat inside out – ‘it had a fleecy lining which made me look special’ – singing ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’.

Planes had a peculiar attraction. At nine, with his best friend, their favourite game was to walk down stairs pretending to be film stars disembarking from an airliner. ‘One of us would pretend to take photographs. At the bottom of the steps we’d trip over and die dramatically of a twisted ankle. Don’t all children play those games?’

After leaving school David got a job at British Home Stores. ‘I believe I was the first boy in the history of BHS to be put on a till; I felt very proud, as you can imagine.’ He also worked on the cold meat counter. ‘I learnt a lot about life there. One day a middle aged lady came in and asked for some bacon pieces for a quiche. She asked for only the fattiest pieces. She said her husband had just been diagnosed with a heart disease. “Hasn’t he been good to you?” I asked. “No,” she said. So I found her the fattiest bacon in the shop.’

But the stage of BHS proved too small for his ambitions, and David began appearing in working men’s clubs as a character called Paul Monery-Vaine, ‘based on the Pulmonary vein in your heart’, who was to be an early prototype for the visceral Divine David. ‘I sang ‘Hey, Big Spender’ and ‘You Made Me Love You’. I ended up closing the show every Sunday evening.’ Then there was a summer season in a theatre above a Café on Coronation St, Blackpool called Blackpool Breezes; The main act billed themselves “As seen on TV”. I later found out it was Maltese TV.’

In the early eighties the bright lights of London and bedsit land beckoned and David began hanging around The Bell in Kings Cross – a post-New Romantic, mixed gay/straight, male/female pop-rock venue for all sorts of ‘artistic’ runaways newly arrived in London. He was drinking, dancing, laughing and having fun, before he found himself all alone in an isolation ward with acute hepatitis listening to a doctor tell him how ‘his sort’ disgusted him.

David beat a tactical retreat back North, to Manchester where he kept alive the ‘alternative’ spirit of The Bell, developing his rock ‘n’ roll drag persona all through the desert years of dance and dull obedience to the pink pound. As he announced in his triumphal recent London ICA performance: ‘We’ve had seamless disco house music for ten years now. I feel like it’s time for a change. D’you know what I mean? I’m just a little bit bored. I feel that it’s time to move on and change the fucking record.’

That same evening, after hip-wigglingly, arms-in-the-air, ecstatic performances of his handbag house anthems ‘Bingo (Your Number’s Up!)’ and ‘Mardi Gras (Time to Die!)’, David’s finale is an act of homage to the gay men he has loved. Picture a row of watermelons with smiley faces drawn on them lined up on stage. ‘Meet my ex boyfriends,’ invites David. He picks up the first watermelon: ‘This is Steve. Steve and I went out for three months (I call him Steve because we were on first name terms). It was beautiful. We loved one another. Then one day Steve came to me and said: “I’ve found someone with bigger arms and that’s important to me. I hope you understand.”’

‘What do you think I ought to do with him?’ he asks, picking up a large wooden mallet. “Smash him!” the audience shouts. David takes a few hesitant, fey swings which stop just above ‘Steve’s’ head, before suddenly letting out a terrible, harpy shriek and smashing the watermelon to a pulp with a salvo of righteous blows, spattering pink pulp across the crowd, and then quickly despatching the other melons.

Mallet dripping, dress covered in pink slime, out of breath, wig akimbo, David gives the audience some agony aunt advice: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, if your boyfriend makes you feel grateful for a fuck – kill him! If anyone stands between you and your dreams – kill them!’.

‘Anybody who survives is taking revenge,’ David tells me later. ‘Revenge is a creative force. No matter how much you were told not to be artistic, still being artistic, that’s revenge; no matter how childish and naïve you were told your ideals were, still believing in them, that’s revenge.

Why does he go on about death all the time? ‘It’s inevitable. It’s real. My hepatitis experience taught me that. And I’m still not convinced it’s the worst thing that can happen to you. If you’re yourself for just one day on this Earth then maybe your whole life has been worthwhile. If you can’t, then maybe death is preferable. And yes, I bring up death because I’m perverse.’ After all, this is the man who when asked to come up with a list of Top Ten records for gay-bar freebie sheet ‘Boyz’ included at No. 4 ‘The sound of new-born lambs calling to their mothers on a busy motorway.’

Is he a prophet, urging us to mend our ways, or is it too late for that? Is he the angel of doom?

‘That would be telling,’ he says, batting his long eyelashes. ‘I do think that if we decide we want a future then we might have one. The powers that be can do what they want for the millennium, but, personally, I think that a mass lifting of consciousness would be quite funky, don’t you?’

The Scariest, Funniest, Smartest, Truest, Noblest Thing You Can See for Three Quid

The Divine David at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, London

by Mark Simpson (Independent on Sunday, 1998)

Last year a one-man avant-garde whirlwind arrived on the London alternative cabaret circuit. Looking and sounding like Bette Davis meets Iggy Pop (and drinks him under the table) he proclaimed the death of drag and traditional crowd-pleasing en-ter-tain-ment.

Oh yes, and the redundancy of sexuality and gender as well.

‘REMEMBER!’ he would howl at the audience, after some crazed portrait-painting or singing Bowie’s Heroes in the style of Tommy Steele, ‘you may be standing there feeling very proud of yourself for being “a man” or “a woman” , “a straight” or a’ – spitting the word out like a piece of four-day old mince he found lodged between his teeth – ‘“gay”, but you’ve all got something in common, something much more certain than any of these fragile illusions. YOU’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!’

‘Now,’ he’d add softly, ‘isn’t that lovely, ladies and gentlemen? Doesn’t that give you a warm feeling inside?’

But The Divine David has decided that this isn’t the kind of thing that the punters want. The embodiment of the avant-garde after the death of the avant-garde, the zombie Spirit of Humanity that used to urge audiences not to go to work tomorrow or pay any bills has gone corporate. A glossy colour leaflet advertises his latest show, Viva 5 Apathy, with pictures of smiling people in suits clutching lap-tops at board-meetings and includes a statement from the President, The Divine David(TM), about how market research has convinced him that what is needed is a more consumer-led product.

‘This time,’ he concludes, ‘it’s corporate!’

Although this sensible mission statement is undermined slightly by a photo on the last page depicting The Divinely Skinny One snapped from behind in a pair of purple briefs, looking over his shoulder, sloppily lip-sticked lips parted coquettishly, mouthing a faux surprised ‘OH!’.

At the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, now re-named the Royal Vauxhall Conference Centre, Jay Cloth, The Divine David’s delectable-yet-efficient secretary and receptionist, takes your money (£3 waged/£3.50 unwaged), issues you with a name badge and does a spot of niche-market research, showing you some flash cards featuring fire, ambulance, police and mountain rescue and asking: ‘Have you used any of these services recently?’

The Vauxhall Tavern is a perfect venue for the Divine David’s reinvention of himself. Built in the mid-nineteenth century as a music-hall venue, after the Second World War it became a drag pub. In the seventies disco lights, black paint and a dj booth were added and it became a gay drag pub. Corinthian columns, flaking paint and a century of tobacco smoke, alcohol fumes and rowdy, anarchic performance reaches its apotheosis and nadir in The Divine David.

Except, of course, he’s now gone corporate. ‘I’ve learnt that people want “entertainment”’ he announces when he finally steps out onto the stage, wearing a business-like mauve woollen twin-set with padded shoulders Herman Munster would have envied. ‘Audiences don’t want anything that will stretch them a bit. There’s going to be none of that avant-garde rubbish tonight. None of you need go home tonight to your rented accommodation feeling stupid.’

He then performs a cappella quite the most disturbing version of ‘You Made Me Love You’ – so inane that it takes on meanings you never wanted to think about before: I didn’t wanna do it…

Entertainment over, David conducts a flip-chart seminar on how to ‘make a go of it; in business. ‘First,’ he says, all schoolmarmish, ‘you take your self,’ and writes “SELF” at the top of the chart. ‘And then you get rid of that.’ He strikes the word through. ‘And you become a what? Does anybody know?’

‘A CUNT!’ shouts out a drunken Scottish voice.

‘Yes, a cunt that’s right.’ He writes “CUNT”. ‘And what do you end up in?’

‘A FOOKIN’ NIGHTMARE!’.

‘A nightmare, exactly,’ agrees David in a business-like fashion, writing “= A NIGHTMARE”. ‘Does everyone see how that works? That’s lovely.’

The Divine David, corporate or avant-garde, doesn’t have much time for sentimentality. At one point he declares his support for Tracy Edwards: ‘Any woman who kills a man is a friend of mine.’

A little later he ruminates: ‘When I’m at a garden party or some such social occasion, people often come up to me and say, “Oh, David, there’s a gay over here, you must meet him.” And I say, “Oh a gay, I know all about that – that’s about gristle up your shitter. If memory serves me right....”’.

Not very fond of ‘men’ or ‘gays’, The Divine David has what some might call a certain distance on his predicament. Others, of course, will accuse him of ‘self-hatred’. But the whole point of The Divine David is drama and conflict, a refusal to become what you are supposed to be, a refusal to relax into identity, into niche markets and corporate/corporal values, into predictability. Or profitability.

So before the second half of his performance, we hear him announce over the p.a.: ‘Ladies und gentlemen, I’ve a confession to make. I’m terribly sorry, but I’ve gone avant-garde again!’

Out he prances on stage in an alarming vented black bodysuit, stretched over his gangly frame and his head, leaving a mad little oval of smeared red lips and melting mascara eyes. To the tune of a disco rhumba, he then dances and mimes in a delightfully demented way with a couple of hoops, including a hilarious wheelchair moment straight out of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?.

The Divine David is back – quite the scariest, funniest, smartest, truest, noblest thing you can see for three quid. Invest now.

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Facebook cancelled me. For not being me.

When trying to log on to the boomer Fisher-Price-Palantir activity toy recently, I was presented with a screen telling me that to unlock my account I had to ‘verify my identity’ by providing a ‘video selfie’.

I went through the gruesome process of providing one: looking left, looking right, looking up, looking down, and swearing my undying fealty to our AI overlords. OK so I made that last bit up – but it’s implicit in the whole process.

Having uploaded the grim evidence, I was told that my “appeal” (apparently I had already been accused, tried and convicted) would be reviewed within 24-48 hours. And that if it was rejected, I would be banned permanently.

About an hour later I received a form email obviously sent out to anyone banned for whatever reason:

Hilariously, Facebook exiled me forever for not being Mark Simpson. So the only way I can use Facebook now is to set up a fake account. Which I have no idea how to do, and still less inclination.

It seems that getting a permanent ban overturned, even for ‘ID’ issues is well-nigh impossible. Once you are cast out of Mr Zuckerberg’s garden you don’t really exist anymore.

Meta will also have pulled my public Mark Simpson ‘Author/Writer’ page, and my various authored books pages, since these were created and managed via my personal page, which they nuked.

I’ve been on Facebook for over fifteen years, for my sins. Embarrassingly, during that time I’ve not been suspended once. Or had any “strikes” against me, as far as I know. Then suddenly, I’ve been found guilty of the capital crime of not being me – and summarily executed.

You could say it’s almost Kafkaesque. If Kafka was a shit writer

Maybe my real crime is that I didn’t use Facebook on my phone, and I didn’t upload loads of photos of my dinner. I also didn’t share much personal information - I prefer to do that in books or behind paywalls - so I was a bit of a data desert. AI may have detected I was an apostate.

Worse, I used an image of Captain Scarlett, a 1960s puppet, as my avatar on my personal page for the last few years. Before that I used a cartoon cat from ‘The Ren & Stimpy Show’. (Though I had of course uploaded photos of myself to my personal page, and was tagged in photos others had uploaded and used a photo of myself as my avatar on my Author/Writer page).

I probably thought, pathetically, that the cartoon avatar would be a fetish that would somehow save my soul from being eaten by Zuckerberg. And perhaps it did, in the end.

Like most people who use social media I’m ambivalent about it, sometimes intensely so: precisely because it makes itself, and the system of voyeuristic-surveillance it facilitates, so indispensable.

Not long before I was zapped by Zuckerberg’s AI bots, for being a bot, I watched an especially gloriously histrionic - but eerily prescient - episode of the 1960s US Sci-Fi TV show The Outer Limits called ‘O.B.I.T.’ The 'Outer Band Individuated Teletracer’ allows the operator to monitor any person, anywhere at any time.

According to Wikipedia the device, which users complain is ‘vile’ and ‘addictive’, leads to:

‘murder, bad morale, false accusations, interrogations, fear, distrust, a breakdown in social activities, a big increase in divorce and alcoholism, suicide, decreased communication and misunderstandings, intimidation, coercion, threats, a breakdown in morality, escapism or exile, conspiracies.’

And this malevolent device was the size of a dressing table-cum-wardrobe. You couldn’t carry it around in your pocket like you can do with Facebook or Instagram. Oh, and the only person invisible to it is the human-seeming monstrous alien who created it to sow discord and chaos on Earth before invasion by his planet.

But sixty years on, with the ‘real’ increasingly devoured by ‘online’ - and the alien takeover already complete - being banished from the largest social media platform, however ambivalent you feel about it, is objectively a form of social and economic punishment – even if you’re not a journalist and author.

It’s also, frankly, rather humiliating to be ejected from a place you were always thinking about leaving, but somehow never got around to. And for so few of your FB friends to notice you’re e-deceased.

This is something we are all going to experience a lot more of: having to prove, to an AI Judge Dredd – holding an e-gun to our heads – that we are human, and who we say we are.

Don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to wonder if I am.

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You can watch the 1963 Outer Limits episode ‘O.B.I.T.’ for free here.

My dad died earlier this year.

He was 96 and had been on end-of-life care at his home for several months, so it was hardly unexpected. And yet it is still something of a shock to discover, as I did in person, that your father isn’t immortal. And thus, neither are you.

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With the deployment of US marines to the Gulf for what seems to be yet another (illegal) invasion - this time of Iran instead of Iraq - and with the media mercilessly bombarding us with war porn, it’s perhaps time to revisit my review of former USMC officer Nathaniel Frick’s memoir ‘One Bullet Away’ about the experienced reality of the last one. Against an adversary much more poorly equipped to shoot back than Iran. (Below it, I’ve also posted my review of Anthony Swafford’s ‘Jarhead’, about the 1990 invasion of Iraq.)

Why do we blokes – and it is almost always blokes – read war books, catch war movies and play twitchy first-person Second World War shooter games like Call of Duty? Why do we crave “war porn”?

Because we still believe, deep down, in this post-masculine era of digitised, virtual life and professional/quasi-mercenary armies that “take care of business” for the rest of us, that one day we will be called up. That one day we will be roused from our comfortable cosseted techno-textured vanilla-flavoured semi-slumber and tested. And we wonder whether we will be able to find the necessary selflessness, courage, virtue, toughness, and, well, murderousness.

Most of all, we worry that they’ll find out we’re sorry sacks of shit.

And, let’s face it, we’re all sorry sacks of shit compared to… blond, square-jawed, Nathaniel Fick, former USMC Captain, Afghan and Iraq war vet, Classics scholar, talented writer (damn him) and all-round gent.

Fick is one of that strange minority of men who isn’t interested in what it’s like to go to war. He’s one of those oddities: someone who actually goes to war. Voluntarily. So, during a particularly hellish, sleepless, hungry moment in Basic Training he spies, from a helicopter, commuters on the freeway headed to work, rested, showered, well-fed, calm and finds himself not wishing to change places with them for a minute. Moreover, unlike, say Anthony Swofford, the slightly neurotic author of ‘Jarhead’, about the first Gulf War, he’s no passive grunt.

He’s a man who makes things happen, who takes decisions, who looks after his men and, even argues with superior officers. Not surprisingly, he comes across as inspiring but also rather peculiar.

His memoir ‘One Bullet Away: the Making of a Marine Officer’ provides the self-loathing civilian with almost everything he is looking for. We get the officer version of USMC boot camp, which turns out to be much the same as the grunt version, except even more gruelling, and starring the same homo-sado DI we know and love: ‘”What’s in here?” He grabbed my toiletry bag. “Drugs? Booze? Maybe a tube of K-Y jelly and a big cucumber??”’

We get action, and rather more of it than Swofford was able to offer: with almost Hollywood-style scripting, Fick passes the terrifying training programme in time for 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan. A swift promotion follows a successful tour of duty, and he joins the elite Recon Battalion, the Marines of the Marines, and the vanguard of the Coalition forces invading Iraq; he describes the action and his own experience of it in economical, fluid, convincing and occasionally lethal prose.

Though not always “unflinching”: for example, when the firing started, sitting in his unprotected Humvee, he would will his limbs to retract into his body armour. But, rest reassured: this was only because he didn’t like to be stuck in a vehicle during combat and preferred to feel the ground beneath his feet.

We also get the “money shot” of war porn: and not just gruesome descriptions of exploding heads (though we do get some of that), but lashings of manly love in the form of camaraderie: Fick was devoted to the Spartan Band that is the USMC, is unafraid to quote Classical Greek poetry and Rudyard Kipling, and takes an almost maternal interest in his men. Fick even confronts his superior officers when they appear to him to be taking reckless risks with his chaps. He is rightfully proud of the fact that he succeeded in returning from Iraq without having lost a single man from his platoon.

Fick, who is clearly a thoughtful and sensitive man – as well as a well-oiled killing machine – eventually leaves the Corps at the end of 2003 because he doesn’t feel capable of regarding the lives of his men as expendable. If this is “war porn”, it is definitely the better kind.

So what’s a civvy pussy to complain of? Well, Fick may question the policies of his superior officers, but not of his Commander in Chief – and blocks any discussion of whether it was a “just” war or not with a riposte that seems to have come from Platoon: “We fought for each other.”

Then again, Fick joined the Marines because he wanted to fight. Having been called upon to fight for his country, it’s not so surprising that he wasn’t keen to question the cause, especially in the dusty wake of 9/11. No, the main reservation I have – my armchair whinge – is that I don’t feel that either Afghanistan or Iraq tested Fick enough.

Although Fick sees much more action than Swafford, and is fired upon regularly, he and his men always have absurdly superior firepower to the mostly conscript enemy, who most of the time run away or surrender, or can’t aim their weapons. And when they don’t run away, Fick can usually call in the Cobra gunships or F-16s or an artillery barrage and wipe them out in seconds.

Which he does, frequently. The disparity in firepower is greater than that between Mussolini’s troops and the Abyssinians – or the stormtroopers and the giant bugs in Starship Troopers. I don’t mean to diminish the training, skill, bravery or all-round awesomeness of Fick and his men, nor do I wish any more of them dead or wounded, but Afghanistan and Iraq were not heroic wars. They may or may not have been necessary - and are tests that I would have failed miserably - but they would have sickened the Spartans.

I suspect Fick feels uneasy too, but in a way that he has yet to fully accept. After a battle, surveying the piles of lightly-armed enemy corpses shredded by American weaponry, one “stapled to a tree trunk by .50 calibre machine gun rounds”, another filled with “thousands of tiny metal slivers” from a Cobra’s flechette rocket, Fick reflects:

“I found no joy in looking at the men we’d killed, no satisfaction… But I wasn’t disturbed either. I fell back on an almost clinical detachment. The men were adults who chose to be here. I was an adult who chose to be here. They shot at us and missed. We shot at them and didn’t miss. The fight was fair.”

Much as I admire Fick and his book, and much as I consider myself unworthy to polish his boots with my tea-towel, I find it difficult to believe any of these statements about his feelings – or the nature of the fight that provoked them.

Independent on Sunday, 26/03/2005

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The Few, The Proud: A Jarhead Memoir of the First Gulf War

The mythology, the dogtag dogma, the cult of masculinity and most of all the haircut, set US Marines apart. Mark Simpson on a memoir of the First Gulf War.

It may seem odd that the United States Marine Corps, the elite fourth branch of the US Armed Services, larger and better equipped than the whole British Army, heroic victors of Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal, spearhead of the last and current Gulf War, should be best known for, and most proud of, its hairdo. But then, the USMC is a peculiar institution. Magnificent, but very peculiar.

“Jarhead”, the moniker US marines give one another, derives from the distinctive “high and tight” buzzcut that Marine Corps barbers dispense, leaving perhaps a quarter of an inch of personality on top and plenty of naked, anonymous scalp on the sides. Like circumcision and the Hebrews, the jarhead barnet has historically set US marines apart, marking them as the chosen and the damned: monkish warriors. Or as one of the Corps’ mottos has it: “The Few, The Proud”.

Image is important for US marines, perhaps because of the burden of symbolism – for many, the USMC is America. Or perhaps more particularly because the USMC is John Wayne. Jarheads, or rather, actors in high-and-tight haircuts, are invariably the stars of Hollywood war movies; the other services just don’t have the glamour and the grit of the devil dogs. As a result, the mythology, the rituals and the dogtag dogma of the Marine Corps cult of masculinity – boot camp, the DI, sounding-off, cussing and hazing, tearful graduation, test-of-manhood deployment, and that haircut – are probably more familiar to British boys than, say, those of the Royal Marines.

The relationship of real jarheads to their actress impersonators is confusingly close. When 20-year-old Lance Corporal Anthony Swofford and his buddies in a scout sniper platoon get the order to prepare to ship out to Saudi Arabia in 1990 in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, they spend three days drinking beer and watching war movies. Ironically, their favourite films, such as Platoon, Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket are ostensibly “anti-war” liberal pleas to “end this madness”, but for fighting men they only serve to get them hot. “Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man,” explains Swofford, “with film you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his First Fuck.”

Take note, Oliver Stone, you pink feather dick-tickler: “As a young man raised on the films of the Vietnam War, I want ammunition and alcohol and dope, I want to screw some whores and kill some Iraqi motherfuckers.”

In fact, Swofford’s ‘Jarhead: A Marine’s chronicle of the Gulf War’ is an avowedly “anti-war” memoir, powerfully written (pink feathers aside) and well-crafted, by someone who was clearly embittered, not to say damaged, by his experience of the USMC and his participation in the First Gulf War. Nevertheless, it isn’t clear whether Swofford, for all his reflectiveness, and of course his authenticity, is much more successful in demystifying war in general or the Corps.

Telling us that war is hell (again) is counterproductive: hell is after all a rather interesting place, certainly more interesting than heaven, or civilian “normality”. Moreover, the quasi-religious, dramatic tone Swofford strikes of despair and ecstasy, loneliness and camaraderie, and the awful- but-fascinating baseness of war is not so different from that of Stone or Coppola (or for that matter, of Mailer). And while there are not quite so many explosions, there’s no shortage of pornography.

When sweating in Saudi in 1990 waiting for the war to start, Swofford’s unit find themselves being ordered to perform for the media, playing football in rubber NBC suits in 100-degree heat. To sabotage the hated propaganda op, they start a favourite ritual of theirs, a “Field fuck”, a simulated gang rape, “wherein marines violate one member of the unit,” Swofford tells us. “The victim is held fast in the doggie position and his fellow marines take turns from behind.”

Getting into the spirit of things, the jarheads shout out helpful remarks such as: “Get that virgin Texas ass! It’s free!” The victim himself screams: “I’m the prettiest girl any of you has ever had! I’ve seen the whores you’ve bought, you sick bastards!” The press stop taking notes.

Swofford reassures us that this practice “wasn’t sexual” but was instead “communal” – however, even in his own terms it seems that the distinction is almost superfluous: it’s the hallmark of military life that what’s sexual becomes communal. Elsewhere he tells us about the “Wall of Shame” on base: hundreds of photos of ex-girlfriends who proved unfaithful – frequently with other marines.

Swofford’s obsession with the marines had a media origin, beginning in 1984 when the USMC barracks in Lebanon was bombed, killing 241 US servicemen. He recounts watching the news bulletins on the TV and how he “stood at attention and hummed the national anthem as the rough-hewn jarheads… carried their comrades from the rubble. The marines were all sizes and all colours, all dirty and exhausted and hurt, and they were men, and I was a boy falling in love with manhood…”.

Manhood in Swofford’s family was intimately linked to the military: his father served in Vietnam, while his grandfather fought in the Second World War. The desirability of manliness was the desirability of war.

It is probably not so strange that his obsession should have begun with an almost masochistic image of suffering and death: taking it like a man is an even more important part of the military experience than giving it. Sure enough, at boot camp Swofford finds his Drill Instructor to be a fully-fledged sadist of the kind that civilian masochists can only fantasise about:

“I am your mommy and your daddy! I am your nightmare and your wet dream! I will tell you when to piss and when to shit and how much food to eat and when! I will forge you into part of the iron fist with which our great United States fights oppression and injustice!”

Like many recruits, Swofford signed up to get away from a disintegrating home life and the flawed reality of his father and found that he had married his superego made barking, spitting, apoplectic flesh.

The DI’s job, as we all know from the movies, is to humiliate and break down the recruit, shame him, strip away his civilian personality and weaknesses and build him up into a marine. The DI is obsessed with inauthenticity: finding out who is not “really” a marine. He asks Swofford if he’s “a faggot… you sure have pretty blue eyes”. During one of these hazings, Swofford pisses his pants – an understandable reaction, but intriguingly it happens to be the same one that he mentions earlier in the book, when, as a young boy living in Japan (his father had a tour of duty there), he received “confusing and arousing” compliments on his blue eyes from Japanese women.

For good measure the DI also smashes Swofford’s confused shaved head through a chalkboard. Later, when this DI is under investigation for his violent excesses, Swofford shops him. However, he feels guilty about this and daydreams about running into the DI and “letting him beat on me some more”. Like I said, the USMC, God bless it, is a peculiar organisation.

Of course, Swofford isn’t your average jarhead. “I sat in the back of the Humvee and read the Iliad” is a memorable line. Other days might see him buried in The Portable Nietzsche or The Myth of Sisyphus. Swofford also seems a little highly-strung: he attempts suicide, Full Metal Jacket-style, fellating the muzzle of his rifle after receiving a Dear John letter from his girlfriend. He’s saved by his returning roommate, who takes him on a run “that lasts all night”. More physical pain to salve the existential variety.

By the book’s end, we are left with an image of Swofford, long discharged, wrestling with despair, not least over the sights he saw in action in Kuwait, but now without the distraction of physical suffering and discipline. Sisyphus without the rock.

Mind you, the word “jarhead” does suggest something that can be unscrewed: brains that can be easily spooned out. It may be true that some men become soldiers to kill; but it may equally be the case that some join to be killed - or at least escape the burden of consciousness.

Swofford appears to feel cheated that life not only went on after the Gulf War but in fact became more complicated and burdensome. Under these circumstances, I think most of us would miss our DI.

Independent on Sunday 23/03/2003

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Statistically the safest roads to drive on, motorways still manage to bring out something horribly, demonically scary in drivers.

Other drivers, that is. Never you or me.

Some would argue it’s because there’s no motorway practical required in the UK driving test. But perhaps it’s more fundamental than that. Motorways aren’t really anywhere. They’re a liminal limbo-land of anonymous boredom and semi-hypnosis where people’s darkest personality defects come out to play – magnified frighteningly by the horsepower they’re barely in charge of.

A motorway is a three lane, high speed Rorschach test.

Here’s an ID parade of some of those who fail it. Badly.

The Tailgater

Everyone’s favourite motorway psycho, he - and it is always a he - insists you admire his shiny BMW or VW badge in your mirrors. Which is supposed to make you remember your place. Behind him.

His alpha importance is responsible for one in eight serious motorway smashes by ingeniously turning the two second rule for the minimum safe distance into a two inch maximum one.

Diagnosis - Penis smaller than the gap between your bumpers

The Bonnetgater

Overtakes you and then cuts you up, forcing you to slow down to maintain a safe - and decent - distance.

Often, they will decelerate after they’ve plonked themselves two inches in front of you. They’ve achieved their objective – making you taste their exhaust – so why waste fuel while picking their nose?

The worst thing about the bonnetgater, however, isn’t their thoughtlessness - it’s their way of turning you into a non-consensual tailgater.

Diagnosis - As Cpl Jones would say: “They DO like it up ‘em!”

The Undertaker

Decides that the minimum safe distance you’ve left between you and the car in front as you overtake a vehicle on the left is in fact reserved for them, and overtakes you at 90 mph – on the inside lane – to occupy it. While on the phone. And eating.

Diagnosis - Probably a “creative”.

The Middle Lane Hog

Lots of drivers hate driving. It involves decisions, attention and awareness - when you could be sharing TikToks, or having a nice snooze. But proper driverless cars are still some way off in the UK. What to do? Fortunately, there’s a solution – become your own driverless car!

It’s really easy. Though it does make life really difficult for everyone else. Just find a motorway, find the middle lane - and make yourself at home.

No need look in your mirrors, or engage your brain at all. Or notice all the angry drivers having to overtake you and then crossing the entire carriageway in front of you back into the LOVELY EMPTY LEFT LANE.

Diagnosis - An inspiration to us all

The Outside Lane Kamikaze

Unable leave a motorway from any lane other than the outside one – braking as they swoop across three lanes because they’ve left it far, far too late.

Not because they forgot their exit but because they absolutely have to overtake as many cars as they can before they leave the motorway - otherwise their life is a total failure.

Diagnosis - A total failure

The Slip-Road Kamikaze

This is the Outside Lane Kamikaze when they join the motorway. Instead of ‘giving priority to traffic already on the motorway’ as dictated by the Highway Code, they treat the slip road as an overtaking lane – or a pit-stop exit ramp.

Once again, they have to overtake as many cars as possible before cutting in front of you just before they run out of slip – finishing with a masterful swerve across two lanes into the outside lane. Sans indicator, natch.

Diagnosis - Still a total failure

The Dozy Racer

Accelerates while you’re overtaking. Can be a deliberate tactic of boy racers (of any age or sex) showing off their torque, but more usually a sneaky, almost unconscious application of the throttle by the driver’s Id.

This presents a dilemma. If you refuse to rise to the bait, and don’t accelerate, pulling in behind them instead, they’re bound to slow down again and you’ll find yourself in the same quandary again a few miles up the road.

But if you accelerate you may have to maintain the same speed for the next fifty miles - as you find yourselves locked in a battle of pretending that you’re not racing.

Diagnosis - Passive-aggressive nightmare. Probably your ex.

The Lorry Driver From Duel

Pulls out their eighteen-wheel rig faster than it takes their indicator to flash once – while you’re just beginning to overtake. Forcing you to brake. Hard.

Will also sometimes tailgate you to pass the time, especially when you’re alone together in an average speed check contraflow at night, in the rain, dazzling you with headlights the size and height of your rear window.

Diagnosis - Misunderstood gentle giants. (PLEASE don’t tailgate me again!)

The Whiner

Complains endlessly about other motorway drivers and compiles whingeing lists of their failings. While hypocritically practising some of the very same outrages himself from time to time.

Diagnosis - Writer

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h/t Simon Mason

As you know, I’ve been moaning for years about the packs of teenage boys mobbing my gym, monopolising the machines – and the changing room mirror. Part of the reason for my endless moaning is that, somehow, there are always even more of them, almost week by week. Making me feel older and older.

Things have got to the point now where I wonder if there’s a single male teenager in the north east town where I live who still doesn’t have a gym membership, an Under Armour vest, and a protein shaker.

A few weeks back I was accosted in my gym’s car park by a young lad wanting me to sign him in. “I’m sixteen, honest! I’ve just forgotten my ID!”

“Sorry,” I replied, shaking my head, “no can do.”

“Aww! Why?”

“Because you don’t look sixteen, I don’t know you, and don’t want to take responsibility for you,” I replied, grumpily.

Maybe that was a bit mean. And in truth, I really have no idea what sixteen looks like these days. But please understand, I was a bit taken aback.

You see, I’m old enough to remember when kids hung around outside off licences pestering you to buy them booze and fags instead of getting them into a gym. And ‘gym’ was something teens only did during PE class, in plimsols, sullenly - shouted at by a bald, pot-bellied, middle-aged chain-smoker.

Teen henchdom has reached such a pitch that even mainstream media has finally noticed this major trend of several years - e.g. as this recent ITV News item, shot in the north east.

The item cites a recent report which showed “a generational shift where many young people prefer the gym to the pub”. Or, I guess, the offy. (The report also claims that for Generation Z gym membership is seen as “an essential”.)

This would explain why Friday afternoons/evenings, which, once upon a time were nice and quiet at the gym, with just the occasional older geezer with no life, like myself, taking their time, are now rammed and raving.

The news item features precocious, confident fourteen-year-old bodybuilder and influencer George Holland (91.4K TikTok followers, 3.1M likes) from Teesside, who won sponsorship from sportswear brand Gymshark at thirteen - their youngest-ever ambassador - and who started going to the gym aged eleven. (I guess he must have found someone less grumpy than me to sign him in.)

“A lot more people from my school have started going to the gym, when no one ever used to before,” he says, in a voice that sounds much more grown up than mine at fourteen. Or now, for that matter.

He adds: “And then you see more and more teenagers on social media posting about going to the gym.”

What the ITV News segment doesn’t really touch on, is that for young people going to the gym is, unlike a lot of social-media-friendly content, now a social activity – they go to the gym with their mates.

This is part of the reason why for them the gym has replaced the pub. And why they keep going to the gym, regularly: they don’t have to rely entirely on their own, lonely reserves of discipline and willpower. Their bodybuilding ‘journey’ (sorry to use that word) is reinforced by their social circle. It’s fun.

When I started going to the gym, back in the mid-1980s, this was a bit of an odd thing to do in the UK – and remained so for decades. Working out was a subculture. Gyms were dodgy basement and backstreet affairs, and your mates would have laughed at the idea of going with you, instead of going down the pub. Bodybuilding was a bit weird – so you had to make friends with other weirdos at the gym. Like me.

And like the subculture of homosexuality back in the 20th century, which overlapped somewhat with gym culture, there was an camaraderie of iron precisely because it was non normie.

But in the 21st century gyms and bodybuilding are no longer a basement subculture. They’re mainstream, corporate, and High Street. Particularly in the last decade, there are big, shiny, affordable chain gyms everywhere – done out like cool nightclubs or bars, with piped dance tunes. And if you’re a teenager, many of your mates will happily join you. All five, six, or seven of you can descend, with your phones, on the shoulder press that I was just about to use. Making it leg day again.

And after your workout, you can all pose and flex in front of the locker room mirror, blocking the entrance, while checking out and applauding each other’s gainz, and taking selfies to upload to Insta for more applause. Then sit on the benches, blocking the lockers, chatting, giggling, vaping, play-fighting, and sharing Tik-Toks. For even longer than you spent working out.

While I harrumph in the background.

Budget gym chains know that these groups of teen lads (and it is lads much more than lasses) are their core business now – and many if not most of them will continue to pay gym membership for much of the rest of their lives.

Unsurprisingly, these gyms don’t seem to make much if any attempt to restrict the size of groups, or police their behaviour, despite this sometimes being an annoying problem for other gym users. Particularly those who haven’t got any mates.

One of the gyms Holland is seen working out in in the doc on his Insta feed looks very much like one I sometimes use (black floors, walls, ceiling and black Panatta machines - to make your muscles ‘pop’ in selfies). Come to think of it, I may even have seen him working out there in that Gymshark top. But then there are a lot of George Holland lookalikes in this part of the world – and a lot of Gymshark. Plus the gym is very dark, and my eyesight is very elderly.

I have though definitely seen him on social media before. He popped up in my feed a while back. I was a bit shell-shocked when I discovered how young he was, and how much more he was lifting than me.

@george_lifts_Should I compete? All my 1 Rep Maxes in 1 session 💪

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It’s refreshing that the ITV News item doesn’t take the form of a moral panic about teen bodybuilders, which it absolutely would have done not so long ago, and instead interviews a GP who is all in favour of it – with provisos about being careful during “growth spurts” and using “over-heavy weights”. (George doesn’t seem to be paying much attention: he’s squatting 180kg and deadlifting 200kg.).

In fact, I would probably go further than the doc. The clip of Mr Holland posing in his bodybuilding competition where he won a bronze in the under-19 category at the NABBA finals in 2025 makes me wonder whether the ultra-low bodyfat, and highly-restricted carbs and salt diet required for that is healthy for young teen boys, even if only for a few months.

But that’s probably just me being a grumpy old fart again.

Auntie, as we sometimes call the BBC in the UK, has also finally noticed the teen bodybuilder trend – and also surprised me with her rather reasonable treatment of it. This recent BBC News website item ‘Cut and bulk: Teenagers explain why they want to get ripped’, which interviews several teen male bodybuilders – including George Holland again – about their hench hobby/vocation fails to treat it as some kind of horrible pathology or baffling self-harm.

It does however offer some sensible caution about fasting, and the so-called “carnivore diet”, which 18-year-old Nat Wolny swears by because “it’s primal”, as well as pointers on how to evaluate the reliability of online advice. Or what is too often “bro science” – or straight up ‘Liver King’ type cynical exploitation. (Wolny sounds like he may have been an LK fan – or a ‘primal’ as Brian Johnson calls them.)

The main star of the feature is, though, our kid Holland again. Who explains, matter of factly, that his drive to work out comes from “looking at others in the gym and wanting to be as big as them.” The BBC reporter lists this schoolboy’s scientific dedication to that goal:

George eats six meals a day, goes to school, trains hard (four days on, one day off, four days on) and posts to his 140,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram.

He’s currently in a “bulking” stage, he explains, consuming around 4,100 calories a day.

After 16 weeks, he will start to cut, gradually reducing his calorie intake to 2,200 a day.

Provincial schoolboy Holland assuredly rejects any suggestion from the BBC that his interest in swoleness might be unhealthy – and the reporter, to her credit, allows him to, without a patronising commentary.

When I ask if he’s worried about the intensity of his fitness regime and the desire to look big at such a young age, he’s very clear: “I completely disagree with that, going to the gym when you are young is dead good for you.” Adding: “It’s good for your mental health, your overall fitness, and it gives you good discipline.”

Holland is mostly correct, of course. Not least when you consider some of the alternative past-times for teen boys, such as drink, drugs, obesity and getting into trouble with the police – particularly in a deprived area such as the north east.

It’s also worth remembering that we live in a culture which often tells us that masculinity is is ‘toxic’ and the cause of all the trouble in the world, but the gym is a place where young lads can celebrate it without causing harm - aside from a bit of moaning from me. While improving their health, physically and mentally, and generally feeling better about themselves.

And I only wish I had known half as much about diet and training in my 20s and 30s as many of these guys in their teens know now. Or shared their work ethic and organisation.

I would certainly look more jacked. And I might, if I was a bit better dancer, have 4.1M followers on TikTok, like 22-year-old American bodybuilder Jake ‘Latman’ Leonard, who explains spornosexuality much better than I can myself.

In ten seconds:

@just_jake_leonard_01Dont worry girl you can grab mine #fyp #chest #latman

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To remind us what reflecting the male gaze back onto itself has done to masculinity in the forty years since Nick Kamen stripped in “Laundrette”, here’s Taylor Zakhar Perez, co-star of the ‘gay ‘ - i.e. man-lurve for ladies - 2023 romantic comedy Red White & Royal Blue (with a sequel coming, alas), tarting about for your delectation in his pricey undercrackers.

Doing a Jeremy Allen-White, in other words, but for Lacoste instead of Calvin Klein. Or perhaps, a Heated Rivalry-themed ‘solo’ spot. (And yes, I’m afraid I will be writing about that show.)

In this slutty new campaign for Crocodile men’s underwear, we find Perez alone in the locker room after a workout. We watch him shower - no shy cubicles in Lacoste’s locker room - water beading and bouncing off his pneumatic chest. We continue to stare as he snaps on his tight, white, form-hugging, Lacoste briefs - dancing and cavorting, athletically, sensuously, auto-erotically.

And who wouldn’t be turned on by themselves if they looked like that?

All to an upbeat French pop song on his 1980s Walkman - the retro gadget is because the official inspiration for the ad was Irene Cara’s 1983 hit song-from-the-movie Flashdance.

But Flashdance was a chaste, chilly, overdressed affair compared to this.

The camera, and thus our eyeballs, roll up and down his smooth, shredded abs, pecs, buns and basket, so extremely closely that we can not only smell but taste the expensive bergamot body lotion you know he’s wearing – as TZP gyrates like a male go-go dancer with bills to pay.

Or as the ad copy from Lacoste puts it:

A new expression of masculinity defined by self-confidence, elegance, and freedom of movement. THAT is true Crocodile style.

No, darling, THAT is true spornosexuality.

The punchline to the promo? An old, unattractive, out-of-focus geezer with a mop and bucket walks in and, instead of joining us on the bench, coughs awkwardly – and Perez, embarrassed to discover he has an audience, suddenly stops gyrating and grinding, and smiles sheepishly before shame-facedly slinking off.

As if.

In my gym’s locker room I am that old man. And I can assure you that the young chaps in their designer pants flexing and admiring themselves in the mirror have absolutely no shame. No matter how many times I cough. Or tut.

Perhaps I need to get a mop and bucket.

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Related reading:

Forty years ago, on Boxing Day 1995, an ad for old-fashioned button-fly jeans first aired on UK TV - causing a national sensation, and sowing the seeds of metrosexuality and spornosexuality in the nation’s living rooms.

And torturing the testes of a generation of young men - mine included - by persuading them that wearing boxers under tight jeans was cool.

I wrote about the legendary Levi’s 501 campaign and its impact here (’Levi’s Lecherous legacy - We’re All Living in Nick Kamen’s Laundrette Now’), back in 2021, shortly after the death of its doe-eyed star, Nick Kamen at just fifty-nine.

Last month I was quoted in a ‘female gaze’-focused online BBC article pegged to the fortieth anniversary of “Laundrette” titled ‘’A female gaze on a male body’: The risqué ‘80s jeans ad that ‘created shockwaves‘’, written by Deborah Nicholls-Lee.

It’s nice of course to be quoted. And the piece raises some important and complex cultural issues in an era of accelerated attention-deficit. However there are some assumptions and omissions in it that need to be “interrogated”, as the jargon has it these days.

So strap yourselves in - it’s going to be a bit of a bumpy spin cycle.

After an introductory couple of paragraphs describing the ad and its impact, we get to the thesis of the piece, presented first by Dr Hannah Hamad, feminist media studies academic:

“The Levi’s Launderette advert was a significant cultural flashpoint… it was “symptomatic of cultural re-evaluations of masculinity… that placed emphasis on the sexual desire of women, via the sexual objectification of men”.

I guess a ‘cultural flashpoint’ is what happens when you get to the end of a male striptease. (I’ll get my coat.)

Hamad’s thesis is seconded by Ali Hanan, founder of ‘inclusive marketing consultancy’ Creative Equals.

“It was… probably one of the first times the script had been flipped around to have a female gaze on a male body”…. The older, less progressive script was used everywhere, from the suggestive 1970s Cadbury’s Flake commercials to the controversial Calvin Klein campaign featuring a 15-year-old Brooke Shields whispering the tagline, “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”

The first (and only UK) example presented of the ‘older, less progressive script... used everywhere’, which I guess we might call ‘male gazey’, the famously suggestive long-running Cadbury’s Flake ads, targeted women, the main consumers of the product. The aim, apparently, was to associate the crumbly phallic chocolate treat with sensuality and “a moment of pure pleasure”. (The 1977 ad linked to is a surprisingly tasteful affair - though there were others, I’m sure, that were rather more suggestive and ‘male gazey’.)

I’m mentioning all this because who the ad is aimed at is rather relevant when analysing it, including, as we’ll see, “Laundrette”. (But oddly, the BBC article disregards it completely.)

We are told the Levi’s ad was unlike the ‘older less progressive script’ because

‘“It came from a female perspective”, and was written by Barbara Nokes, one of eight founding partners of global advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH). Nokes’s role, says Hanan, “has got quite lost in the story of that ad”.’

I would agree that Nokes’ role has been overlooked – I wasn’t aware of it, or had forgotten, until reading this article. So, I’m grateful for that, and sorry for my ignorance. On investigation, it seems she is credited with coming up with the original idea – remembering being in a launderette when a man washed everything but his underpants. And it is a very good idea.

Though some pedants claim it was such a good idea it was not original, or that perhaps Nokes mis-remembered where she saw the stripping man, because there exists a 1968 UK TV ad for Hamlet cigars featuring a bowler-hatted chap stripping down to his boxers, vest and gartered socks, gawped at by startled women waiting for their smalls to finish drying.

Clearly, unlike Nokes’ concept, the knobbly-kneed Hamlet chap (who could be aged anywhere between 25 and 55) is not intended to be a sex object, while the women, one or two of whom perhaps are, certainly don’t appear to be admiring him. Or giggling. As was the case with the other spots in the famous 1960s-70s ‘Happiness’ Hamlet ads, men (the target market) are being sold a cigar as a salve for stressful, awkward or embarrassing situations. Not as a way of turning themselves into the sexy centre of attention.

But the ‘female gaze’ of “Laundrette” had a motherlode of male in it.

John Hegarty, a male, is credited as being the Executive Creative Director, Agency Producer and Art Director. While Levi’s Strauss’ website states that “Launderette” was ‘the brainchild of Hegarty, who had recently won the Levi’s account for BBH’. (He is also on record as saying that the launderette concept was his idea.)

The director’s credit is Roger H. Lyons, a male, who clearly took inspiration from some of the smalltown America sequences in director John Schlesinger’s 1969 classic Midnight Cowboy – starring a baby-faced young Jon Voight as wannabe hustler from Texas in tight blue jeans. Schlesinger was also male – and gay. And according to some accounts, the gay male designer Ray Petri also provided input. (He had styled Kamen previously for The Face magazine.)

The Levi’s Strauss website also has some highly relevant information about the target market of the ad, and the thinking behind the casting of Kamen, which is missing from the BBC article.

‘Dressed in a T-shirt and 501 jeans, model Nick Kamen immediately caught the eye and interest of everyone watching him onsite and onscreen. The plan was for Nick’s gorgeous good looks and athletic build to inspire Nick want-to-be fans to dress the same. It worked — sales skyrocketed after the ad, by a whopping 800% according to some estimates.’

The plan was for Nick’s gorgeous good looks and athletic build to inspire Nick want-to-be fans to dress the same. Levi’s 501s were being marketed mostly to men – the original brief for the ad agency specifies a target audience of 15-19 year old male jeans wearers ‘who care about the way they look’.

Note how Kamen ‘immediately caught the eye and interest of everyone watching him onsite and onscreen‘. Everyone. “Launderette” sold young men the joys of being looked at - by everyone.

“Launderette” was the prime-time debut of the male desire to be desired. The self-regarding, undiscriminating heart of metrosexuality (rather than “meticulous grooming”). Though yes, assuredly, the impact and the success of “Laundrette” certainly helped the 1980s place ‘emphasis on the sexual desire of women, via the sexual objectification of men’, as Hamad puts it.

The ‘re-evaluation of masculinity’ going on at the time, and the growth of visual culture and consumerism, presented men more ‘passively’ – encouraging a more active/assertive female sexuality. The 1994 Diet Coke Break ad mentioned in the article as part of the cultural impact of “Launderette”, is much more self-consciously female gazey – in large part because the target market is actually women. (See also ‘baby-Chippendales’ Take That being marketed to Diet Coke ladies’ daughters at the same time - after being road-tested on gay men.)

And yes, “Launderette” was enthusiastically welcomed and enjoyed by many women (and girls – such as the two giggling in the ad). That was undoubtedly part of the plan – not least because giving women visual pleasure was the proof of looked-at-ness. And BBH succeeded in going beyond their brief – I’m sure there were quite a few women who went out and bought Nick’s pants, either for themselves or for their boyfriends, contributing to that famous 800% increase in sales. (A figure which may, however, have itself been part of the clever marketing hype).

But it was narcissistic and homoerotic male self-reflection that was the focus of the ad, both in terms of its effect and its intent. It’s not so much about the arrival of the female gaze in advertising, I would argue, as the mainstreaming of the male gaze turned back on itself. ‘The plan was for Nick’s gorgeous good looks and athletic build to inspire Nick want-to-be fans to dress the same’.

Or as I put it in the 1994 essay which sired the metrosexual, referencing recent advertising campaigns targeting young men:

Metrosexual man wears… corduroy shirts (Elvis wore them), chinos (Steve McQueen wore them), motorcycle boots (Marlon Brando wore them), Calvin Klein underwear (Marky Mark wears nothing else). Metrosexual man is a commodity fetishist: a collector of fantasies about the male sold to him by advertising.

And, I might have added, Levi’s jeans because Nick Kamen wore them: Nick want-to-be fans.

“Launderette” was of course fiendishly well-made, blending music video editing and faux nostalgia in an intensely ‘cool’ fashion. Or as John Hegarty put it (and is quoted at the end of the BBC article), ‘It was a piece of magic.’

It really was. It bewitched a generation in a way that will be, I suspect, impossible for anyone under 50 to understand.

But according to the syntax of the ad, what was really cool wasn’t so much Levi’s jeans but being a star – being looked at. Even when washing your laundry. In “Launderette” and the follow-up BBH Levi’s campaigns for most of the next decade, the product was successfully associated with achieving local celebrity/love-object status.

It was in many ways a cleverly, BBH-managed crossover of the marginal, taste-making sensibility of 1980s magazines like The Face and Ray Petri, where 501s, pouty male vanity, sensitivity, and homoerotics were already cool, into the mainstream. Something the BBC article acknowledges in its ‘New Man’ section – though this is also attributed to feminism. (However, the snobbish cognoscenti, myself included, only wore 501s that had belonged to dead people - bought from ‘vintage’ clothing shops like Flip in Covent Garden, or Camden Market.)

As I put it in that 1994 essay:

The promotion of metrosexuality was left to the men’s style press, magazines such as The Face, GQ, Esquire, Arena and FHM, the new media which took off in the Eighties…. They filled their magazines with images of narcissistic young men sporting fashionable clothes and accessories. And they persuaded other young men to study them with a mixture of envy and desire.

Now, forty years and two generations on from “Launderette”, male vanity and passivity is no longer rebellious/deviant, novel or marginal – it’s simply ‘normal’. Social media has made it possible to turn being a local love-object – on the beach, at the gym, in the bar, in the bath, in your bedroom, doing your washing – into being a highly lucrative global one. We’re all living in Nick’s Laundrette now. But it’s changed hands and is called ‘TikTok’.

“Launderette” and its equally-successful 1986 follow-up “Bath” - which was in many ways more ‘objectifying’ and thus even more prophetic than “Laundrette” - were male striptease shows that, in a visual sense, ushered in the 21st Century a decade and a half early – but a striptease where the product stood in for the phallus. Which was a real ‘gender flip’ (to use that cringe cliché), since in traditional psychoanalytical cinematic terms it was ‘castrated’ women who accessorised the phallus with their ‘masquerade’ (or chocolate Flakes).

The jeans-standing-in-for-the-phallus trope reached its almost parodic climax with the 1994 BBH Levi’s 501 ad “Creek” - which was perhaps the best Levi’s ad after “Laundrette” and “Bath”. But you can also see the Diet Coke Break cross-fertilisation. (Diet Coke Break was also released in 1994 - along with the metrosexual.)

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A quarter of the way into that tarty 21st century foretold by 20th century Levi’s ads, roles and ‘gazes’ have got wonderfully confused and complicated.

Curiously, the BBC article doesn’t mention “Reiimagine” the 2024 remake of “Launderette”, starring the superstar singer and feminist icon Beyonce in the Kamen role, stripping down to her underwear, billed as a ‘gender-flipped’ (that phrase again) take on “Launderette”, ‘with Beyonce taking the lead role to put women at the centre of the story and challenge traditional perceptions of denim’.

In other words, Queen B is putting women at the centre of the ‘objectifying’ story and ‘challenging traditional perceptions’ of jeans as only something to enhance the viewing pleasure of the male booty. Nick want-to-be fans. Is this the male gaze or the female gaze? Or something less ‘polarising’?

The soundtrack is Beyonce apparently singing about the joys of reciprocal objectification:

You call me pretty little thing
And I love to turn him on
Boy, I’ll let you be my Levi’s jeans
So you can hug that ass all day long

That being ‘objectified’ can be pleasurable and powerful, for women and men, that it isn’t necessarily about exploitation and powerlessness, about abjection, is something that much feminism – and the BBC article – struggles to acknowledge. (Though at least the feminists quoted do acknowledge that men can be objectified.) Towards the end, it quotes Hamad warning about the inherent dangers of sexual objectification and ‘regimes of looking’:

“Reversing the gender dynamic of sexual objectification and gender-flipping the regimes of looking that come with media representation, is not inherently empowering for women or for anyone else”…. In 2024, a Calvin Klein advert featuring Jeremy Allen White working out on a rooftop in nothing but tight white underpants led to controversy about sexual objectification.’

I hadn’t heard of any controversy about Jeremy Allen White’s CK ad (which I analysed in excessive detail here). So, I clicked on the link, keen to find out who had complained about it - presuming it was men’s rights activists. So I was surprised to find a BBC article from 2024 titled ‘FKA twigs calls Calvin Klein ad ban “double standards”’.

Twigs was protesting the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) banning her semi naked CK poster campaign, in which she wears a denim shirt, showing off the side of her buttocks and part of one breast (no nippleage), on the grounds that it was “likely to cause serious offence by objectifying women”.

Writing on Instagram, she suggested the ban – which came after a campaign starring actor Jeremy Allen White went viral – showed “double standards”....

In her response, FKA twigs wrote: “I do not see the ‘stereotypical sexual object’ that they have labelled me.

“I see a beautiful strong woman of colour whose incredible body has overcome more pain than you can imagine.”

(FKA had several uterine fibroids surgically removed in 2018.)

So, in in fact the controversy here is not about the perils of male objectification, or even objectification itself, but a female model/celeb complaining about her semi-naked ad, unlike a semi-naked man’s, being banned because it was deemed ‘objectifying’. The ASA did receive some complaints about Allen White’s CK ad but ruled against them.

And by the way, Allen White’s CK campaign is extremely and meticulously sexualised. Not that I’m complaining.

‘Objectification’ is of course a deliberately loaded term. Not to mention highly subjective in application. Especially in the hands of the ASA.

Back in 2018 I wrote about their decision to ban a Tunnock’s teacakes poster ad featuring a woman tennis player’s naked thigh for being sexually objectifying – but ruled against complaints made about a “Pure XS” TV ad for a Paco Rabanne aftershave featuring an attractive young man, stripping off in his bathroom, and admiring himself in the mirror, while himself being admired through peepholes by several women.

Here’s how I summed up the decisions, after examining the ASA’s published arguments:

What the ASA seems to be saying is that the male model was not objectified because it’s not bad objectification. Good objectification, according to the circuitous reasoning behind what is anyway a loaded term, can’t be objectification – because objectification is necessarily bad. When in fact, objectification can be… wonderful. Which is part of the reason why so many young men today work so hard to turn themselves into sexy things.

Which raises the issue that got this ruling a lot of attention in some sections of the press this week, and alerting me to the existence of the ad. It seems likely XS was complained about by people who are not really offended by it but pushing an agenda, or as they might put it, concerned about double standards.

A double standard that holds that objectification of men is either impossible or is good if possible, and objectification of women is bad – by definition. A double standard that, on TV at least, seems to now be the dominant morality – in part because TV tends to be watched more by women than men. Even BBC costume dramas these days are all about the gratuitous topless male totty. Indeed, things have got so bad of late that I am tempted to actually watch one.

The ASA doesn’t appear to have changed its doctrinal approach to ‘regimes of looking’ since I wrote the above, nearly eight years ago.

What has changed, however, is that rather than killjoy men’s rights activists, it is now (feminist) women complaining about the ASA’s double standard. Because they, like Beyonce, want some of that advertising ‘objectification’ - if only on their own terms.

To be a ‘pretty little thing’ - or a Nick want-to-be - can be awesome.

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Further reading:

Here is a box, a musical box, wound up and ready to play. But this box can hide a secret inside! Can you guess what is in it today?

I’ve been revisiting, half a century on, the BBC TV Watch With Mother classic Camberwick Green on Prime Video. If you have the misfortune not to have grown up in the UK in the late 1960s and the 1970s, then you won’t understand how much unbridled joy the rhyme above heralded.

Fifteen minutes of puppetry paradise lay ahead - drinking in every slow-moving moment with wide, and (as-yet) unsullied eyes, trying to slow time down by sheer force of childish will. Even though not much happened, you had to pay very close attention - holding your breath - because VCRs, let alone YouTube, were not a thing yet.

In truth, TV was barely a thing at that point - there were only three channels and they mostly screened testcards. BBC1 only broadcast 7-8 hours a day in 1966 when Camberwick Green first aired. (And just two years earlier there had only been two TV channels.)

The unmissable content? Some stop-motion animated puppets without mouths going about their delightfully dull lives in an imaginary village, set in a timeline which was mostly Edwardian England, but with some 1960s intrusions, such as milk floats and tractors. Accompanied by a cheery singalong song whenever a character was on his way to somewhere equally dull nearby. (In many ways Camberwick Green was rather like Upper Poppleton, the North Yorkshire village I grew up in.)

All narrated and voiced by the sainted Brian Cant, who also sang the cheery songs. Like a fantasy dad entertaining his kids.

I lived for Gordon Murray’s show as a sprog, barely able to contain my excitement over which character would emerge from the revolving, colourfully-painted music box to the sound of a haunting baroque minuet played on a glockenspiel.

Would it be Windy Miller, Camberwick Green’s organic farmer and cider microbrewer? Captain Snort of Pippin Fort ( “He’ll work a boy as hard as he can/To turn him into a soldier man!“)? Mickey Murphy the “master baker”? Farmer Jonathan Bell and his “modern mechanical farm”? Or “the big friendly policeman/PC McGarry No. 452”?

I can report that Camberwick Green is still magically captivating as an ancient adult with all those 21st century distractions at my fingertips. And yes, this is mostly down to the terrible vice of nostalgia and the equally irresistible notion of lost innocence.

But not entirely. The past is familiar, but also a foreign country.

The simply-styled puppets (all missing a mouth), the astonishingly labour-intensive, 22,500 photos/frames-an-episode stop-motion (the analogue anti-thesis of a digital, AI world), the peculiarly mesmerising foot-pulling way they ‘walk’, the bucolic settings and scenery – and the singalong songs – along with Cant’s charming RP voice, are beguiling in their own right. They are fragments not just of a long lost childhood, before all the disappointments of life, but also of a vanished world where not very much happened by today’s accelerated standards, but it happened with your full, devoted and real-time attention.

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And soon, we who grew up with this will vanish too. Like the characters at the end of the show who, revolving round and round again, slowly disappeared back into the dark bowels of the music box from whence they came.

But before that, I should mention that half a century on I notice, in addition to some details that HD reveals but 1970s Radio Rentals TV concealed, such as the dusty fingerprints on the lid of the music box, and the anatomically correct foam trousers, that almost all the characters are male.

And by far the most featured female is ‘Mrs Honeywell and the Baby’, a petticoated garrulous gossip always wheeling around a pram. All the chaps are constantly trying to politely but desperately edge away from her before she buttonholes them and asks them to hold the baby.

Camberwick Green was the Edwardian Village People. And I think you can understand now why I turned out the way I did. The BBC did this to me.

This homosocial - and sexist - sensibility was essentially repeated with the more proletarian (but definitely not urban) spin-off Trumpton (1967), Camberwick Green’s shire town, which featured the fire brigade in every episode, with the stentorian Captain Flack’s famous roll call etched on the impressionable brains of millions of UK kids:

“Pugh! Pugh! Barney McGrew! Cuthbert! Dibble! Grubb!”

(I shall refrain from making any puerile jokes here - but only because they’ve all been made already.)

Trumpton’s version of Mrs Honeywell and the Baby was even camper - Miss Lovelace, a single milliner who, instead of millinering, is always walking her three Pekingese dogs, Mitzi, Daphne, and Lulu, and seems to have been styled after Dame Edith Sitwell.

The final spin-off, Chigley (1969) is however, with the hindsight of gay dotage, the campest of all three shows. Set in another village near Camberwick Green, it stars moustachioed Lord Belborough who lives at Winstead Hall, a large neo-classical stately home, with his partner Mr Brackett, who pretends to be his butler. (Male homosexuality had only been partially decriminalised in the UK two years earlier - ‘…this box can hide a secret inside’).

No one else lives in that huge old Hall with them. Not even a housekeeper.

They both enjoy dressing up as engine drivers, have their own private railway and a steam engine called ‘Bessie’ (the only woman in their lives), with which they love to pretend to be useful and working class, picking up crates from canal boats at Chigley wharf. Stealing work from those that actually need it. (Though in Trumptonshire, where it is always summer, and every day is a ‘beautiful’ one, there is no sight nor mention of money - perhaps because if it existed, it would slip out of their fingerless hands.)

Whenever the telephone rings in Winstead Hall there is a steam-driven errand to run, and his Lordship, upon being informed of the latest request, always enthuses: “Splendid! Come on Brackett! Let’s get changed!“

And change they do - into butch overalls, which give Lord B a very peculiar, elbows-out gait, like a matelot in a Force 8. Or a drag king on Netflix. They then mount Bessie and, exquisite balls of cotton wool smoke emerging from her funnel, papier Mache countryside sliding past to chuffing sounds, Mr Cant launches into their song ‘Time Flies By (When I’m the Driver of a Train')’ - which was and remains my favourite singalong of the Camberwick Green-Trumpton-Chigley triptake. (But which now, now that time has indeed flown, takes on a more melancholic aspect.)

Time flies by when I’m the driver of a train
And I ride on the footplate there and back again
Under bridges over bridges to our destination
Puffing through the countryside there’s so much to be seen.
Passengers waving as we steam through a station.
Stoke up fireman for the signal is at green.

After all that puffing, each episode ends with the 5 o’clock horn blowing at Chigley biscuit factory, where those not fortunate enough to own Chigley have been working all day. And where most of the kids watching this show were supposed to end up.

The dungareed workers, every single one of them male (and, like everyone else in Trumptonshire, white), stream out of the gates not to head to the pub, or play footie, or even go home, but to take part in the compulsory daily folk dancing, hosted and overseen by Lord Belborough and Brackett, changed back into their posh clothes - and playing a Dutch barrel organ.

I am not making any of this up. (See photographic evidence below.)

Then, as if by magic - and certainly with no explanation or introduction - two ladies suddenly appear for the male workers to dance with. Though perhaps they are just male workers in folk-dress drag.

Designed and styled by Lord Belborough and Bracket.

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Giving the musical box’s ‘secret’ away, this complete Camberwick Green episode on YT stars Captain Snort, his soldier boys, their “rumpty-bumpty army truck” - and also features Mrs Honeywell and the Baby.

‘Whether or not it’s addictive for people who watch it, porn certainly seems to light up the reward centres of the commentariat brain. Panics about porn are a habit that just keeps increasing alarmingly.’

I wrote those words back in 2016, in the Telegraph article below. And here were are, nearly a decade on, in the midst of yet another bout of compulsive media wanking about wanking. Concern porn about porn. The hoary claim that porn is responsible for a supposed “epidemic” of ED, and is “rewiring” men’s pathetic brains - but not women’s - is now being recycled by prominent UK feminist journalists. The pseudo-science behind these claims is taken apart (again) here and here, but as you will see below, this story is as old as… corn flakes.

Obviously in an age of 24-7 online porn we’re all rather more jaded than when I had to mail postal orders to a PO Box in Scandinavia for a magazine with actual penis in it - only to receive a threatening letter from Customs and Excise three weeks later telling me my overpriced wank mag had been seized for being “obscene”. But even if we could somehow go back to 1981, the boredom would drive most of us, even Xstian feminists who ban their husbands from watching porn, to real acts of self-harm.

Broadband Sodomy

The crusade against “fapping” is eerily reminiscent of the anti-masturbation movements of the 19th century

(Originally appeared in the Daily Telegraph 29 April, 2016)

Those annoying porn ‘pop-ups’ are impossible to avoid these days. Especially when browsing serious newspapers. PORN HORROR! headlines zoom repeatedly into our sightlines, warning us that pornography is ‘addictive’ (despite an inconvenient lack of evidence), ‘ruins relationships’ and ‘rewires men’s brains’, turning them into sex zombie automatons.

Whether or not it’s addictive for people who watch it, porn certainly seems to light up the reward centres of the commentariat brain. Panics about porn are a habit that just keeps increasing alarmingly.

The UK Government itself is currently in the sweaty grip of this hysteria. With David Cameron’s controversial (and somewhat porous) ISP porn filters only recently installed, MPs are now turning their attention to the popularity of anal sex in online pornography. A recent consultation paper published by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport pondered restricting access as a way of reducing the numbers of people wanting to try the back bottom instead of the front one.

“More young people are engaging in anal intercourse than ever before,” reads the paper, solemnly. “While the increase in anal sex cannot be attributed directly to pornography consumption, it does feature in a large percentage of mainstream pornography (for example, one content analysis found it featured in 56pc of sex scenes).”

The paper’s assumptions – as with all porn panics – appear to be entirely heterosexual: so much so that it doesn’t even bother to explicitly state them, even when talking about anal sex. Instead they just cite research which suggests that anal sex “is often not seen as a pleasurable activity for young women”. In other words, the Government’s anxiety seems to be that straight porn is encouraging straight people to engage in ‘gay sex’.

It’s easy to forget, but just a couple of generations ago any sexual contact between two men, including of course anal sex – the sex act that male homosexuality symbolises for many – was completely illegal in the UK. It wasn’t until the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 that it was partially decriminalised in England and Wales (Scotland followed suit in 1980; Northern Ireland in 1982).

As late as 1986, the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (who also famously introduced the first anti ‘gay propaganda’ law, Section 28) demanded a mention of anal sex be deleted from a government Aids education leaflet.

Many at the time saw Aids as a divine punishment for the ‘sin of Sodom’. And the ‘deep-seated’ resistance to ‘sodomy’ is of course religious in origin. But it’s important to note that the religious and legal definition of ‘sodomy’ is not restricted to anal sex – it is essentially any non-procreative naughtiness, whatever the shape of the genitals involved.

Hence all same-sex sexual contact is sodomy – but so is hetero oral sex, for example. For monotheism, the point of sex is to make more uptight monotheists.

And here’s the rub. ‘Straight’ porn today is basically broadband sodomy – non-procreative sex acts piped into people’s hands for them to commit non-procreative sex acts over.

Current porn panics represent a digital-age, socially-concerned update of warnings about the terrible fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. Nowhere is this clearer than in the US, where (thanks to the First Amendment) most of our porn, and also most of our panics about it, come from. America is a complicated, conflicted country founded by Puritans, constituted by libertarians and built by salesmen.

Despite a Supreme Court ruling in 2003 that anti-sodomy laws violate the constitutional right to privacy, several US states still have them on their statutes. One such state is Utah, which just announced porn to be a ‘public health emergency’ – five years after it was revealed to have the highest percentage of online porn subscribers in the US.

Indeed, one of the front runners for the Republican Presidential nomination race, Ted Cruz, tried in 2004 to defend a Texas law banning the sale and promotion of dildos and artificial vaginas on the basis that “there is no right to stimulate one’s genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship”. He failed, but it just goes to show that the right to stimulate your own genitals isn’t to be taken for granted.

Nor is onanism necessarily a fundamentalist obsession. The mighty Time magazine recently devoted its front cover to a warning about a supposed emasculating epidemic as a result of of online masturbation: ‘Porn and The Threat to Virility,’ read the terrifying headline on the feature story.

America, we were warned, faced an epidemic of impotence amongst young men caused by porn and ‘fapping’, slang for masturbation, coined on Reddit’s comment boards. (The sensationalist ‘science’ of this story and many other porn panics, including ‘addiction’ and ‘misogyny’ moralising, was nicely diced and sliced by Joanne Bagshaw at Psychology Today.)

The crusade against ‘fapping’ is eerily reminiscent of the anti-masturbation movements of the 19th century, when male ‘self-abuse’ was widely-seen by respectable right-thinking people on both sides of the Atlantic – and also medical science – as a scourge that led to impotence, weakness, effeminacy, insanity, and the collapse of the nation.

That great American medical man, salesman and devout Seventh Day Adventist Dr John Harvey Kellogg, was one of the most famous foes of the ‘solitary vice’. His bland corn flakes were supposed to save you from it – like porn today, an exciting diet was thought to lead to over-stimulation. Other, even more unsavoury ‘cures’ included phenol dripped onto the clitoris and circumcision without anaesthetic.

Male circumcision eventually became dominant in the US – c. 81pc today – in part because of its perceived inhibition of masturbation. Though it seems to have been about as effective as corn flakes at getting men to stop ‘fapping’.

Likewise, today’s panics about online onanism are usually based on a cherished, quasi-religious ideal of ‘natural’ and ‘normal sex’. But instead of procreation, they often assume the ‘purpose’ of sex and sexual desire to be (hetero) ‘love and intimacy’ – and cast porn as the satanic lubricant of the fappers’ sins.

The US’s ‘foremost relationship expert’ Dr John Gottman praised Time’s anti-porn crusade in a doom-laden ‘Open Letter on Porn’ which labels it a “serious threat to couple intimacy and relationships” and talks a lot about ‘normal sex’. Again, as in most porn panic texts, including the Time piece and the UK Government consultation papers, the presumption is entirely heterosexual. Same sex relationships don’t exist.

There’s a very good reason for this. As gay therapist Joe Kort points out in this breezy, plain-talking riposte to Dr Gottman and the way discussions on porn as a ‘public health crisis’ and ‘addiction’ always exclude same-sex relationships, the vast majority of gay and lesbian couples simply don’t have a problem with porn. It’s not rewiring their brains; it’s not destroying their relationships.

How can this be when porn is such a ‘serious threat to couple intimacy and relationships’ – along with the nation’s hard-ons?

Kort thinks it’s because same sex couples are less likely to believe that their loving relationship should forever satisfy the need for outside sexual stimulus for both partners – and less likely to hide their interest in porn.

To that I would add that same sex couples probably have less investment in the notion of ‘normal sex’ than most hetero ones – usually having had to overcome social and religious stigma attached to their ‘abnormal’, ‘unnatural’, ‘sodomitic’ sexuality.

To put it bluntly: perhaps when you get over shame about sex there’s sweet FA to panic about.

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My old mucker and The Queen is Dead correspondent/co-author, US-based Steven Zeeland, recently unearthed a copy of this historic document in his archives.

Originally sent to me by HM Customs & Excise in 1998, two years before the Twentieth Century sputtered to an end, it advised me that they had seized a package addressed to me, which included

‘ONE-VIDEO ENTITLED “MARINE FIRST-TIMERS”.

ALSO, ONE LETTER AND ONE PHOTOGRAPH’

The grounds given: “they are considered to be indecent or obscene and are therefore prohibited from importation.”

The fact that it was sent from the US and the mention of Marines and a letter suggested it was Steve - someone who turned “military chasing” into a sociological as well as a sexual vocation - who had sent me the offending package.

I was kindly allowed the highly expensive option of challenging the seizure in the civil courts. With almost zero chance of success, since the definitions of ‘indecency’ and ‘obscenity’ were notoriously and deliberately vague and subjective. And anything involving erect penises - let alone erect penises with other erect penises - tending to be regarded as most “likely to deprave or corrupt”, the legal “test” of obscenity.

And I would certainly agree with the Twentieth Century guardians of public decency that there isn’t much point to porn without pricks.

Steve, of course enjoyed the protections of the First Amendment and was taken aback by the seizure when I faxed him the HMCE letter. Today he tells me that the video as far as he can recall, probably featured masturbation, solo and mutual, with possibly some oral, but was “really terrible.” Ever the romantic, he had taken the trouble to copy it for me (onto a blank, untitled cassette) due to the candid, unscripted dialogue of some of the “exceptionally beautiful” jarheads. And also because the video was made by a porn producer he interviewed for his the latest academic text he was working on, Military Trade.

The impounded “photograph” mentioned was apparently a postcard of Tom Cruise in the 1981 military academy movie Taps, which I wrote about in my war movie chapter in Male Impersonators (1994).

In case I had the deep pockets and bravura to challenge them in the civil courts, I was also kindly threatened with the possibility of prosecution by Her Majesty’s Customs & Excise and the imposition heavy financial penalties and “in certain cases” imprisonment if I was deemed to have been “knowingly concerned in importing prohibited items”.

I opted not to challenge the seizure.

This was not the first time I had received such a letter. Several years previously, c. 1981, when a horny teenager and still living at home in Upper Poppleton, North Yorkshire, I had received a very similar, if not identically-worded, surprise from HM Customs & Excise.

A classified ad in a top-shelf straight wank mag such as Fiesta or Mayfair, sticky copies of which circulated at my all-boys’ school (this was, remember, long before the Internets), had caught my glittering eye. The ad, illustrated with a promising Tom of Finland drawing, was for a magazine that might more closely approximate my particular requirements. Which, needless to say, were not well catered to by WH Smiths back then.

And even if they were, I wouldn’t have been permitted to buy one, being under eighteen - if I had had the chutzpa to try. Those hetero wank mags circulating at school, which occasionally included more “hardcore” titles like Whitehouse, were mostly pilfered by boys from their dads’ wank banks.

I had duly converted a large wedge of my saved pocket money into postal orders - which, I’m astonished to discover, still exist - and, full of moist-palmed anticipation, sent them off to the listed Scandinavian PO box. (Now, of course, I’d just have to pay for a VPN.)

So I was more than a little disappointed with what I got in return. If intensely relieved I had found the letter before my mum. I did though worry for months afterwards, given the barely-veiled threats in the form-letter, whether I was going to be hauled off to prison. That would have been incredibly awkward.

Hence my second brush with HMCE seventeen years later was rather less scary and more amusing-annoying - in a Pythonesque or Gilbert & Sullivan fashion.

“One month after the date shown above” the vigilant civil servant, having watched Marine First Timers, probably to the end, just to be sure, and having perused Steve’s letter to me, to check if I was some kind of porn dealer deserving of prosecution, will have consigned the offending articles to the purifying flames of the furnace in the basement of Islington’s Mount Pleasant Sorting Office. Assuming he or she didn’t add it to their own personal wank bank.

Please permit me a Carry On snigger at the name ‘Mount Pleasant Sorting Office’. (And also the fact that it was built on the site of Coldbath Fields Prison.)

This touching experience of the artisanal, hand-crafted censorship of personal mail only happened a quarter of a century ago, but seems, in an age of 24-7 hardcore gangbangs streamed into our hands - involving Marines or almost any other occupation you might hanker after - bizarrely Victorian.

Which it was, even then. Where, I wonder, did Her Majesty’s Customs & Excise find the small armies of public-spirited types willing to risk being corrupted by all the filth they had to view all day? While being paid?

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that HMCE didn’t survive the new Millennium. It was absorbed by the Inland Revenue in 2005. Revenue not morality was now king.

But it is kind of cool, in hindsight, for our correspondence to have been officially deemed “indecent and/or obscene”.

Steve and I continued our depraved and corrupting intercourse for a couple of years after the last letter in The Queen is Dead, mine anticipating his London visit in the summer of 1998, which his seized letter followed. Our epistolary romance didn’t however quite make it into the digital 21st Century. Which feels right. Letter-writing had already become something of a quaint affectation, even by the 1990s.

Being a sloppy archivist, I managed to lose my copies of my missives to him - though not his. Fortunately Steve, is a smart archivist, and is, as you will have gathered, still with us, still on friendly terms, and has kept my letters to him and is currently engaged in scanning them.

So there may be a sort of coda to The Queen is Dead.

If Only for Fans.

Above is a still from Guillermo del Toro’s new film Frankenstein, with Oscar Isaac as the demented doctor, and a peroxide blond Jacob Elordi as his shredded creation, getting to know one another.

If only.

Del Toro’s galvanic stiff, garlanded with plaudits by the critics, and which I harumphed through t’other day on Netflix, may sport a Rocky (though, what film doesn’t these days?) but is The Rocky Horror Picture Show without the songs, the gags or the shags.

It is however quite silly – but with a massive budget ($120 million), running time (150 long minutes), overwrought design, and stolid sense of self-importance which continuously commands you not to snigger, but to take it seriously. At one point, when Dr Frankenstein is chasing his Creature over the frozen wastes for thousands of miles – with a peg leg – I longed for a Benny Hill soundtrack and a frantic, speeded-up framerate.

Del Toro, who made the Blade and Hellboy films, turns Mary Shelley’s famous Creature into an undead superhero – and her gothic novel into a fairy tale. Which is an obvious and contemporary but also pointless thing to do. So, the monster is superhumanly big, superhumanly strong, his injuries heal almost instantly, and he is in fact indestructible and immortal – but is very humanly haunted by his inhuman origin story and fate.

Whereas in Shelley’s novel, subtitled ‘The Modern Prometheus’, it is Victor Frankenstein who is punished for stealing the power of creation from god, in del Toro’s re-telling it is the Creature himself who is sentenced to eternal suffering. Like Prometheus bound to the rock by Zeus, his organs relentlessly grow back anew to deliver him – and us – more agony.

In an ending you can see coming for days, the Creature teaches us all about the real meaning of humanity. Call me shallow, but I would rather have seen a burning windmill - or a castle spaceship taking off.

It certainly helps us to believe in the Creature’s inner humanity that, in addition to speaking (eventually) in a posh English accent he is also a shredded undead superhero – and naked for much of the film save for a loincloth reminiscent of Rocky’s gold lamé Speedos.

True, he doesn’t have much of a tan, and dark blue scars divide up his body parts, but the effect is not unlike the kind of inking a lot of today’s spornosexuals go in for. (Who, I have insisted elsewhere, are not just latter-day Rockys – but also their own Dr Frank-N-Furters.)

Spornosexuality is the pumped epitome of masculinity’s pleasing aestheticization - in a hyper visual, UHD, HDR culture where everything is aestheticized, even reanimated monsters from the charnel house. (And where the films somehow get drabber and drabber as they get more and more gorgeous.)

So, you can absolutely see why Lady Elizabeth Harlander (Mia Goth), having spurned Victor’s advances, is immediately drawn to the “monstrous” – and nearly-naked – Jacob Elordi. Unlike his creator who fails to see how humpy his himbo is, keeping him chained up and neglected in the cellar, she seems to immediately clock that he might be good for relieving her “tension.”

Or as Inga (Teri Garr) says in Mel Brooke’s Young Frankenstein, another parody far superior to this “straight” treatment, released in 1974 (the year after Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show debuted on the London stage): “He vould have an enormous schwanzstucker!”.

But del Toro, having gone out of his way to provoke such base thoughts, doesn’t want to be dirty, the way Janet did. The notion that Elizabeth’s concern and connection is motivated by vulgar sexual attraction to the Creature is put in the mouth of a jealous Victor to discredit it.

Instead, we are meant to think strong, brain-and-heart smart proto-feminist Elizabeth is drawn to him because she can see past his shocking physical appearance and sense his inner humanity, identifying with him as an outsider, another victim of the patriarchy.

Elizabeth: What if, unrestrained by sin, our creator’s breath came into its wounded flesh directly?

Victor: Good God, Elizabeth. If I could force myself to believe it, it would be my inclination to see attraction in you for that thing.

Elizabeth: Understanding. In those eyes I saw pain, and what is pain if not evidence of intelligence?

Victor: What about my pain? What about what you have denied me? What my heart wants…

Elizabeth: Your heart? [chuckling quietly] Of all the human anatomy, that is the organ furthest from your understanding. Only monsters play God, Baron.

(This clunky, didactic dialogue is, I’m afraid, typical of the whole lumbering movie.)

There is though not much monstrousness to see past. It’s as if The Elephant Man had starred a young Tom Cruise or Rob Lowe with a bit of toothache. Hence the Creature’s demand that Victor make him a female companion to save him from incel solitude seems a tad redundant.

Likewise, Frankenstein’s contempt for his own creation doesn’t make much sense.

In the novel, Victor shuns his unnatural offspring because of its hideousness – which obviously isn’t going to fly with Elordi as the Creature. The explanation is more ideological-pedagogical. Yes, that’s right, del Toro’s Frankenstein is a cinematic lesson in toxic masculinity. Because we don’t get enough of those nowadays.

Opposite to the novel, which gives Victor an idyllic childhood and doting parents, he is shown tormented by a domineering, driven, cold and oppressive patriarch, played, naturally, by Charles Dance. A celebrated surgeon, he drives Victor’s adored young mother, also played – Freudian Klaxon! – by Mia Goth, to a very early grave.

So, his bafflingly contemptuous and sadistic treatment of his handsome and astonishing creation, along with his general MCP arrogance and egotism, is a repetition of this pattern, or “cycle of abuse”, to use the therapeutic jargon. The sins of hegemonic masculinity are visited upon the sons. Both Victor and his Creature.

The central love-story of del Toro’s Frankenstein is self-consciously the family romance, particularly the daddy-son bromance gone – as admittedly it often does – horribly wrong. With a by turns jealous and disappointed Victor essentially “negging” his needy offspring until the final few moments of the film when there is an unconvincing deathbed reconciliation-consummation aboard a ship in the Arctic trapped in thick, heavily symbolic ice.

But the real ice is, alas, the lifelessness of this pretty-looking but unconvincing “dream project” del Toro tells us “has been thirty years in the making”, and which will no doubt be showered with Oscars. His 2017 The Shape of the Water is a much better Frankenstein film.

He should never have gone back to the lab.

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Further reading

I have been alerted by a chum who is much younger - and hence much more alert and much more on TikTok - to a series of currently-airing ironically retrosexual ads for “natural” male cosmetics, fronted by Alan Ritchson, the spornosexual star of Reacher, which seem worthy of comment from Metrodaddy.

The brand he’s pimping is called ‘Dr Squatch’, named after the mythical Sasquatch or Big Foot - someone who, I fear, didn’t use much soap or deodorant - founded in 2013 in San Diego, with virile, hairy fragrances such as “wood Bourbon barrel”, “Eucalyptus Greek Yoghurt”, and “Grapefruit IPA”.

Bought earlier this year by massive multinational Unilever (whose Lynx/Axe brand’s relationship to metrosexuality I wrote about recently) for an invigorating $1.5 billion, it attracted such big-hitting attention because of its successful viral/annoying “social-first” advertising emphasising the “naturalness” of the product and the alleged skin-irritating artificial awfulness of its competitors (like Unilever).

Dr Squatch is, in essence, a pampered, yummy brand for a pampered, yummy male generation (Z) who enjoy seductive, hypermasculine aesthetics - aka spornosexuality. And for them, Reacher/Ritchson is their dream muscle daddy.

The ads are set in ‘Manlandia’, which sounds like a clothing-optional resort in Palm Springs but is in fact a wood-cabined, Shangri-La of virility where Unilever’s global financial clout delivers us Mr Ritchson shirtless, shredded and TRT pumped, chopping wood and delivering Dr Squatch’s “extremely natural, extremely manly” slogan.

The woody nature of the pamper product and these ads is a perfect match for Mr Ritchson’s acting style. Luckily, he’s not playing it entirely straight here, as he does in the incredibly dull but popular Reacher - where the only real excitement is watching him shower. In Manlandia, a mythical place created by a shower products brand, where we’re told “a man’s shower is his castle”, he camps it up in the great outdoors - displaying the talent for comedy he did in the brotastic Spike TV sitcom Blue Mountain State (2010-12).

The ads are a curious pastiche of the late-Noughties phony anti-metrosexual “menaissance” in the US - the overdetermined not to say hysterical era of what I dubbed the “manly strap-on”, when the “man” or “he” or “bro” word was anxiously strapped onto anything that moved - “manfood”, “mancodes”, “manvans”, “hegans” (yep, that really was a thing). A phallic pacifier designed to open men up to selling them more product.

Manlandia features “man-caves”, a “man library” (full of… steaks and deodorant) and and lots of comic over-compensation involving chain-saws and drills. But the ads have a humorous and ironic affect which acts as a knowing alibi. Unilever obviously wants to butch up its slightly sissy pamper product - but they and their ad agency know that in 2025 this is “problematic”.

So like much advertising, Manlandia goes Betty Bothways - avowing the thing it disavows. This is after all how myth is manufactured in a consumerist culture.

Hence the “Yes You Man!” ad in this series is self-consciously “inclusive”. Announces Ritchson: “Welcome to Manlandia - where men can be dudes and dudes can be men!”. What does this mean? Probably not very much, but it does seem to be permissive rather than prescriptive - the “mancode” is brostory, dude.

A white, Aussie guy stereotype, barbecuing sausages and steaks on the back of his motorbike (no, it doesn’t make any more sense however many times you watch it), announces “I can DO anything I want”. A young white man playing a guitar solo onstage tells us “I can BE anything I want”.

“Yes you man!” replies Ritchson to both, giving them the Reacher seal of approval.

Then a somewhat swishy, pretty young black man in a fluffy white bathrobe exclaims: “I can use natural soap instead of spicy synthetic cleanser!”.

Ritchson agrees and affirms “Yes you man!” again, but with a slightly different cadence - nevertheless bestowing his approval. Welcome to Manlandia - where men can do dudes.

All that matters is that you buy the pricey product. “There are many ways to man,” he assures us, “but only one way to smell like one - with Dr Squatch” - jamming a freshly-axed block of his sponsor’s seven-bucks-a-pop soap in his nostril and sniffing it like the last bottle of poppers during Bear Week.

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This “be all you want to be” (but buy the fucking product) messaging is decidedly metrosexual not retrosexual, and along with the fluffy black chap, most certainly would not have appeared in one of those reactionary “menaissance” ads from the late Noughties except as a punchline.

Then again, Ritchson himself wouldn’t have appeared either. Twenty years ago, this married (to a woman) dad of three would also have been considered way too gay. After all, the porno in sporno is homo.

Ritchson’s spectacularly objectified, finally-undressed “guns” and body (his many tatts are covered by makeup when playing Reacher), throbbing and swoleing beneath his preternaturally pretty forty-two-year old face, is the focus of all the ads - and the real commodity. But he only takes his plaid sleeveless shirt off for anything but a few seconds in one of them - nominally addressed to women: “Ladies, do you wish your man was made in Manlandia?”

But this is also ironic. We already know that Ritchson and the people making this ad know better. That this is just about giving viewers permission to totally enjoy his slutty spornosexuality. And while I’m sure that plenty of women go wild for his totally commodified body - and most of the young men who might buy this soap are very interested in driving women wild - Ritchson and the makers of this ad know that “bi” far the keenest, most passionate consumers of his body are men. There are no women in Manlandia.

That’s why they’ve paid the orange man-mountain a huge pile of moolah to make these ads for man-soap. And their massive marketing budget is the reason why their soap costs so much it will make you cry even without getting it in your eye.

But make no mistake, however ironic and jokey the address, the camera-worship of Ritchson’s pecs, abs, perky nips, and cum-gutters the size of storm drains - zooming lasciviously in and out - is intensely serious.

h/t James Kean

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Sad news today of the passing of the much-loved actress Patricia Routledge, aged 96, most famous for her portrayal of Mrs Hyacinth Bucket - “It’s pronounced Boo-kay!” - in the 1990s British TV sit-com Keeping Up Appearances. Hyacinth was the inspiration - or role model - for this piece about back-seat driving from 2014.

Clive Swift, who played her husband Richard, died in 2019, aged 82. Part of me likes to imagine they’re now reunited in heaven, driving around in an immortal Rover 216, Hyacinth wearing a hat as a big as a halo and instructing him to “Mind the clouds, dear”. Or am I thinking of hell?

Some people are more proactive passengers than others.

Hyacinth Bucket in the classic 1990s UK sit-com Keeping Up Appearances, played by the formidable Patricia Routledge, takes what we might call a very ‘hands on’ approach to being driven by her long-suffering husband.

‘Mind the sheep, Richard!’

‘They’re in the field!’

‘This could be the lambing season.’

We all laugh at the snobbish, provincial suburban lady’s incessant and insistent back-seat driving. Not least because it is meant to be symbolic of her marriage to Richard. He may sit in the driver’s seat, but it’s definitely his passenger who is in charge. Wearing a nice big hat.

Richard is patient to a fault and hardly shows his frustration. Then again his wife is a terrifying old battle-axe who doesn’t take kindly to a ‘tone’ being taken with her.

But all drivers hate a back-seat driver. Until they find themselves a passenger, and then their inner Hyacinth emerges. According to a 2011 survey, 92% of UK motorists admit to being back-seat drivers.

This however didn’t stop 51% of them getting angry behind the wheel as a result of advice from passengers, or the same number claiming it was the biggest distraction for drivers. While 14% even claimed they were involved in an accident or near miss as a result of being told to blow their horn in a more refined way, dear - or some such.

The official advice to passengers from car safety experts is not to distract or frustrate the driver with back-seat driving. They say it could be dangerous – both to your safety and to your relationships: partners are ranked by motorists as the worst back seat drivers.

I suppose no one likes being criticised by their partner, particularly if being married to them has made you wonder, like Richard must have, if several weeks in traction at the General Hospital might be a nice break.

But what precisely is a back-seat driver? According to Wikipedia, it is ‘a passenger who is not controlling the vehicle but who excessively comments on the driver’s actions and decisions in an attempt to control the vehicle.’

Which confirms what I have always known: I’m not a back-seat driver.

You see, I never excessively comment. There are so many things I could say, but I stoically bite my lip instead. Though quite often this action does, entirely inadvertently, produce a loud tutting noise.

When I do comment I only impart the most pertinent and pithy pearls of my precious driving wisdom to the person fortunate enough to find themselves behind the wheel in my presence.

Besides, I don’t sit in the back. I prefer to sit up front, where I can see much more clearly all the mistakes they’re making, such as driving too close to the vehicle in front – and then too far away.

And what hazards they have failed to anticipate, such as the deceptively harmless pensioner stood at the bus stop, leaning on a walking stick, who could suddenly and with no warning whatsoever sprint into the road. (And by the way, it needs to be mentioned that sheep in fields can jump hedges.)

Sitting up front also means you can use helpful, non-distracting, non-verbal signals, such as sharp intakes of breath, grabbing arm-rests, or anxiously checking and re-checking the seat belt. Even though I’m not actually Catholic, I usually carry Rosary beads with me as I find counting them loudly and crossing myself can be quite salutary.

If all else fails, there’s always stamping on an imaginary brake pedal and pressing yourself back against the seat with a look of wide-eyed abject terror on your sheet-white face.

I also do my best to help the driver by leaning forwards at junctions and shouting ‘YOU’RE ALL RIGHT THIS SIDE!’. Or ‘YOU CAN GET A BUS THROUGH THERE MATE!’

When I’m not fiddling with the stereo and the dashboard controls. I invariably find that people haven’t set these at their optimum levels – and the radio is tuned in to the wrong radio stations.

OK, so perhaps I’m just ever so slightly controlling. But honestly, have you seen the way other people drive? It’s not my fault that I’m a better driver than them and it would be dishonest of me to pretend otherwise. Not to mention anti-social and selfish – how are they going to improve if I don’t mention they should be using the gears to brake more as this will lengthen the life of their pads and discs?

Unfortunately, not all drivers are as open to wise advice as Hyacinth’s husband. I’ve been yelled at just for suggesting that their screen wash isn’t as effective as the brand I use. And that their wiper blades need replacing.

When that happens I just tell them that they shouldn’t talk while driving and concentrate on the road instead.

And adjust my hat.

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h/t to Simon M

Memory and smell are closely related, neurologists and novelists tell us. Which is probably why I remember ‘the Lynx effect’. Well, that and the fact that one of the most successful and longest-running advertising campaigns ever used that tagline.

In the 80s, 90s and 00s Lynx (Axe in the US), British-based mighty multinational consumer goods company Unilever's young male grooming brand, was the eye-smarting aroma of anxious adolescent heterosexuality. And also downlow metrosexuality. Their ads used laddish humour to normalise the use of otherwise 'girly' product. Yes, hard to believe, but back then deodorant was still considered somewhat girly or gay by many teen boys. And Unilever was after the great unwashed mass market.

Lynx ad lads only used fragranced deodorant because it got them girls, loads of them - ‘the Lynx Effect’ - which proved they weren't gay. Often the Lynx ad lads were deliberately physically unprepossessing - dweeby, even - to emphasise, comedically, the bodacious efficaciousness of the product with the ladies, and also perhaps to further avoid gay taint. Such as this 2003 ad for Lynx Pulse - note how the less dweeby, young male pool players are baffled (0.32) by his popularity:

The laddish humour of the ads of course also cunningly disguised their exploitation of teen male anxiety about body smells and dating. About being worthy of lurve. (Hence attacks on Lynx for sexism also helped to make the product seem less 'girly' or 'gay' - as it did with 'lad mags' that were in fact male lifestyle and beauty magazines.)

While the strength of Lynx products themselves almost suggested a kind of chemical warfare on male adolescence. For years they made locker rooms barely breathable - particularly given the extremely generous and haphazard application favoured by many Lynx users.

But in 2015, Lynx ads finally came out of the locker. They became bi-curious, or at least more open-minded and inclusive. Lynx aired an ad for hair gel in Australia featuring a young chap kissing a girl and then - lawks! - a boy. More than that, the ad celebrates possibilities, rather than exploits anxieties (save the anxiety of losing your hair when older).

This was racy stuff for Lynx - and landed them, as they probably planned, plenty of editorial. Including from me. Though it may have happened in part because Metrodaddy had spanked their bottoms over the hysterical heterosexuality of their ads, urging them to be less uptight about metrosexuality and more celebratory - like the young men they were targeting - when they asked me for a consultation not long before the ad was made.

Lynx/Axe did dip its toe in this stream several years earlier, with another 'curious' deodorant ad back in 2006, Click, but in a slyly dishonest fashion. Starring a young Ben Affleck in full metrosexual mode (he had been identified by both the media and myself as metro) with The Steve Miller' Band’s ‘Gangster of Love’ as a soundtrack, it has him totting up with a bouncer’s clicker the number of times he gets a come-on during a busy, glamorous day of shopping, dining and socialising and generally admiring himself in the desiring looks of others.

Including, after a moment’s hesitation and a ‘what the hell?’ shrug, one flirt from a swishy male shop assistant (0:53). The metrosexual is an equal opps narcissist - and the male desire to be desired is the heart of metrosexuality.

As I said in the essay ‘Meet the Metrosexual’ which introduced my fetching offspring to the US in 2002, the modern male obsession with being looked at is 'because that's the only way you can be sure you actually exist.' And this was several years before social media and smartphones took charge of our eyes. (Instagram etc digitised, automated and massively upscaled the metrics of looks and likes.)

But the punchline in Click is that the film star has the rug pulled from under him by the ordinary, comparatively plain, blue-collar, and (we are supposed to think) definitely not vain or metrosexual, hard-working Lynx lad in the lift at the end who wins the click-measuring contest with double Affleck’s sleb digits. (Though in truth, we don’t know how many of his clicks were men in lifts into delivery lads.)

In the last decade I lost track of Lynx since, like most people not yet in a nursing home, I no longer see much 'mainstream' advertising - or advertising that isn't heinously e-targeted at me and my male pattern hair loss. (That 2015 Lynx hair gel ad was so right). And besides, what advertising I am exposed to is usually instantly forgettable. The age of mass-market (TV) advertising that made Lynx the monster brand it is has passed.

Hence I'm not the only one who lost track of Lynx: their sales have suffered. Wikipedia tells me that in recent years, Axe/Lynx lost out to a Tik Tok promoted trend of 'smellmaxxing' - the 'layering' of expensive designer colognes by teen and tween boys. Now that metrosexuality is simply ‘normality’ for today's younger generation, the era when fragrance had to be packaged as something more practical-sounding like deodorant or a ‘babe magnet’ seem quaint and… naff.

Lynx is however fighting back, bringing out a new 'Fine Fragrance Collection' which according to its website

…brings premium scents crafted by world-renowned perfumers to your daily routine. We've levelled up our range this year with new gourmand fragrances like Cherry Spritz, Peach Infusion, Cocoa Velvet, and Watermelon Freeze.

Yes, that's Lynx using words like 'perfumers', 'gourmand fragrances', 'peach infusion' - for product aimed at teen boys. Clearly Lynx lusts for some of that smellmaxxing action.

To promote this new collection, Lynx UK have brought out a series of short, ten second, Tik Tok-ready 'The Power of a Fragrance' ads which have managed to puncture the multimedia miasma of modern life, go viral - and kick up a bit of a stink. So much so even I noticed them.

They do this by being funny, and slightly shocking - 'pushing boundaries' in an age which doesn't seem to have many left. Or in social-media marketing speak - ‘polarising’. Polarising is good because the opposite of polarising is ‘indifferent’.

They combine, cleverly, the legendary laddish humour of old Lynx ads with a radically different marketplace. The Lynx Effect is back - but now it is polymorphously perverse rather than hysterically heterosexual.

In the first a (black) basketball player in the locker room pulls his shorts out and sprays the product onto his wedding tackle. Cut to him jumping for the net with the ball while a (white) opposing player, instead of blocking him, is irresistibly drawn to the fragranced packet - sniffing and smiling, eyes closed, getting so close, in slo-mo, it looks like a sex act.

The black basketballer is bemused and baffled - but then, he did take the trouble to spray his own bits with the ‘pear-and-sandalwood’ scent before play, so maybe he shouldn't be quite so taken aback.

The product shot shows a couple of bottles of 'NEW Lynx Lower Body Spray', with the rubric: 'Gentle on skin - even down there'.

In the second short ad, a young man getting ready to go out squirts the seat of his pants (why he would do this is not explained). At the cinema, squeezing down an aisle, a seated young woman catches the 'gourmand' aroma from his derriere and her nose follows his arse, eyes closed, along the aisle, sniffing in a way that looks a lot like (fully-dressed) rimming - while what appears to be her male partner looks on.

The young man is baffled and slightly alarmed - but again, he did spray his own arse. This seems like another ad for 'Lower Body Spray' but if you pay attention to the product shot at the end it's actually 'Lynx Whole Body Spray' - Cherry Spritz. (So many products to buy to make your ‘lower body’ fragrant.)

In the final ad, a boxer sprays his naked feet in a locker room. Cut to him knocking out his opponent in the ring - who falls with his head next to the sprayer's feet and begins sniffing them, eyes closed, grinning, his nose following the feet, still prone on the ground, as the boxer shrinks from him.

Cut to the winning boxer showering - and zoom back to reveal the KO'd opponent still lying on the floor at his feet, sniffing and smiling. The product shot is Lynx Whole Body Spray (Cherry Spritz) again.

Plenty of very grown up people online seem to be genuinely outraged, one Redditor commenting:

‘I don't want to see people sniffing other people's crotches, or think that anyone is specifically trying to get me to sniff their crotch.’

It’s easy to laugh, but the ads are clearly playing with kinkery - and disgust. Worse, the kinkery is mostly 'gay' - two M-on-M to only one M-on-F kinkery (and that seems to be invoking F-on-M anilingus.) Moreover, both the basketball player and the boxer are using the nice-niff product (on their crotch and feet) before taking part in sport with other men.

All of which Lynx ad lads would have found way too gay, back in the day. Though probably today’s generation just think it’s funny. Which it is. The fact it offends older people is just a plus.

Then again, use of the product is equated in all three ads with winning and dominance - particularly the two M-on-M ads. And both the boxer and the basketball player using the 'fine fragrance' are reassuringly masculine.

And although many are upset, as Unilever no doubt hoped, that the ads are 'perverted’, or ‘filthy’ the ads are, curiously, both sexual and un-sexual.

In a sense, they are an inversion of perversion. The reason some people find feet and crotch smells appealing is precisely because of their funkiness rather than their 'Cherry Spritzness'. The point and power of these fragrances seems to be to eradicate 'lower' funkiness. Lower body spay.

Dr Freud believed that the human sense of smell diminished when we began walking upright, relying more on our eyes than our nose - and that civilisation required the repression of olfactory stimuli. Today’s humans are mammals that don’t appear to have pheromones - which lends credence to this theory. (The existence of human pheromones has not been proven - however the existence of a perfume industry worth $80 billion p.a. is highly indicative of their non-existence.)

When we were on all fours our noses were closer to the ground - and to other anuses and genitalia (and feet) and so, like our pet dogs today, to which we have outsourced much of our nasality and inappropriate sniffing, we were much more ruled by and reliant upon our sense of smell.

The Lynx ads seem to recreate, in sanitised fashion, Freud’s primal ‘all fours’ scenario in a 21st century urban environment - using basketball jumps, cramped cinema seating, and boxing KOs to bring the civilised nose into close, appreciative contact with the crotches, arse and feet of Cherry Spritzed strangers.

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Postscript: Newly sensitised to sniffy ads with lads, I've just noticed an ad on Amazon Prime (while waiting impatiently to watch an old movie) for Lenor, featuring rugby players scrumming down but ending up in a cuddle huddle - due to the irresistible, long-lasting fragrance of each other's rugby kits.

Not nearly as kinky or as interesting as Lynx Lower Body Spray, but clearly some overlap. And, I’m sure, a harrowing sight for keen collectors of used rugby kit.

h/t James C

Back in 1996, I took a shine to a jangly, wryly melancholic, lyrical single by Texas indie band Deep Blue Something which managed to be grungey and Smithsy in a way that I hadn’t thought possible - or indeed needed. But once heard, made perfect, pop sense.

I wasn’t the only one who had their head turned: it went to No.1 in the UK, no mean feat at the height of Britpop, and was a big hit globally. When people still actually bought records.

Called Breakfast at Tiffany's - the camp old movie/Capote reference in itself Smithsian - the song told of the narrator’s difficulties in accepting the un-mutually agreed end of a relationship, and the bitter-sweet realisation that ‘the one thing we’ve got’ is that they both ‘kinda liked’ the 1961 movie version of Truman Capote’s 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

At the time I was struggling to accept my own un-mutually terminated love-affair (documented in masochistic detail in The Queen is Dead). I even sent the single to my ex in the hope that he’d kinda like it.

Although it is a fine pop single - one that, unlike many of us, still stands up all these decades later - I also took a shine to Breakfast at Tiffany’s because Todd Pipes, the fresh-faced, ginger-blond, thick-necked lead singer with the plaintiff, poetic voice looked a bit, on pre-digital TV, and through the haze of self-pity, like my ex. Or maybe an idealised composite of all my exes.

‘Todd Pipes’ is after all the perfect pop star porn name.

You may laugh, but looking for photos of him for this post, I discovered that Pipes’ pecs & abs (which I didn’t know he had) were splashed over the cover of now defunct soft-core porn mag Playgirl in 1996. (I’m now intrigued of course whether he was the ‘dude who goes nude’.)

In this spornosexual century we’re blasé about this kind of slutily sculpted male body - but I can assure you that back in the 1990s they were much rarer. Particularly in indie pop stars. Moz’s oft-displayed saucy vegan torso was less gym-honed than half-starved.

I can’t remember whether I bought Home, the album Breakfast at Tiffany’s appeared on. Which is perhaps, along with lawsuits from a former manager, and the crushing pressure on innocent indie kids to maintain that level of sudden global fame, why Deep Blue Something, and the surprising, sensitive, Anglo-American (or Texan-Mancunian) sonic landscape they momentarily promised, slid out of view. They were dubbed, inevitably, and fatally, a ‘one hit wonder’.

Mr Pipes eventually pursued a part-time solo career, getting a day job as an English teacher. In the Breakfast at Tiffany’s promo he’s seen reading a book at table - which I thought at the time was a Morrisseyean affectation/reference, but it seems that he was a reader all along. All heady books she’d sit and prophesise….

But now, thirty years on, Deep Blue Something and Mr Pipes are back, with a new album, Lunar Phase. And, knock me down with an ostrich feather, it turns out that the feelings were mutual. The shine I took was reflected back. The very first track, and the first single from the album, is a bitter-sweet musical love-letter Todd has penned to me.

I can’t pretend I’m not flattered: remarkably unmolested by the passing of time, and all its crimes, he’s still pretty hot for a 57-year-old. And I bet he still works out. I’m only three years older but could be mistaken for his dad. And he’s still clean-shaven, which is even more miraculous in these hairy times. The song isn’t bad either, which is a welcome bonus. In fact, it’s pretty catchy - and funny. As well as strangely affecting.

Well, yes, officially the song is about that former Smiths frontman and long-distance solo artist Stephen Patrick Morrissey and his cultural (re-)cancellation in recent years for his “problematic” views. Or simply having any.

Deliver this sage of word and tongue,
Tell us the things this man has done,
Convict the accused, and condemn if you must. . .

Todd is a married man, so it’s entirely understandable that he needs to keep us on the downlow. But, recklessly, the song is named after one of my hits - Saint Morrissey, the 2003 ‘psycho-bio’ of the Mancunian crooner the blurb for which describes it as 'At once Devil’s Advocate and Counsel for Canonization…'.

So, Todd, I totally get the message. Shame though you waited until we were so fucking old.

I guess Morrissey is the one thing we’ve got.

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h/t Graham Rae

Staying in a university town recently, I visited a budget chain gym - because I'm a budget chain kinda guy - and was struck by the number of dodgy taches sported by stoodenty types. Sub Goose from Top Gun efforts.

This, along with the widely reported news that the large UK craft beer brewery and bar chain Brewdog, founded in 2007 and often touted as a hipster business success story, was closing most of its outlets and laying off staff at short notice, reminded me of how the hipster, once ubiquitous and rampant, seemingly vanished into thin, artisanal air.

All that's left of the hipster cat is his nose tickling grin. And no one seems to be mourning him. Hipsterism has become hipsterisn't.

Most of the hipster signifiers, from pulled pork to fixie bikes, dodgy taches and bushy beards, skinny jeans, creatively inked arms, stripped brickwork, craft beer and ‘gourmet’ burgers, have long since been assimilated. Much of the hatred for hipsters turned out to be envy.

Which is hardly surprising, since hipsters functioned as an early-adopting product-and-trend-testing focus and gentrification group in much the same way that gay men had done in earlier decades. Hipsters were after all straight(ish) clones with a fetish for gingham and facial hair.

And because they were straight(ish) clones many tended to have a peculiar, conflicted relationship to the male body - both pretending that men couldn’t be objectified and also jealously mocking the ‘douchebags’ who, very successfully, objectified themselves. This is why I dubbed hipsters ‘the anti-sexual wing of metrosexuality’.

Well, that and the fact I didn’t really fancy them.

And after Trump’s election in 2016, wokery rather than pop cultural curation became the dominant signifier of both belonging and uniqueness. Authenticity went non-binary. Ideological conformity and sloganeering became the new flannel shirt.

Added to which, hipsters were highly-online people before being highly-online became normal. They were the creatures of Tumblr and blogs, rather than Insta and Tik Tok. Once they ceased to be e-vanguardists they lost their cultural importance - and some of their marketable skills.

But probably the main reason hipsters disappeared is because, as I pointed out when they were still very much around (see Note 1, below), hipsters hated themselves - even more than everyone else. Or rather, they hated being called hipsters: 'They were far too special and unique and knowing to be captured by a word. Let alone that word.'

By 2016 there was no escape from that word - there was even a hilarious BBC TV documentary called The Hipster Handbook, presented and written by the legendary trendspotter and flaneur Peter York. Visiting famous hipster haunts Williamsburg and Shoreditch in his Saville Row togs (definitely not a budget chain kinda guy), York expertly and politely pinned and mounted the plaid butterfly on national television.

It’s impossible to say exactly when the hipster died because he didn’t. Instead, he was digested and recycled over the course of several years. Transubstantiated. But after that 2016 doc, hipsterism rapidly melted into the big print wallpaper.

I was asked to contribute to it, but sadly wasn't available, and instead, after it aired, offered the post below with its bitchy bullet-pointed notes on hipsterism.

I met Mr York for the first time a few years later, on a bar crawl of Soho private members' clubs with a mutual mate, the dapper Essex boy writer Alfred Tong. York, who is exactly as wonderful in the impeccable flesh as on TV knew exactly how to catch me off guard.

"It's great to finally meet you,” he said, eyes glittering with that trademark impishness. “I've always been such a big fan of your work".

"Hang on!” I exclaimed. “That’s MY line!"

Notes on Hipsterism

(Originally appeared on marksimpson.com 17/11/2016)

While everyone else in the 80s wanted to look like they’d walked off the set of Blade Runner or Top Gun, Peter York looked and sounded like he’d stepped out of Dangerous Liaisons. Whenever the co-author of Style Wars and The Sloane Ranger Handbook popped up on telly, as he often did back then, talking about trends or ads in a Saville Row suit, his hair looked like it should be powdered and bowed, and his upper-lip beauty-spotted.

In BBC Four’s recent TV doc The Hipster Handbook – which I was asked to contribute to but was unfortunately unavailable – York seems relatively unaffected by the vulgarities of time, sartorially or even much physically, given that he’s now in his 70s. That imperious ‘high’ hair is still there, if greyed. Though who knows? Maybe it really is a wig now.

His almost drag queen hauteur is still also present and incorrect, enabling him to be wonderfully rude and direct – but entirely politely. I have no idea about York’s sexuality, but in an odd way his persona reminds me slightly of Quentin Crisp (or rather, Hurtian Crisp).

When he visits Williamsburg in Brooklyn, NYC, the birthplace – though perhaps we should call it curation place – of hipsterism he explains in clipped tones to a local complimenting him on his ‘fashionable’ Olde Worlde overcoat: ‘It’s the national dress of my country’.

York was an anachronism in the 1980s but also strangely, sharply (post)modern. Now that we’re living in a ‘post-postmodern’ world he looks like a time-traveller. Dr Who as market researcher. In Williamsburg he discovers that a decade or so on from their arrival, hipsters and even beards are now thin on the ground, having moved on to pastures more affordable – and are not much missed. Asked to define a hipster a young, clean-shaven man dismisses them as: ‘creatives about to turn into yuppies.’

York also travels to Shoreditch, London where hipsters are, as in most other ‘cool’ enclaves of large cities in the Western world, apparently still very much ‘a thing’ – after all these years of peak hipsterdom and regular pronouncements of its death. Full of young creatives being uniquely individual and amazingly authentic in their identical plaid shirts, compulsory facial-hair and passion for really-like-difficult-to-source coffee beans and expensive frosted cereals.

York like any good dandy, aspires to be as artificial as possible. Culture is nature’s enemy and vice versa. Hipsters however, perhaps because they usually have no idea about nature at all – and seem only to have the same ‘ironic’ idea about culture for that matter – are obsessed with authenticity.

‘It’s SO not me’ drawls York.

Paradoxically, the clean-shaven, sharply-dressed old man of slightly camp artifice seemed much more substantial than the young, earnestly ironic men in their ill-fitting beards and table-cloth shirts. Then again, I imagine Mr York is very substantial financially (according to Wikipedia, in addition to his best-selling books he works as a management consultant).

And yes, the doc was entirely focused on the male hipster: the only women interviewed were social commentators, academics or sales staff in hipster clothes shops. To the point where it sometimes looked like a documentary about a bear cub commune. But most people are only interested in the male hipster – and as York points out, most women can’t grow the hipster hallmark: a beard.

York’s mere presence offered a kind of mocking critique of our hairy young creatives – even without the impish glitter he had in his eyes when listening to them as they droned on about the ‘tradition’ and ‘craft’ behind the expensive bottled beer they like to drink and make.

The money shot came when he visited a barbershop in East London, now specialising in ‘facial-hair management’, observing a handsome man-bunned twenty-something chap reclining in a retro barber’s chair getting his bushy brunette beard ‘managed’.

‘Would you like it rounder at the bottom – a lumberjack finish?’ enquired the bearded, inked, young barber solicitously.

At the climax of the ‘management’, the barber rubbed beard conditioner into the customer’s pride and joy.

Regardless of what the actual, existing sexuality of these two young men is it’s difficult to see how this scene could be any gayer. In fact, if it had been properly gay, with your actual gay sex – cocks agogo – it would somehow have been considerably less gay.

And what’s more, it was gay threesome – with York as the older voyeur/punter (in a double-breasted blazer).

‘What does “lumberjack” mean?’ asked York, with an heroically straight face. The barber patiently explained that it’s a ‘wild’, ‘rugged’ look. He mentioned the ‘lumbersexual’. But pronounced it ‘lumbosexual’. Which is, actually, the way it should be pronounced.

The barber, who I think may not have been so much a true believer as just someone trying to make a living, made the salient point that a lot of his customers ‘work in media, architects, or web design, that type of thing’, who ‘spend a lot of time in front of a PC screen so don’t have that feeling of being in touch with their, like, masculine side’.

Amidst all this plaidery and lumbering York’s voiceover tells us that the shelves in the barber shop are positively groaning with beautifully-packaged product: ‘This is not a lumberjack’s cabin – this could be Mayfair’.

He suggests that hipsters’ laborious obsession with ‘masculine authenticity’ produces a look as constructed as what he terms ‘the metrosexual look that went before it’. He also admits that he can’t quite get the ‘beardy thing’ and that it strikes him as ‘a bit steampunk, a bit homosexual – a bit Clone Zone, a bit Tom Selleck in Magnum PI’.

This is probably where I would have popped up saying something unkind. Though I’m not entirely sure that I would have been needed.

All the same, I’ve listed seven unkind notes on hipsterism below:

1. Everyone hates hipsters – including & especially hipsters.

They’re far too special and unique and knowing to be captured in a word. Let alone that word. Hipsters want to be the curators never the curated. Which is why everyone delights in pinning the ‘H’ word on them as they try to wriggle away. It’s Kryptonite to their eclectic superpowers. Or garlic to a vampire.

2. Hipsterism is a cult with no credo

As that that big beardy Karl Marx put it: ‘Hipsterism is the sigh of the badly-dressed, a longing for authenticity in an inauthentic, online world. It is the OxyContin of the creative classes.’

3. Hipsters think they’re totally worth it.

And so should you. ‘Artisan’ means: double the price because expensively-educated kids got their hands dirty – and wrote something amazing on a chalkboard.

4. Hipsterism is not locally sourced.

It’s a thoroughly American cultural franchise. Hence hipsters in London or Barcelona, Berlin or Rome laboriously replicate the obsessions of American hipsters – such as ‘gourmet burgers’, ‘craft ales’ and ‘real coffee’ – that were a reaction to the Budweiser blandness of American consumerism. Regardless of the fact that in Europe we already have amazing ‘real beer’ and ‘real coffee’ outlets. Called ‘Germany’ and ‘Italy’.

5. Hipster masculinity is also not locally sourced.

It is imported, assembled and accessorised – curated – largely from officially ironic but rather anxious-looking retro ‘authentic’ American signifiers such as ‘the trucker cap’, or ‘the lumberjack’. Signifiers which are fairly meaningless in the UK – except perhaps as a Monty Python sketch.

6. Hipsterism is the anti-sexual wing of metrosexuality.

Maybe it depends on how aroused you are by gingham, but hipsterism sometimes looks like a form of male self-love that seems to be oddly self-loathing. Flannel shirts as hair shirts. Hipsters generally have big beards and big data allowances instead of bodies. (This is perhaps why some hipsters like to make ‘gender flip’ memes mocking the objectification of women which depend on the notion that men aren’t and can’t be objectified.)

7. The hipster beard is not a beard.

It’s far too heavily overdetermined to be mere face fur. There’s something magical and quasi-sexual about it. At least for hipsters. For all their famous love of irony, most don’t seem terribly ironic about the hairy thing on their chin that they treat like a prized, pampered pet.

The plain, unvarnished, but nicely-conditioned truth is that the hipster beard is a fetish – in the classic Freudian sense of a penis-substitute. This is why they have to be so BIG, and why they can’t leave them alone.

And also why we can’t stop staring at them.

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'Dollybirds' are an extinct species today, due to their hideously sexist maladaptation to the Twenty-First century. But they were enormously popular in the mid-Twentieth Century UK, particularly in the Swinging Sixties and the Seedy Seventies. Film and TV were full of pretty, fashionable young women, their hair, their legs, their (skimpy) colourful clothes, their lashes, and their giggles. And sometimes, a flash of their perky, pre-silicone tits - if there was an 'X' rating.

Dismissed nowadays as objectified products of the industrialised 'male gaze' and, of course, the patriarchy, they were also a symbol of fun, pleasure, pop culture, and aestheticism. Of liberation - and the arrival of 'never had it so good' consumerism. After all those years of war, rationing, repression, headscarves, and waiting in big brown neck-to-ankle overcoats in the drizzling rain for a cancelled omnibus.

The 1967 British film 'Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush', which I saw recently on Amazon Prime, somehow for the first time, is on the painted face of it a coming-of-age sex comedy vehicle for a dollybird parade. One with a god-awful prog-rock soundtrack, absurd non-plot, bizarre snobbery, and set entirely in... Stevenage. It should be unwatchable, but is instead strangely compelling - and still feels alive, even after nearly 60 years.

Partly this is due to the vivid and vivacious cinematography by Alex Thomson, and the peculiar, time-capsule concrete curiosity of a 1960s new town simmering saucily in a permissive English summer. But mostly to the vivid and vivacious star - pretty, fashionable, full-colour, flirty Guildford boy Barry Evans, then twenty-five but playing an eighteen-year-old trying to lose his virginity. Or rather, being exceedingly fussy about whom he loses his virginity to - out of all the legions of leggy ladies (young and old) throwing themselves at him.

Evans' performance and Clive Donner's directing turns this otherwise mediocre dollybird movie into something more interesting - a dollybird movie where the young male protagonist is a dollybird too. At least for a while. And of course, dollyboys were to eventually replace dollybirds.

Narrating with his cheeky-chappy, stream-of-bird-obsessed-consciousness, situating the audience intimately inside his hormone-soaked head, styled in some seriously smart and decidedly un-Stevenage gear, as well as flashing a taut bod and buttocks more than once, it doesn't seem as absurd as it should that all those lovely ladies find dollyboy Jamie irresistible.

(Jamie/Evan's breezy, cheery, wisecracking intimacy with the audience puts me in mind of a proto-Bueller in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, played two decades later by a similarly baby-faced brunette Matthew Broderick. Which I doubt is a coincidence, since writer-director John Hughes was a big fan of Sixties Brit Pop - and has Ferris performing a Beatlemania hit, 'Twist and Shout'.)

Dollyboy he may be, nevertheless Jamie has a brain and is well-read - the screenplay is adapted from grammar school boy Hunter Davies' coming-of-age memoir/novel with the same name. Davies adapted it himself, but ‘additional dialogue’ is credited to non other than the (later) famously gay New York dramatist Larry Kramer, his first writing credit. Kramer is probably where much of the witty wisecrackery and almost screwball dialogue came from, giving the film, along with Evans' looks, a gayer sensibility than it should have.

Jamie ends the film virtuously renouncing sex as something that, once achieved, wasn't as important as he thought. Sensible, ambitious, reformed Jamie chooses to focus instead on his upcoming University education. Which, unless his mum was lacing his tea with bromide, seems a bit of a stretch.

He is however allowed to eye up a less glamorous girl he had ignored before - after learning that she's won a place at university too, announcing that “she’s the kind of girl I could marry”, and that "she's a nicer class of person!" (a phrase he uses throughout the film). The reformed dollyboy has renounced dollygirls.

Against the stereotype, most of the female dollybirds in Mulberry Bush aren't dim either. The real division here is class: Linda (Adrienne Posta), the working class dollybird, is presented as being stupid, greedy, and vapid, unlike the sophisticated middle-class ones, and is unceremoniously dumped by Jamie on the way back from the chippie after she offers herself to him in the park.

Jamie is from what appears to be a lower-to-middling middle class family, and the women he's most interested in are older and from upper middle class families. He has a desire to be instructed in the arts of sex but also those of social advancement. Social advancement - "a better class of person!" - triumphs over sex with the film's ending.

Mulberry Bush’s dollybirds are also sexually assertive, independent-minded, and thoroughly modern - so much so that petit bourgeois Jamie is mortified to discover, after a blissful romantic weekend of consummation with his 'dream girl' Mary, played by a radiant young Judy Geeson, that she is seeing other guys and, while she enjoys being with Jamie, she needs her freedom: "You can do what you like, and I can do what I like!". She's a 'poly' dolly. (A scenario reversed in 1971's John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday - where a woman wants monogamy with a young, bisexual man who doesn't want to commit.)

Oh, and for comic effect, Jamie's younger, sixteen old brother (Allan Warren) is presented as a much more successful, non-virginal man of the world, and he displays downlow dollyboy/metrosexual tendencies - dressing sharply, hogging the bathroom, and using his secret stash of lady-killer fancy aftershave that he keeps hidden in the toilet cistern, away from his 1950s mum and dad's disapproval. I shudder to think what it smelled like.

Evans would later star in Seventies UK TV sit-coms Doctor in the House, and Doctor at Large, about the hee-larious hi-jinks and mishaps of medical students, and the now unbroadcastable but huge hit at the time Mind Your Language, set in a English as a Second Language school in London, with Evans playing a likeable, good-natured tutor coping with all them crazy, comical foreigners.

His last lead role was in another sex comedy, or 'blue comedy' as they were known by this time, Adventures of a Taxi Driver, a sexploitation flick made in 1976 by Stanley Long with no budget and no shame - and apparently no time for second takes. Once again, Evans playing a young, very heterosexual but less innocent man, Joe North, with loads of horny dollybirds throwing themselves at him in the course of his working day as a denim-jacketed London black cab driver - including Judy Geeson again, this time playing an exotic foreign stripper with a snake. And also Adrienne Posta (working class Linda in Mulberry Bush) playing - with real verve - his jealous fishwife fiancé Carol.

Since this is a comedy, and British, most of his scenic 'detours' are rudely interrupted by returning husbands/boyfriends - and an escaped boa constrictor. Resulting in hurried, perilous, butt-naked escapes out of bedroom windows.

As in Mulberry Bush, Evans/Joe also intimately shares his thoughts or confessions with the audience - this time addressing them directly, winkingly, leeringly breaking the fourth wall. Alas, Joe doesn't have many thoughts worth sharing, apart from bragging about “picking up some crumpet.” Made a decade later, Adventures of a Taxi Driver is way more dated than Mulberry Bush - and rather more sexist, despite being written by a woman.

Probably the best thing in it is Diana Dors, the British 'blonde bombshell' and original dollybird, who plays Joe's nagging mum - incredibly badly. But who cares? She's Diana Dors!

Slated by critics but loved by the public, Adventures of a Taxi Driver spawned two sequels (Adventures of a Private Eye, and Adventures of a Plumber's Mate) but Evans refused to appear. He did however star in a remarkably similar role in another ropey sexploitation flick that year, Under the Doctor, which I haven't watched - and don't intend to. (I guess, like Jamie in Mulberry Bush, I'm a bit of a snob).

The British film industry in the Seventies was in such a seedy state because all-conquering TV, the realm back then of the housewife (remember her?), had stolen its audience and its receipts - so it had to offer something that TV was unable to: smut. Or more precisely, a kind of fake porn which was eagerly consumed because the real thing was still illegal, thanks to the stentorian Obscene Publications Act of 1959, which banned anything likely to “deprave and corrupt” - in other words, anything that was worth wanking to. Oh, and the Internets was decades away.

By the Eighties, like many ageing dollybirds before him, middle-aged Evans found his baby-faced looks and his past glamour, along with the (blue and low) comedy association, working against him, as he competed for mature roles. The mid-1990s found Evans working as a minicab driver in Leicestershire - a tragic mocking echo of his last starring role, which itself was a tragic mockery of his first.

Fortunately, in the following decade he was "rediscovered" and recycled by reality TV and found himself bathed in the ambivalent flickering cathode-ray light again, winning I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here in 2005, and later launching his own online dating agency.

Except he didn’t. Mr Evans never made it out of the Nineties. He died in obscurity and alcoholic squalor in 1997, aged 53.

The sad, final act of his life contained a plot twist, however - and one I was completely unaware of until I looked him up after watching Mulberry Bush. He was found dead in his bungalow, having apparently taken his own life - or perhaps the victim of foul play, it's unclear which - after falling out with an eighteen year old male “friend”. (Which prompted my alliterative brain to ask the question: Was the ex-dollyboy done in by a Dilly boy?)

According to several people who knew him, interviewed in the (very watchable) C4 documentary Saucy! Secrets of the British Sex Comedy, Evans, whose career had been mostly based on playing rampantly heterosexual characters, was gay but "leading a double life". (His Wikipedia entry claims he was 'bisexual' - but no one mentions that possibility in the doc.)

Ironically or perhaps aptly, Mulberry Bush, the (hetero)sexual revolution coming-of-age movie Evans first starred in, was released the same year as the partial and controversial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in 1967. Having already spent the first twenty-five years of his life in a Britain where any and all male-on-male sexual contact was illegal, and homosexuals a camp joke - and being a Barnardo's boy who came literally from nothing - he would have been keenly aware that 'indiscretion' could cost him everything. The tabloids would have a field day announcing that the much-loved Jack-the-Lad lady-killer of Taxi Driver was 'REALLY A POOFTER!'

This inclines me wonder whether he turned down the Adventures of a Taxi Driver sequels, which seems to have effectively marked the end of his career, precisely because of its success. Being anxious about being forever mis-typecast in the shagging straight-laddish role (his East End accent in the film wobbles more than his conquests' bottoms) - and fearing being outed as a result of pushing his luck.

In an especially cringe scene in Adventures of a Taxi Driver he picks up anobvious drag queen, but naively assumes his fare is a woman. The DQ assumes Joe is gay because he mentions that he lives with a mate. When Joe eventually puts the moves on his dollybird fare, his hand sliding under her skirt, he gets the shock we've been waiting for: "BLOODY ‘ELL!" he exclaims, eyes comically wide to a zoomed-in camera.

It's an awkward scene for us to watch now - even without knowing about Evan's sexuality and his need to keep it under wraps. But how awkward must it have been for him? He must have been asking himself how the 'bloody hell' he could keep up this randy straight drag king persona he had found himself trapped in.

Which only makes his first and freshest cheeky-chappy dollyboy cinematic lead role during the high summer of the British sexual revolution even more curiously and melancholically captivating - with all its unfulfilled pretty promise.

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