Grayson Perry: All Man
Channel 4
★★★★☆
Peaky Blinders
BBC Two
★★★★☆
I didn’t have particularly high hopes for Grayson Perry: All Man, the artist’s exploration of masculinity. This had nothing to do with Perry, more a weariness with documentaries generally. These days they seem to be made in the assumption that the viewer is a moron who must be guided, like PC Plod directing traffic, with clunky musical cues and signposts so that they know which bits are “funny” or “sad”.
When I heard that an artist who sometimes dresses up as a girl called Claire was going to interview rock-hard cage-fighters I imagined the temptation to pit transvestite against muscled meathead in a verbal spat had proved too much for ratings-hungry telly.
However, the best documentaries are those that deliver the unexpected and this was one. It was beautifully judged, containing not a moment that patronised the viewer or exploited easy targets but plenty that will have moved them to tears.
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Perry’s conversations with the cage-fighters and other young men of the northeast showed us how hard it is to be a man now, especially in a community built on the stoical breadwinning brawn of colliery miners. With those jobs long gone, where does that inherited machismo have to go?
Once I would have dismissed such human blood sport as just tarted-up violence, but this showed us that it can also be a brutal therapy. Andy, who grew up in care and whose only family, his brother, killed himself, wept as he admitted to being “broken inside”. When he steps into the cage, however, and begins the mutual, legal beating, he experiences a “release” from his inner pain.
Perry said that many young men wear their muscles and tattoos like armour to hide vulnerability so that eventually they don’t even recognise when they are sad. The lovely, grief-racked Thelma told of how her handsome son Daniel had killed himself without warning; no one had guessed what a dark place he was in because he had betrayed nothing.
Perry produced two stunning art works at the end but an equally strong and surprising moment was Perry recognising that in a way cage-fighting is healthy. These men were at least in touch with their feelings, their needs. It was just another way of trying to stand out among one’s fellow men, searching for one’s “heroic narrative”.
Perry does so by having an exhibition in a gallery, they do it by knocking seven bells out of their opponent. Intelligent, not mawkishly sentimental and no pointless background music: this is how factual television should be.
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Peaky Blinders opened by revealing who was Tommy Shelby’s lucky bride. It was Grace, looking less than thrilled, but what remained a mystery was how she managed to walk up the aisle without tripping, given that the veil over her face was thicker than a horse’s blanket.
The first episode of series three, set in 1924, opened slowly but sumptuously, the tension and sense of menace mounting as the wedding party at the grand country house got under way and the female guests whined: “But we were told there’d be cocaine.”
Parts of it were hard to follow, or indeed hear, but it all gathered to a stylish crescendo in which scenes of shagging, bare-knuckle fighting and a Russian infiltrator meeting a protractedly gory end were skilfully intertwined with the trademark stonking soundtrack. The stage is set and promises that this series will be a cracker.