So, last week, for those of you who weren’t paying attention, I was cross with the BBC. Yes, cross, I tell you, as they filled the news with World Cup non-stories, and issued vacuous non-statements about North Korea. But this week, it’s time to level things up. Because they also did a good thing last week, which was to broadcast an episode of Family Guy, Partial Terms of Endearment, on BBC3. This episode wasn’t screened at all in the US, because it is about Lois having an abortion. She becomes a surrogate mother for a friend, but the friend then dies in a car crash. So Lois heads to the Family Planning Centre with her husband, Peter, where she makes a reasoned and thoughtful decision to have an abortion. Peter’s all in favour of an abortion, too, until he is shown a pro-life video by protestors outside the centre.
This is all — in case I have made it sound rather joyless — incredibly funny. The video that Peter watches is a heroic pastiche: “Science,” proclaims the spokesman, “has proven that within hours of conception, a human foetus has started a college fund and has already made your first mother’s day card out of macaroni and glitter”. At this point, it cuts to a picture of a foetus holding a handmade card which reads, “Mom, don’t kill me! I wuv you.” Sorry to declare myself sole arbiter of good and bad jokes, but that’s a corker. Peter is converted to the pro-life cause. “If God wanted us to kill babies,” he tells Lois, “he would have made them all Chinese girls”.
It’s no surprise this episode hasn’t aired in the States, although it is expected to be included in the DVD release of the series. But it hammers home the fact that abortions used to happen in popular culture, just as it happens in life. No longer: films like Knocked Up, Waitress, and Juno all deal with unwanted pregnancy, and all tie themselves into knots trying to explain why smart women wouldn’t even consider an abortion (either in Knocked Up, where Katherine Heigl is a career woman who despises the guy with whom she has an ill-advised one-night stand, or in Waitress, where Keri Russell is married to a wife-beating lout whom she loathes). It’s a huge narrative flaw that Ellen Page’s sassy, fearless, pro-choice teen, Juno, would be so overwhelmed by the mention of baby fingernails that she would cancel her abortion immediately, and have a child she didn’t want.
It seems that we can’t be expected to like fictional women if they do what factual women do all the time: terminate an unwanted pregnancy. But things weren’t always this way; Dirty Dancing has an abortion storyline, and it’s regarded as a classic chick-flick. Pop culture has simply become more judgemental — and less realistic — as pro-lifers have become more vociferous.
So three cheers to Family Guy, for having the courage of many of our convictions. And an extra cheer for the BBC, for letting us watch it.
So here’s where I’ve been: New York. I know. Get me. And I had a very lovely time indeed, even if I now don’t believe there are any Picassos left anywhere else in the world. Which there can’t be, because I saw at least 10,000 of them at MoMA, The Met and the Guggenheim. So Europe must be Picasso-less, and no-one’s mentioned it. Weird. Other things I did on my holidays included seeing Angela Lansbury in A Little Night Music. Read that and weep, Murder, She Wrote fans. Jessica Fletcher playing an ageing courtesan and mother to Catherine Zeta-Jones. I kept expecting someone to stagger on with a knife between their shoulderblades, and Lansbury to leap up and solve the crime. It is the only thing that could have improved the night.
But don’t think I wasn’t thinking about you Indexers the whole time I was away, because I was. I thought about you every morning watching Good Morning America. And I especially thought of you when the story turned to President Obama’s irritation with BP. Early last week, maybe Monday, the President said he wanted to know whose ass he should be kicking, with regard to the environmental calamity in the Gulf of Mexico. Now it seems to me that there are a lot of asses he should be kicking: BP, obviously; Halliburton; George W Bush, who apparently granted the drilling licences; anyone who drives a child the size of a small dog around in a mini-van the size of a small tank and considers that sensible behaviour; and pretty much all of us who want to use electricity, travel about, buy stuff and retain the moral high-ground. Then when he’s finished kicking global ass (with the exception of a few anti-consumerist hermits), he can get on with being President again.
Only, Good Morning America couldn’t report that Obama wanted to kick some ass. They are not allowed to say “ass” on the news there. They had to say “butt”. Which, if nothing else, begs the question of how much less rude than ‘ass’ ‘butt’ really is. I think they’re roughly on a par. But I guess America thinks differently. And it made me realise that we spend a lot of time bemoaning our crappy freedom of speech laws in this country — and with good reason. We mutter about the libel laws here, and how American senators call it Libel Terrorism and so on and so on. And so I had kind of slid into the belief that America is the land of the free and we are the oppressed.
But I had simply forgotten that freedom of speech doesn’t exist on American TV (with honourable exceptions like HBO). So much so that they can’t report accurately a statement made in public by their president. He can say it, but they can’t. That is, no matter how you look at it, batshit. Even David Letterman gets bleeped for minor swearing, and his show goes out at 11.30 at night. So next time we’re wringing our collective hands at our crappy libel laws, let’s all at least take a moment to thank our lucky stars that if David Cameron calls someone a prick, the BBC will most likely be able to say so.
Spartacus: Blood and Sand has got everything it needs to get pulses racing: sex, violence, swearing, the lot. It was first shown in the US on Starz (a subscription only channel), and faced calls to be banned there, as it became clear that the gladiators wouldn’t simply roam around with tridents and nets, but that legs would get chopped off at mid-height (provoking, at least for me, memories of the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, shouting at King Arthur to come back here, so he could bite his knees). As if that weren’t enough, there are orgies aplenty, and full frontal male and female nudity. It starts on Bravo next week, in the UK.
We’ve certainly come a long way since Up, Pompeii. If Frankie Howerd seemed risqué, with his puns, his lascivious manner, and his sexpot slavegirls, then Spartacus: Blood and Sand may not be for you. Certainly, it isn’t for mediawatchuk, who have already expressed their worries that children might find the programme online.
And do you know what? They might. But here’s the problem with this. Children can find anything online, for the excellent reason that they have grown up in an online world. They aren’t mystified by the internet, any more than I was mystified by the video recorder which baffled my parents. And since the internet is, let us be honest, chock full of stuff we wouldn’t want kids to see, Spartacus is the least of our worries.
What’s so frustrating about mediawatch’s attitude here is that they start somewhere reasonable: many of us wouldn’t want an eight-year-old to watch John Hannah getting blown by a slavegirl while gladiators half-decapitate each other in the background. And then they take it to an unreasonable conclusion: if children might see it, and children shouldn’t see it, it should be banned.
Quite aside from the necessary truth that it just isn’t possible to remove from the internet everything we don’t want kids to see, it also isn’t desirable to do so. The blurring of boundaries between childhood and adulthood has created many things I dislike (small girls wearing “Porn Star” t-shirts, grown men on tiny scooters. Equally chilling). But none bothers me more than the belief that all art, all culture must be child-friendly, in case a child inadvertently lights upon it. Children shouldn’t be watching Spartacus because it isn’t for them. I shouldn’t be watching In The Night Garden because it isn’t for me. So can’t we all just agree to act our age?
And on the subject of swearing, ten points to John Hannah, who plays Batiatus (played by Peter Ustinov in the Kubrick Spartacus movie) for delivering the line, “You have no mother. You were belched from the cunt of the underworld”, with a world-weary air. I may be over-reading, but I think he’s channelling Dido in Aeneid IV, when she tells Aeneas that his mother was no goddess, but he was born from harsh rocks and nursed by tigers. Only, you know, with swearing.
