24 April – 22 May 2004
Scottish Media Monitor
It makes a change for me to start off with something light-hearted, but doing the rounds was news that The Daily Star in Scotland were waving their lavender scented hankies in the air in a campaign against sex on TV! (I had no idea there was so much moral purity behind Drambuie-soaked journos with hacking smokers’ coughs). Banning “sick TV romps” was the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard since The Star’s owner Richard Desmond - he of Asian Babes and Television X – made a bid for that doyen of everything right-wing and Conservative: The Daily Telegraph!
Leslie Grantham, alias ‘Dirty Den’, thought he was enjoying some sexy cam-action using MSN Messenger with a girl who told him she was a lap-dancer from Leeds. Sadly, a Sunday tabloid was just setting him up. The Daily Record’s Cara Page frothed: It was “sordid pictures of himself naked and performing a sex act… filthy web sex with a blonde stranger… sending disgusting messages by computer to a 23-year-old blonde called Amanda… paid for by the licence payer, as he plugged his computer and webcam into a BBC dressing room phone line… sending pictures of himself in an aroused state, Grantham described sexual fantasies including threesomes, having sex in public, using sex toys and performing unnatural sex acts… He also asked if she wore stockings and suspenders and stripped for clients… Other live images he sent, which have been censored for a family newspaper, show him… carrying out a sex act… Most of his other fantasies were too sordid to repeat.” (Cripes! So what does Cara Page do for fun?) Before he’d been properly asked, Grantham was described as being “shamed” while ‘Amanda’ belly-ached to The News of the World: “I was shocked to see such a family favourite behaving in that manner… it was not the kind of behaviour that is suitable for a family audience. It was disgusting… X-rated filth”. Her moral indignation, of course, didn’t stretch to the gutter-scraping shenanigans she was performing for readers of The News of the World! Not surprisingly, newspaper columnists wet their knickers over the cam-sex. Selina Scott in The Sunday Mail called for a clean-up of soaps saying: “The truth is that TV soaps are as sordid as many of their current storylines and Dirty Den is aptly named”. The Daily Star of Scotland described “seedy solo sex”. The Daily Record editorial, instead of thanking Grantham for boosting sales, filling their pages with more wank fodder, called for his sacking and labelled him “a disgusting web pervert”. Amanda Platell had a masturbatory fantasy over “Grantham’s sins” in The Daily Mail. He was “a repulsive little man… a shameless pervert… debauched… an Eastern European porn star… shameful… warped… Every time I see him swagger into the Square, all I can think of are those pictures of him stroking his flabby body, concocting twisted fantasies with strangers… Has the BBC forgotten that EastEnders goes out at 7.30pm, slap bang in the middle of kids’ viewing? By any yardstick of morality, he is a despicable role model…” So now you have it. Everyone who appears on television before 9pm must pass a test proving they are good role models for children! So what about the Sunday tabloids lying around the family home and ‘Amanda’s’ example of a role model? Ignoring the unsociable hours Grantham worked and challenges he faced in his social life, The Record sniffed: “The thought our hard-earned cash is paying his £200,000 salary is too much to stomach now. So, Beeb bosses, sack the pervert”. But wait a minute! Aren’t all these reports titillating and sexual in themselves… unhealthy building blocks in the formation of male sexual fantasies? Not so long ago, the moral standard was that pre-marital sex was wrong. Yet that only made it all the more exciting. Despite religious objections, unwanted pregnancies and STIs, safer sex won the toss. It’s not that different when the composers of these odious morality tales try to lord it over those who are clearly enjoying themselves. The titillating nature of the tabloid’s contents only exposes them as hypocrites. Tim Wood’s feature in The News of the World carried pictures of “sick” Grantham sucking his finger and the “twisted soap star” exposing what readers could only assume was a huge boner hiding behind a block of black ink. (“His manhood pressed close to the camera” The News of the World described it). But the point is, airbrushed cunts in Health & Efficiency and black, silk posing pouches held up with elastic in fifties gay mags eroticised the subject, in just the same way as pixellation, black strips and editorials of professed moral indignation do today. The message is clear: Its great, but don’t get caught. The many thousands who privately enjoy phone-sex; explore sexual fantasies in chat-rooms and do web-cam sex despite a plethora of tabloid finger-wagging is testimony to the hypocrisy. It’s just unfortunate the journalists never get caught! Far from being “a vile pervert”, Leslie Grantham was exploring sex in a modern, contemporary way. It happens in a world that newspapers will have to catch up with if they are ever going to survive in it at all. Apart from that, we should recognise a very disturbing aspect to this invasion of privacy that should not be tolerated. Only last year, a Glaswegian dentist lost his job after The Scottish Sun printed his picture – with customary pixilation - off a gay website. (Scottish Media Monitor, August 2003).
So the law that always surprises our friends from England, restricting the sale of alcohol before 12.30am on a Sabbath, is finally going to be lifted. And about time too! Introduced to prevent us staggering into church completely drunk it is about as useful as a chocolate mantelpiece. Eddie Barnes, reporting the reforms in Scotland on Sunday didn’t contain the usual tones of religious militancy he dishes out, but still managed to find space for Rev Iver Martin, Minister of the Free Church of Scotland, a religious cult in Stornoway to say: “My view is that the sale of alcohol is the same as anything else on a Sunday… I believe that Sunday should be treated differently… It is a fact of this so-called tolerant age that there is very little regard to religious belief and conviction”. All I can say is that he has a funny idea of ‘tolerance’ if we are all expected to adhere to his interpretation of it! There were more legitimate expressions of concern, especially over Scotland’s appalling record of alcohol abuse. (You might wonder what all this has to do with sex, but hear me out…) Fencing off an aisle in Asda is not going to curb excessive drinking. If anything, shopping for Sunday lunch and having to go back out again for a bottle of wine just focuses your mind on it. With greater liberties come greater responsibilities. There is only one way we can achieve that and that is by education. (A corporate sigh from the back of Class 5). I propose we take schoolkids on a school visit to a vineyard in France, (or failing that Oddbins in the High Street). We let them taste, buy and take home the best alcohol. We give them a good glass of wine with their dinner and we teach them Tennents is crap. (Sorry, boys). We don’t have to stop there. We should lift the censorship that protects us from seeing the damage that smoking does to the human body. We could talk about it in the classroom. Let’s raise awareness of the problem of litter in our streets and that chewing gum also comes with responsibilities. And sex. (I was going to get to that sooner or later). Yes, we should be tackling that head on too, putting aside any assumptions that kids may or may not be having sex: simply that they can. Taking on greater responsibilities involves learning about the art of sex properly. If we don’t prepare young people adequately for sex, is it any surprise that more and more under-15s are being treated for Chlamydia, gonorrhoea and syphilis every year? It doesn’t help when the UK is unable to act for fear of upsetting religionists, The Daily Mail or the Home Secretary. So while youngsters experience their first lay in a drink-fuelled frenzy they can barely remember, we read how Dr Ahmos Ghaly “an expert in STIs in Tayside” has discovered that virginity has “become ‘taboo’.” There is an element of truth in this, but such remarks only act as red flags for our bullish press, including The Daily Record, who wailed over the loss of a long forgotten age. Few commentators can bear to look at the landscape as it is now and accept the new challenges. The Record’s report concluded: “American virgins’ group the Silver Ring Thing will visit Scotland next month to get teenagers to sign up to chastity”. Hallelujah! For we are saved! The Record’s editorial sighed; “our TV is saturated with sex”. But there is very little honesty in most of that ‘sex’ either. Much of it is as plastic and titillating as the sex on offer in our tabloids. But, with an unexpected challenge to religionists and moral conservatives, the tabloid spoke with honesty about the promotion of chastity in the US “to which President Bush has gifted £140million. The States now has twice the teenage pregnancy rate of Britain and STDs are spiralling out of control. The Bush administration are so embarrassed, they have stopped publishing figures”. They rightly went on to compare this to Sweden, which halved their rates of STIs and teen pregnancies by frank, open and honest discussion of sex. The Record’s opinion was that sex on TV should be made to look “a whole lot less romantic… perhaps showing a teenager standing in line with their sample at a clinic…” But neither is that being completely honest about sex and would serve only to drive sex further underground. The Scottish Daily Express, perhaps mistakenly thinking that the success of a newspaper lies in aping The Daily Mail, demanded in its editorial that we “regain the moral high ground” as it ranted: “While the liberal classes wring their hands and call for yet more sex ‘education’, the situation becomes worse. It is wrong to say, as some do, that we should not be judgmental. It is high time society did take a strict moral line”. Oh what, like: ‘Just Say No?’” Muriel Gray, writing in The Sunday Herald, illustrated the point perfectly when she reported that considerable skill, training and intelligence is required to operate increasingly high tech weapons and then read that “the average literacy and numeracy skills of army recruits in both Britain and the US are currently estimated to be the equivalent of those of an 11-year-old”. Food for thought, eh?
The Scottish Daily Mail’s report by its political editor, Ian Smith: “Test all immigrants for Aids virus…” concerned comments made by Professor David Goldberg, described as “the leading HIV/Aids specialist at the Scottish Centre for Infection and Environmental Health”. With warnings of “record levels of the disease” this year, he was reported as saying: “…The main reason was immigration from Africa”. This is a paper that has always baulked at the idea of proper sex education for everyone in schools, so excuse me if I regard their concern for Africans living with HIV with an element of suspicion.
garry@scottishmediamonitor.com
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CUT IT OUT…
The Sunday Herald on the release of The Good Old Naughty Days, an antique film of French erotica: “The film leaves little to the imagination and is likely to trigger protests, especially from the religious community which could be particularly incensed by a scene featuring ‘nuns’ being spied on by a pair of voyeuristic ‘priests’.” Already shown in London, its release is dependent on the whims of local councils. Glasgow City Council would only say: “It’s not coming to Glasgow”. Welcome to Hicksville!
The Herald ‘balancing’ the report on Scotland’s first gay civil registration ceremony of two women: “The Reverend Graham Brown, of the United Free Church in Sauchie, Clackmannanshire, said the council’s ceremonies were sinful and immoral, and a church elder in the town said he would be praying for the women who ‘married’ at the weekend”. The Daily Record unusually did not contain comments from religious militants but printed the number of their newsdesk with the plea: “Do you know the couple?”
Alan Taylor in his diary in The Sunday Herald on Mrs Katie Grant: “A very warm welcome back to the diary to Katie ‘Capercaillie’ Grant, the unthinking man’s grouse. Capercaillie turned up on Radio Scotland’s Guid Mornin Teuchters last week to review the papers… She was most exercised by a gobsmacking revelation (the First Minister’s failure to congratulate Nicola Beneditti, the teenage violinist for winning BBC Young Musician of the Year award) in the Hootsman to which – by amazing coincidence – she contributes a column… Capercaillie… proceeded to rant like one of Macbeth’s banshees. Just when one was thinking of calling a strait-jacket hotline, Derek Bateman, GMT’s host, managed to get a word in edgeways and told Capercaillie to let the air out of her balloon. For such small mercies, he deserves the nation’s heartfelt gratitude. Next time, though, he should let go of the string”.
The Sunday Mail columnist Selina Scott reading the signs outside clubs in New Orleans: “‘Our girls are black’, ‘Our girls kick higher’, ‘Our girls wear less’. The most popular one had a sign outside reading: ‘Our girls are guys’.”
