All in a Don's Day

by Mary Beard

  The son and daughter are worried that it will be wasted on me, as I won’t recognise enough people to make it worthwhile. (I haven’t even been watching much Casualty lately, which used to be my regular weekly hospital soap.)

  But if our experience at the Emmys is anything to go by, it will be fun anyway. We got invited to their awards ceremony a couple of years ago by a friend who organises it … and apart from Mary Tyler Moore and Tina Fey and The Late Show, the hundreds of names and the faces and the shows getting awards were an almost complete mystery to us.

  It lasted for hours, and I was particularly worried that the husband, whose tolerance of soaps (particularly those set in American suburbs) is rather less than mine, would not enjoy it a bit. Quite the reverse, though. We were both absolutely gripped by the choreography of it and the whole razzmatazz … and that was before the gala dinner.

  So I have high hopes for the BAFTAs, win or no-win.

  Comments

  SPEECH! SPEECH!

  Gosh! I′m so

  Shocked, My

  Heart′s almost

  Stopped,

  My legs are

  Like jelly,

  My voice has

  Near flopped,

  But thank you

  So kindly,

  So warmly…

  God Blimey,

  With praise,

  To ′the husband′

  The crew, and

  Almighty.

  A DENNIS

  The sentence for ‘serious’ rape?

  19 May 2011

  The most depressing thing about the most recent version of the ‘rape debate’ is the way it has come down to how long the rapist should be banged up for. The worse we think the crime, the longer they should spend in clink. For what?

  On the Today programme this morning Vera Baird was attacking the proposal that rapists who pleaded guilty should have a 50% sentence reduction. The argument was that if the average sentence for a rapist was 5 years, then a 50 % reduction meant 2.5 years, which with remission for good behaviour would mean 15 months. Just 15 months, she said … for rape?

  Well, there are all kind of factors to weigh up here. As Ken Clarke has pointed out, the ‘average’ sentence includes those sentenced for ‘statutory rape’, for any sexual encounter with those aged under 16, however consensual. So the 5-year average is already an odd, and far from ‘average’, figure.

  But leaving those figures aside, and assuming the 15-months sentence, is that a fair punishment?

  That’s where the ‘bang ’em up’ mentality seems hopelessly misguided. Most websites today have deplored the idea that a rapist should be let out in under 2 years. WOT 15 months for rape?

  No one stopped to say … well 15 months in the nick, that means total loss of job, probable mess of any family relationship, disintegration of family itself (i.e., punishment for them), plus the conversion of a wrongdoer into a hardened criminal (that’s what prisons do). Well done, judicial system. Can’t we think of something more humane and better and more designed to stop them doing it again? Isn’t there something we can do better for the victim as well as the perpetrator?

  Now before you say: you wouldn’t say that if you had been raped … let me say I have been raped – an unwilling encounter on an Italian train that I wrote about years ago in the London Review of Books. On the Clarke scheme, it was slightly less than the most serious, but not at the bottom of the heap. I have to say that I agree with him that there are gradations in this crime. I didn’t think of going to the police but, if I had, I would have thought that my rapist deserved far less a penalty than if he had jumped at me with a knife or a gun. (I never felt in mortal danger.)

  And if I had pressed charges, I don’t actually think that I would have wanted the guy banged up. I really, really would like him not to have done it again, and I would have liked to have got the chance to tell him what a tosser he was … but I don’t think I would have wanted to have ruined his life, as he didn’t – in the end – ruin mine.

  I know I may be tougher in all sorts of ways that other victims of rape; but that doesn’t mean that my views shouldn’t be heard too. The thought that he would have been in a jail for years would not have been my dream or desire. I would much have much preferred that he spent a long series of weekends picking up rubbish in a seedy Italian town, or using his skills (he was an architect) for free, in the city planning of Italy. Or actually just saying sorry. (If that biscuit factory architect is reading this, he still can say sorry …)

  But overall it has been a bad week for those of us who worry about the modern obsession with imprisonment. The Today programme also revealed that the maximum penalty for passing off penalty points for speeding on to someone else was life imprisonment (it’s perverting the course of justice).

  Have we all lost our marbles?

  Comments

  I must say I found this blog hard to swallow. Do you mean that if a criminal makes his or her victim feel as if they are mortally endangered, they deserve the clink, where as if they make them feel humiliated, exploited (sensations that might not have applied to your experience but are felt by many rape victims) and traumatised to the extent that she/he wakes up in a rage decades later, this does not require a comparable punishment?

  JOSEPHINE

  Not winning a BAFTA ( … phew???)

  23 May 2011

  Last night was BAFTA night. The Pompeii documentary that I had been part of was nominated for an award in the Specialist Factual category … so we all got dressed up in our best to go to the awards ceremony at the Grosvenor House Hotel.

  Needless to say, I am not a regular at this kind of event, and found myself full of both admiration and loathing at the whole slickness of organisation. I met up with some members of the team (Richard, Caterina and Daisy, on her first post-baby outing – just remember, ladies, how wonderful and stressful that is!) in the bar of the Dorchester, before we drove up to the red carpet at the awards HQ.

  This is where admiration and loathing kick in. You get out of your car and instantly the ushers know whether to say ‘to the left’ or ‘to the right’. On the left are the paps, with their cameras getting the celebs; on the right are the poor bloody public who have really come to see the celebs but actually get M Beard et al. walking along.

  Admiration? Well … it is fantastic how these guys instantly know whether you are photo-worthy or not. Loathing? Well, obviously don’t get me going on celeb culture.

  Inside, after a glass of champagne, I was on a BBC table – with mates and new mates (including Tom Hugh-Jones, son of a Cambridge colleague who made Human Planet, nominated in the same category as we were). And we waited till our category prize was announced (‘and the BAFTA goes to …’).

  We didn’t win.

  Now let’s be honest. If we had won, I would have been very pleased and drunk more champagne than is wise (never mind having to give a lecture at nine o’clock this morning); and would particularly have celebrated the success of those members of the team whose professional award this is. (I guess getting a BAFTA is a bit like becoming an FBA in my day job.)

  But was I disappointed? In retrospect, I don’t think so. Of course, the whole occasion gears you up to want to win. (That’s rather like academic job applications … you might apply for them when you are young just as a practice run, not expecting to get them, but once you have finished the application, you find you are a bit invested in the whole thing.)

  But within a few minutes, I felt a bit of relief.

  Look, I thought – this was my first TV programme. It was wonderful – really wonderful – to be nominated for a BAFTA. Actually to win … that would be a bit different. I mean, I am hoping to do a bit more rather austerely popular, characterful, academic television. How would I have ever lived up to a BAFTA for my first shot at the genre? Wouldn’t it always have been a bit of a poisoned chalice?

  So thank you all … I think I have got just the affirmation that I wanted (in fact, more than the approbation
and minus the hubris). And I will try to do even better next time.

  Comments

  Ah, but according to the kitchen cabinet here, you will have to control the producers, insist on a complete absence of distraction, silly sounds off, unnecessary music, remorseless focus etc. And you will have to be prepared to turn on your heel and walk away if your conditions are not met … Entsagen Du, sollst Du entsagen!

  PETER WOOD

  I have not seen Beard′s TV programme, nor do I know the criteria for these awards – many technical/artistic factors are involved, but from what I have gathered from the programme′s content I feel some purely academic queries might be raised that diminished its chances. Beard in her usual contrarian way implies the Romans were dirty people and the whole public baths thing was in reality much dirtier than we imagine – people floating around in a kind of oily scum (reminiscent of those jolly British pre-war prep-school days where one was quite liable to find a turd floating by in the communal bath). To support this idea she mentions the lack of drainage – how could the water be kept clean etc. She also mentions how the streets would have been full of refuse and excreta. She also – I believe – looks at modern Naples and observes the refuse disposal problems that continually beset that city. I cannot help thinking that all this shows surely a certain naïveté in approach. Surely a society where three out of five persons were slaves would be able to find some creatures who could be used to sweep these streets clean.

  LORD TRUTH/RONALD ROGERS

  Young minds … and the dirty bits (in Aristophanes)

  4 June 2011

  I am pretty much in agreement with the Mumsnet line that there is something truly ghastly about young kids and aggressively sexualised clothing … what on earth goes on inside the mind of someone who designs a padded bikini for a six-year-old or a pink T-shirt (size 18 months) with ‘Come up and see me some time’ blazoned across the front I really can’t imagine.

  But the David Cameron view, as reported on the radio and in the Guardian this morning, prequelling Reg Bailey’s recommendations, that it should be banned (along with a whole raft of other things that are ‘inappropriate’ for kids) is quite another matter. For one thing, how on earth is it going to work? It’s all very well being strict on enforcing the nine-o’-clock watershed, but when any self-respecting five-year-old can use iPlayer on his/her computer, what exactly is the point. (And the rules for post-watershed are pretty odd anyway. Our Pompeii documentary was a post-watershed programme – and what young minds would that have corrupted?)

  And just think of all those lawsuits and legal fees that will follow the disputes about whether this or that logo is too ‘sexualised’ … (The point about languages, as Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Williams showed us, is that it is possible to sexualise almost any phrase if you try hard enough.)

  But anyway, isn’t the effect of a ban (or a brown paper bag around a lad’s magazine) to make it more intriguing to the curious child, not less?

  That’s how it worked when I was 13 or so for the dirty bits in Aristophanes. OK, it took me about a year or so of reading this particular Greek comic poet at school to realise that the reason the line numbers apparently went from 1205 to 1210 in only 3 lines of verse was not to do with problematic and corrupt textual transmission – but because some Victorian nanny-state editor had taken out a possibly corrupting couple of lines that were something to do with sex (or occasionally bottoms).

  Their expurgation served to make them much more alluring. So, as soon as we got a chance, and we were up at the boys’ school, where they had a much bigger Classical library (thanks to the famous Dr Kennedy – of The Latin Primer – among others), we rushed to the unexpurgated version in some complete, not-for-kids, text and pored over it with the boys in a kind of academic version of ‘doctors and nurses’. It was, of course, extremely good for our Greek … but that hadn’t been the object of the expurgatory exercise.

  Of course, you will object, sexualised clothing and sexualised images near schools are not the same thing as the naughty bits in an ancient Greek dramatist. In some ways they are not – and in some ways they are. Both of them, in their different ways, are a nice illustration of the ‘BAN IT’ culture that we have come to accept. If you don’t like something, if you think – even more -that its presence could harm young minds and bodies, then BAN IT – as if that was effective, and the only strategy of change that there was. Surely, if we disapprove of such things, we are clever enough to devise other ways to discourage them (as at last one sensible report on drug use and abuse suggested this week).

  Not every culture behaves in quite this way. When our children were young we often used to spend a week in the summer in a Greek village where there was a nice open-air cinema, usually showing English/US films with Greek subtitles. There was no apparent interest in any form of ‘classification’, but many of them had ‘18’ certificates over here. The under-10s in the village tended to sit on the front row, enjoying their Coke and ice-creams, while some often up-front images of coupling and breasts and bums passed on the screen in front of them (accompanied by a dialogue they couldn’t understand and subtitles many of them could not read). Maybe untold damage was being done to them. Who knows? But that was not the impression we got. In fact, most of the younger ones were throughout much more interested in the ice-cream than the screen (on the principle that you have to begin to understand what is going on before you can be interested in it).

  Greece isn’t exactly a role model in modern Europe at the moment. But this may be something it has got right.

  Comments

  Interesting. And do you feel the same about ‘racism’/‘sexism?’

  ROGER PEARSE

  Lucky it was not a Turkish cinema. I recall a horrific film (being enjoyed by whole families in the open air of a hot Diyarbakir evening) where the baddies put the hero′s baby girl on his shoulders placed a noose round her neck, then wrapped the rope round the beam and proceeded to punch the father in the stomach. I could watch no more (to the evident amusement of my kind hosts), but could not fail to catch the bit at the end where the hero uttered the Fatiha and was executed (to tumultuous applause) just BEFORE his grown-up daughter arrived with the reprieve.

  OLIVER NICHOLSON

  ‘Many jokes in Aristophanes depend on a fairly detailed knowledge of the physiology and psychology of sex. I have explained these jokes much more plainly than has been the custom hitherto. One reason for this is that, whatever may have been the case in the last century, it is obvious nowadays that most of those who are old enough to study Aristophanes already have a sound factual knowledge of the main line and branch lines of sexual behaviour. A more important reason is my own inability to understand (except in the sense in which one understands a purely historical or anthropological problem) how it could ever have been believed that it was morally objectionable to foster adolescents′ appreciation of the more light-hearted aspects of sex but at the same time unobjectionable to acquaint them with the grossest political and forensic dishonesties of the orators.′ KJ Dover, Aristophanes: Clouds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. viii–ix.

  TERRENCE LOCKYER

  Byron noted the ′Aristophanes′ effect long ago:

  Juan was taught from out the best edition,

  Expurgated by learned men, who place,

  Judiciously, from out the schoolboy′s vision, The grosser parts; but, fearful to deface

  Too much their modest bard by this omission,

  And pitying sore his mutilated case,

  They only add them all in an appendix

  Which saves, in fact, the trouble of an index.,

  Byron, Don Juan, 1.44

  HOLT PARKER

  Dream School goes to the Education Select Committee

  22 June 2011

  Yesterday I went to the House of Commons to give evidence at the Education Select Committee, who had decided to discuss what came out of Jamie Oliver’s TV Dream School experience, where I had taught Latin, and what lessons mig
ht be learned. I was a bit sceptical about this. I mean, it was only a reality TV show and – while it might have prompted some interesting debate about things educational – it was not a guide to what is, or is not going on, in the nation’s schools. Certainly the idea that you can get any clear idea of issues of discipline from what happens when a TV camera is pointed at 20 late teenagers and a group of (fairly media-hungry) pretend ‘teachers’ is simply bonkers.

  Actually my worries were, by and large, allayed. I had never been to a Select Committee before, though I had watched them on the television. (OK, next question … what happens to a group of media-hungry politicians when you point a TV camera at them?) But I knew that many people thought that (after the House of Lords) they were the best place for finding reasoned and reasonable discussion in our parliamentary process. And so it turned out to be. The discussion took plenty of time (two hours), the MPs had a reasonable knowledge, had done their homework and listened.

  So how did it go from our sides? Well, first some of the kids were interviewed. They were brilliant.

  If you watched all that footage of the fighting and the lippiness and the tears on the Dream School series, then this Committee was an antidote. They contributed clearly, articulately and often movingly – about what had gone wrong for them at school and what they were hoping to do now. (One is going round talking to primary schools and hoping to move into journalism, one is about to do a childcare/youth work qualification, one is holding three conditional offers for an IT place at Uni, and so on.) It looks like a total transformation, which of course it can’t be. They must have been like this all along underneath, but sort of waiting for all this to come out.

  Then it was the turn of some of the teachers: the head, plus me, Alvin Hall, Robert Winston, Jazzie B and David Starkey.