Dave Hill's Big Britain

At Guardian Comment: John Barrowman & Gay Genes

I could be missing something, but John Barrowman as Captain Jack does seem to be a new kind of gay presence in Britain's Saturday evening TV telly schedules. Here's my friendly-critical piece on his Making Of Me programme for the Beeb.

We like John Barrowman in our house. He’s a dashing star of some of our favourite TV shows especially Doctor Who where he plays Captain Jack Harkness, the time travelling bi-guy who can’t die. Jack’s quite a character, flirting with guys and gals alike but signaling gayness loud and clear to any viewer primed to receive.

As Jack, Barrowman's is not your established Saturday evening telly-homo performance. We’re accustomed to camp comperes, but not to an action hero with a certain kind of shine in his eyes. Last night he presented an authored documentary in the form of a quest into the mystery of his own sexuality. For all the reasons above I watched with interest and sympathy. Yet the programme was a missed opportunity.

Sarfraz Manzoor: Oh Dear...

An intelligent fellow, he writes:

"Let me begin with an admission: yes, it is true - I am a man. This is a dangerous admission to make on Cif, where it seems open season on men has been declared."

I have an admission too. Little depresses me more than Sarfraz's line of argument: so tired, so trite and so typifying the very poor standard to which debate about the sexes has fallen, even at Comment Is Free. Sometimes especially at Comment Is Free.

Ladycakes

I've just baked these beauties. Thank goodness there's nothing suggestive about them.

Blaming "The Feminists"

Anna Pasternak inquiries:

"Why are today's married women so insecure, clingy and proprietorial? Have they really lost the trust most wives once instinctively felt in their relationships?"

She rang up her girlfriends:

"I...railed against what seemed to me to be the shattered sisterhood, in which women no longer look out for one another but instead see themselves in competition - emotionally, physically and financially - with every other woman. But there was no sympathy to be had...Didn't I know, they asked me, what it's like to be married today? To have actually got your hands on a good man - even had children with him - at a time when the dating game is a hellish shark-pool of hopeless men and desperate women. To be such a wife immediately makes you a target, they told me - or at least it makes your husband a target, for predatory women."

Why, oh why, oh why?

"The consensus, according to my friends, was that female emancipation - and the social, economic and sexual freedoms that have gone with it - have led to a liberal world in which nothing is sacred any more. Women are out for what they can get - and if that means another woman's husband, then so be it."

You see, girls, it's like this: "the feminists" have ruined marriage and made women behave like men - that's why, in this "liberal world", you can no longer be friends. Men, of course, are wholly blameless in all this. Oh, and Anna Pasternak is chick lit's Melanie Phillips. Both write for the Daily Mail.