Ferry Tales (N2, Wednesday)
The Lipstick Years (BBC2, Wednesday)
Secret History (C4, Tuesday)
Football Stories (C4, Tuesday)
`Annie," said Leo, "is a man-eating, chain-smoking, alcohol-abusing, drug-addict, substance-abusing bitch." Annie - full name Annie Balls - is Leo McHale's stage persona. She may also be his alter ego. He's not sure. Leo is a Dublin drag-artist, one of many, it appears, who have surfaced in the past seven or eight years since the city's gay scene emerged from a closet that could surely double as an aircraft hangar. Leo's partner in drag is Derek McCann, aka Penny Bridge.
We met Leo and Derek or, if you prefer, Annie and Penny, in what was to be the final episode of Ferry Tales. Despite heavily advertising a July 26th screening, it was transmitted on July 19th. (RTE's scheduling appears to have flipped, with Imprint and at least one other series also screening unadvertised episodes.) Anyway, we saw Leo and Derek preparing to bring their act to London, "one of the world's drag capitals". Given the "pomp and pageantry" outfits of so much of establishment London (knights, judges, beefeaters, Black Rod, Silver Stick and the rest of the lads) the place is Drag City.
At the more democratic end of the market, however, dressing up in dodgy outfits is not state-sponsored and the competition to make a living from the practice is tough. Still, Leo felt the 50-minute London gig offered "a huge opportunity". Perhaps it did. It certainly offered an opportunity to show a way of life which seemed more poignantly naive than gender-bending risque. Leo, having fled scaffolding and work in a Chinese takeaway, was fired by ambition to become a major drag artist. "Watch out Ru Paul, watch out Lily Savage, I'm coming," he said aboard the ferry.
Derek was conspicuously less zealous in his quest for fame in female clothes. He seemed to get togged out just for the carryon, not the career. "What happened to proper frocks?" wondered an exasperated Leo as he and Derek traipsed around Dublin looking for women's clothes. Things are in a bad way when an honest bloke can't get a dress to fit him. Anyway, for their final Dublin gig before the "huge opportunity", Leo and Derek performed for a 700-strong audience.
We saw them doing their make-up, readying their tights and fitting their bras. Horses for courses, I suppose. At any rate, it would require a pretty experienced careers-guidance officer to prepare a young man for the nitty-gritty involved. The lads stayed awake all night before heading for the ferry at Dun Laoghaire. The extraordinarily naive Derek cracked a "joke" about concealed cocaine to a ticket clerk. The clerk was not amused. Neither was Leo. The gap between Leo's ambition and Derek's complacency was reaching critical point. Arguing on the ferry, Leo complained that he was "doing all the work". Derek, as laid-back as ever, agreed. He had never been to London and the trip appeared to excite him more than the gig at the end of it.
In the event, this was probably just as well because the lads' performance at The White Hart in Tottenham bombed. Bizarre as their act is, they were both sufficiently likable that you'd be pleased to see them succeed. But frankly, in Drag City they were out of their league. Their humour, such as it was, lacked sharpness and lipsticked Leo was reduced to cajoling the audience to lend encouragement "because we're nervous". Still, though it was clearly tough going, they stuck to their routine and, albeit disappointed by the muted reaction, crossdressed all the way to the end.
For the moment, at least, Ru Paul and Lily Savage can feel safe - or as safe as any bloke wearing women's clothes can feel. Leo and Derek found out that even cross-dressing can be culturally specific. Popular in Dublin, they sank in London. Whatever the capacity of the Dublin closet, it's hard to imagine that these lads are representative of Irish ferry passengers to Britain. Since returning to Dublin, Derek has taken a bar job and has little time for drag. But Leo's ambition drags on undiminished.
Their story had opened with a voiceover about the "seven million individual journeys" made each year across the Irish Sea. Inevitably, this evoked memories of the "eight million stories in the Naked City" but it rekindled other reflections too. Time was when thousands took ferries to work on the building sites and in the factories of England. Transvestite navvies were rare - if, indeed, they existed at all. Now there's little need to seek work in England. But from navvies to drag artists in a half century? It's probably progress but not as we know it, Jim.
In contrast, The Lipstick Years was straightforward history. Time was when only women wore lipstick and this week's edition of Lowri Turner's series reviewed the changing status of women on television. Back in the 1970s, gameshow hostesses were regularly invited by the male presenter to "give us a twirl". And twirl they did, when they weren't posing archly beside the furniture, fridge-freezers and cars which were offered as prizes.
Carole Ashby, who featured as Nicholas Parsons's sidekick on Sale Of The Century, recalled having to wear short skirts and "being treated like a potted plant". Few women were allowed to speak - or, at any rate, speak more than few words - on gameshows. Anthea Redfern, who went on to marry Bruce Forsyth, denied that she resented being "Brucie's chimp". Recalling "the limited opportunities" for women then, she argued that being the butt of Forsyth's smart remarks on The Generation Game was probably a necessary stage in the liberation of women on television.
In 1964, Monica Rose gave up her job as a junior accounts clerk to become the chirpy Cockney hostess on Hughie Green's Double Your Money. She achieved fame but ended up committing suicide in 1994. A few years earlier, she had broken down on Wogan. Working in a Leicester supermarket, she had clearly lost a sense of her own identity. Terry Wogan, fearing a full nervous breakdown on his show, moved to placate Rose. But she seemed inconsolable, gibbering on about having once been "a star". Sad stuff.
Mind you, in the 1970s, there were TV outlets for women other than gameshow sidekicking. Some became scantily-clad dancers on Top Of The Pops or on The Benny Hill Show. Dee Dee Wilde, a personable former Pan's Person, demonstrated the Pan's People pelvic thrusts. "We never felt exploited," she said, adding that, if anything, she and her dancing sisters often believed they were exploiting the public. It was testimony from the pre-pop-video age and to contemporary teenagers it must have appeared as though it were straight out of the Ark.
At the more broadsheet end of television, Angela Rippon and Anna Ford made early waves as newscasters. Ford spoke about the importance of "image" for a female newsreader and showed us a wardrobe of outfits that Leo and Derek would kill for. But Rippon's celebrated dance routine on The Morecambe And Wise Show in 1977 was as stereotyping as it was liberating. As leggy as a Pan's Person, she reinforced the notion that TV women are more to be looked at than listened to.
Turner's analysis of all these images is that women have now moved from "twirling at the periphery to smack bang at the centre of the screen". She cited Kirsty Young, Melinda Messenger and herself as evidence of this. Well, she has a point. But much television continues to seek human mannequins - male as well as female. The situation has certainly improved for women but if Lowri Turner is a contemporary role model, progress still has more than a few laps to go. Perhaps it's still largely a male conspiracy but it's by no means exclusively so.
Being screened on the evening of the Concorde crash, there was an added poignancy to Secret History: The Few. Disembowelling the myth that the Battle of Britain was principally won by public-school chaps, we saw footage of old fighter-planes crashing to land and into the sea. Like the picture of the crashed Concorde's last few moments, you knew that people were alive as the planes began to plummet. "Some screamed the whole way down," said an interviewee who had heard doomed pilots on the radio to the command centre.
Anyway, it was established that of the 3,000 pilots who fought on the British side, only 200 had been to public school. The image of squadrons of Terry Thomases taking off to tackle the Hun was carefully fostered by British government propaganda. Within the RAF, there was a clear class distinction between upper-class "officer pilots" and the "sergeant pilots" of all other classes. The newsreels, extremely influential at the time, preferred snobbish, braying voices to those of "north of England lads with engineering backgrounds".
In the three and a half months duration of the Battle of Britain, the British side lost 544 pilots. Experienced Polish and Czech pilots were the most effective but, like the sergeant pilots, they too were excluded from the propaganda. If 1940 seems a long time ago, prompting you to sneer at the crudeness of the propaganda back then, consider how contemporary elites continue to use the media for their own benefit. Clearly, there was bravery throughout the classes in the wartime RAF. But history then, as it does now, recorded versions favourable to the reigning status quo.
Most of this documentary's evidence for revisionism came from anecdotes. Claims, convincing too, were made that the RAF's insistence on formation-flying was dangerous and counter-productive. Devoting all your concentration to avoiding your fellow flyers left none for fighting manoeuvres. Gunnery was allegedly neglected and, it was claimed, "air aces" (you needed five kills or more to claim such a title) regularly falsified their reports and refused to share knowledge with colleagues, whom they grew to see as rivals. Progress on the class front seems, if anything, slower than gender or even crossgender advances.
Finally, Football Stories: Man In Black featured the cross-class David Elleray. Harrow public school housemaster by day, by night and at weekends he is a Premiership referee. Not surprisingly, within football, he is often the victim of inverse snobbery and is regularly derided as "Lord Elleray". Realising early on that he was never going to cut it as a player, Elleray became fanatical about refereeing. He showed us an old scrapbook with pictures and reports of refereeing controversies. A very complex complex, that.
Many fans find him too pernickety and he has made major errors - Denis Irwin's sending-off at Liverpool among them. But he did admit that Harrow is more important to him than football. Declining an offer to referee at the World Cup in France in 1998 because he had applied for the position of headmaster at Harrow, his ambitions were made clear. Mind you, he didn't get the Harrow job. Elleray was, by the way, educated at a state school. Yup, progress on the class front is less than dynamic and the media is still among the players most deserving of a red card for cynicism.