All in a Don's Day (19 page)

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 might 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.

Most of us were singing pretty much from the same hymn sheet, not too full of doom and gloom about the British system, a desire to free teachers up a bit, and no passion for the kind of old-fashioned discipline that people of our age like to imagine is just what the kids need (and will ‘work'… whatever that means!). And there was plenty of praise for Latin!