cop shop episode 42

IMDB doesn't say anything about Bud Tingwell being in these eps of Cop Shop (41 & 42, I think) but it has the most unusual storyline about Tingwell's character Keith York, a high-up in the police, who's being blackmailed by crooks who have tapes of his psychiatric sessions wherein he somehow does or does not confess (?) to being homosexual, or actually I think just having urges in that direction which he has not and most definitely will never act on. There is a most peculiar sequence in which, for no obvious reason, he and his wife (played by Cecily Polson) have spectacular sex and then talk about it (the sex). The situation is not solved, which is to say he presumably continues to be gay, though the blackmail materials are recovered. But the Yorks seem very happy. 

I don't really know what was going on here. It was like a script written by AI where AI was told that gayness was a dose of nits. 

SMH 'Monday Guide' 22 May 1978 p. 5

the simpsons s16 e10 'there's something about marrying'

Recently I sort of accidentally started watching old episodes of The Simpsons, a show I stopped keeping up with solidly about twenty years ago. Maybe more. The season I randomly landed on was (I now appreciate) season 16, which was screened in I think 2005. I could tell it wasn't super-recent because the style of animation was, while not as primitive as the first episodes obviously, still not as pristine as it appears today, but tbh I could not otherwise really figure out what the year was. I was figuring 21st century. 

Anyway, this episode intrigued me and I had to check it out more because it really, really shows how much times have changed in, well, 18 years, which I have to admit is quite a long time and imagine if times hadn't changed? I'm going to spoil it, by the way. 

Essentially the plot is that gay marriage is legalised in Springfield to assist in tourism (I suppose it's 'tourism', though really the gay people who are coming to Springfield are simply getting married, they're not exactly having any other kind of touristic experience that we see). Reverend Lovejoy refuses to marry gay people (apparently no-one sorted this out with him before the law came in and apparently there is only one church in Springfield) so Homer gets a priest's license off the internet and marries gay people for $200 a pop. Marge's sister Patty asks Homer to marry her to her fiancee, a pro golfer called Veronica. Marge is challenged by the news that one of her sisters is a lesbian and then discovers that Veronica is, actually, a man who (it is revealed) pretended to be a woman to get into some golfing league which we are supposed to understand through its acronym so I don't know whether it's just women's golf or gay women's golf.* Not important. The point is he is not a woman but also only pretended to be a woman to get some privileges or something? 

It's amazing to imagine that this episode was groundbreaking and controversial in its day, but wikipedia assures me it was. I wonder if I would have thought so at the time. The jokes about anyone marrying anything (Homer marries Reverend Lovejoy to the bible without his consent, for instance, but at the very end we see a line of people going into Homer's chapel to marry inanimate objects eg the Sea Captain is going to marry the figurehead off a ship, etc) are extremely Cory Bernardi as far as I'm concerned. There is also a lot of stereotypical male gay shizzle that feels like a real throwback, far older than 2005, but what do I know, I'm not a gay man or woman and I am probably - like so many things in this world - not really qualified to have an opinion except broadly as a consumer of culture, and I guess as an ally. 

Of course I watch The Simpsons with the Finnish subtitles turned on as though I'm ever going to learn anything from this, other than that languages have words for everything and you have to learn them all and it's probably impossible.  

'Could we hurry up?'

'Veronica is a man!' (Finnish has no definite or indefinite articles which makes it somewhat easier at the same time as it makes it harder, lol). 

'Patty, I love you but I pretended to be a woman long before we met.' 

I guess there is a joke in here somewhere that 'Leslie' is a man's name that sounds like the woman's name 'Lesley', and 'Robin' can be a man's or a woman's name, I don't get the last name, 'Swisher', though (yes I know the caption says 'Swisherinä' and names are often presented in this kind of way in Finnish and I don't know why, but the character's real name is actually 'Swisher'. 

'Even if you are a lesbian you are the same'. (Who'd have thought the Finnish word for 'lesbian' would be 'lesbo'?! 

*I looked it up. Ladies' Professional Golf Association or something like that. I assume there's a belief at the heart of this that men are intrinsically better at sport than women? Not sure. 

homicide - the corrupter

This episode of Homicide screened on 23 March 1971 and it's sort of interesting not just because of the only time I've ever seen Vivean Gray playing a character with a modicum of sex appeal (although I suppose the characters she was famous for, Mrs Jessup and Mrs Mangel, did have romance storylines). 

In this case however the romance that her character, Hilda Mercer, is having is confusing, if it's meant to provide some kind of contrast with the main thrust of the story which is the first I've come across on Homicide that deals reasonably sympathetically with homosexuality. 

In the 6 October 1970 episode of Homicide, 'Once a Killer', a fruiterer called Conti eludes the police (specifically, Peter Barnes who's staking out a St Kilda flat) by wearing a flamboyant disguise and walking a big poodle. Barnes says something along the lines of, 'I thought he was just a queer!' So that makes this episode doubly unusual.

Ok, so what happens? A young man called David Whittaker is found dead in his bed. His landlady, Miss Mercer, was out the night before looking after a 'sick friend', but it transpires that in fact she is having an affair with a man whose wife was out of town - put a pin in that, it's not crucial to the story, except that we see a flashback where she confides in Whittaker about the situation and he tells her to seize the day and she asks him something like whether he's ever been in love and he just gives her a meaningful look. 

So to cut a long story short it turns out Whittaker had until recently lived in a country town somewhere and his teacher had in some way seduced him (?) (it's never really spelled out, or it's left to the imagination, but the episode is called 'The Corrupter', right).* Rather confusingly the teacher appears to still work at the school, although his wife has left him and the education department has terminated his employment, so whatever. The teacher has driven to Melbourne, tried to get back with Whittaker (he says they could move to Sydney - which is everyone's default on Homicide for getting away from trouble, except very occasionally it's Queensland) and Whittaker has laughed in his face and gotten killed for it. 

As is so often the case I'm left wondering. Is the Hilda Mercer storyline thrown in to suggest that love comes in many forms, or that we are not to judge (eg Hilda Mercer, who is a real Jessupmangel in most other respects, would be likely to judge gay people normally but here she is caught in a situation she would not approve of for anyone else), or...? Atypically for Homicide - I suppose they were just dipping their toe in the water - there is no moralising elsewhere; Peter Barnes doesn't say anything about anyone being 'just a queer', neither Whittaker (in flashback obvs) or his killer (Kevin Lang) gives a soliloquy about the love that dare not speak its name; the only character who comes close to editorialising is the character of Whittaker's brother, Don, who expresses his hatred for his brother without really saying why, and since the whole thing is so subtle (to me, anyway, lol) it doesn't have a huge amount of impact.  

To further muddy the waters we are really left in the dark about what we are supposed to think about the relationship between David Whittaker and Kevin Lang, and of course in 2022 we would naturally be very down on a teacher-student love affair but in this episode that power imbalance is really not at all discussed. I suppose since homosexuality was illegal anyway in 1971 not to mention highly condemned by most, no-one was really going to split any hairs on pedophilia/age of consent stuff. The Homicide team had enough to contend with, putting together a more or less nonjudgemental storyline about gayness. 

I would be interested to see whether this episode got much attention at the time. Certainly there was no particular press preview stuff about it. The above was about all there was in the Age Green Guide on it.

One more interesting thing: Lex Mitchell plays Don Whittaker. Mitchell was of course one of the original detectives in Homicide when it started seven years before, and he was only in it for the first 24 episodes I believe. I gather he is still alive (he is probably in his early 80s) and oddly, considering he was a founder member, one of the few members of the main cast remaining. 

*Look it's possible that David Whittaker is meant to be 'The Corrupter', after all, the teacher was a married man. But it's just not made clear, at all. To my mind there's no sense in which the show suggests that David brought his appalling fate on himself.

jimmy carr is a prat

Carr said: “When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy and horror of 6 million Jewish lives being lost to the Nazi war machine. But they never mention the thousands of Gypsies that were killed by the Nazis.

“No one ever wants to talk about that, because no one ever wants to talk about the positives.”

The statement prompted laughter and clapping from the audience.

If only for my own mental alertness I’m going to try and write a few thoughts about Jimmy Carr’s joke about Romani dying in concentration camps. 

 

Jimmy Carr recently made a joke in a Netflix special which was, apparently, dedicated to pushing the envelope and getting himself cancelled (or striking a blow for free speech, whatever). I haven’t seen the whole special and maybe I should (I will) but I have seen the excerpted joke. It’s not good, but Carr is that kind of comedian, hit-and-miss and really hateable a lot of the time, with his weird 1930s face and affected donkey laugh* like some kind of pre-Ealing very unfunny British comedy extra. I have watched him compere UK game shows where he demonstrates a reasonable amount of skill reading jokes (eg trademark insults) off cards but more commonly just keeping the show together.

 

The gas chamber joke is one of those ones a comedian can do because it appears to edgily divide and conquer its audience: those who actually believe that ‘gypsies’ deserve(d) to die are hoist on their own petards (or at least: who cares what those people think) and those who appreciate the possibility that there is some way in which the joke can be seen to be a joke about racist hate, have to then concede that it’s a contribution to the discussion (about what can and can’t be said, about the ridiculousness of racism, etc). 

 

Of course it’s still a shit joke. Mainly it’s shit because it’s so lazy – the old ‘punching down’ to a marginalised group. It’s not brave to joke about ‘gypsies’ on any front, and this is proven simply by inserting any of the other groups who were murdered in the death camps – Jewish people obviously but also gays and disabled people. If Jimmy Carr had joked that it was terrible that Jewish people had been murdered but gays had also been murdered so that was a plus, then he would be beyond cancelled. I’m not saying that LGBTQI people per se have power to effect that, but actually in my opinion that sector of society has adequate support – by dint of family and social connections throughout mainstream society – that there would be outraged resistance. Clearly, had it occurred to Carr to make a joke that thousands of homosexuals dying in gas chambers or by other means of torture/systematised elimination would be a good thing, he would have abandoned that as an idea because there would have been gay people in the immediate audience when he made the joke, or friends of gay people, many would indeed not even really have understood a joke predicated on the idea that a government would hate gay people enough to want to kill them. But Romani people are still far enough on the outer that he can make the joke. It’s just an outright bullying piece of shit joke by a privileged prick to a bunch of privileged pricks, and for most of those privileged pricks the idea of a gypsy/Romani person is a piece of cartoon fun, like something out of Enid Blyton. 

 

I wish I could say something more sophisticated about it than that, because I wanted to assist with my own mental alertness, but it seems that simple to me. I do recognise that the whole special, which I will say once again I have not watched but will, was about pushing the envelope. Obviously when you set out to do something like that you are going to necessarily mess shit up occasionally and that’s OK. But I guess the bottom line really is Jimmy Carr doesn’t have the capacity or credibility to handle big issues. His joke doesn’t make anyone think seriously about the issues it raises, it just makes (reasonable) people think Jimmy Carr is trying to operate outside his abilities and it’s kind of blown up in his face. Not, sadly, in terms of getting him obliterated from his day job (would he really care? I would if I was him because what kind of supporters would you end up in bed with if that did happen) although I’m sure he never needs to work again as it is. But definitely in terms of him making the world a little bit worse and decent people despair a little more, he’s had a cracking success. Fuckwit. 

Update: OK I watched it, sort of, I listened to it while I was searching for an image, which made me realise how long I can spend searching for a simple image, although I guess it seemed longer. Yes, he tells the joke framing it in all these cowardly ways about how (for instance) it raises awareness of the murder of 'gypsies' and then goes on to talk about how Jehovah's Witnesses were also murdered, with a few jokes about how that might come about. Then he goes on about how if you can't laugh at terrible things, you aren't equipped to handle them when they 'really' happen. He boasts about how edgy he is, etc and how he's going to be cancelled sometime anyway so he might as well get it out of the way or something. Almost all of the show is set-ups for a really sad, wretched view of the world, which I guess is understandable, what hope would you have if you lived in England? Fuck! 

* 'asthmatic donkey fucking a seal', he says in the show