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Call the Midwife [message #68999]

Mon, 02 February 2015 15:21

timmy

Has no life at all

Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13751

We have a reasonably banal TV series, Call the Midwife, based on the real experiences of a midwife in London during and after The Blitz. The books are now exhausted, and we have reached 1960 using screen writers who have developed the original theme. It's Sunday evening TV, a mixture of schmaltz and social justice of the day.

Yesterday, the series decided to focus on the stigma of homosexuality. It did it poorly initially, albeit dramatically, and took me back to my own fears about being queer. The man was married. There the similarity ends. He was arrested by being entrapped by a 'pretty policemen' in a gentleman's toilet, prosecuted, and sentenced to be cured with stilbestrol. "You will take this until you are cured," intoned the judge.

In the community the neighbours hurled insults at his wife, and he attempted suicide by car exhaust fumes. His wife hurled insults at him, too.

I had not anticipated being affected by Sunday Night TV, but it was as though I was living it. I was going to say "again", but I never quite lived it.

The political background is the Wolfenden report, published in 1957, which meant I great up amidst a great discussion about those fucking homos. There was no political appetite for it at the time, so the broad recommendations were enshrined in law in 1967 here.

This show brought back my teenage pain.

It was also deeply uncomfortable to be watching it in company with my wife. I felt that she probably espoused the screen wife's reaction. Brokeback Mountain was an easy watch together, and disappointing. It was a lousy film. This banal TV series was well done and the very banality emphasised the attitudes of the era

[Updated on: Fri, 06 February 2015 17:21]

Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School

		Call the Midwife By: timmy on Mon, 02 February 2015 15:21
		Cottaging By: timmy on Mon, 02 February 2015 15:32
		Re: Cottaging By: The Gay Deceiver on Fri, 06 February 2015 12:51
		Re: Call the Midwife By: ChrisR on Sat, 07 February 2015 21:17
		Re: Call the Midwife By: timmy on Sat, 07 February 2015 22:09
		Re: Call the Midwife By: The Gay Deceiver on Sun, 08 February 2015 03:46
		Re: Call the Midwife By: ChrisR on Sun, 08 February 2015 18:24
		Re: Call the Midwife By: The Gay Deceiver on Sun, 08 February 2015 20:17

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