| home |
chapters |
galleries |
editlog |
contact |
blog |
Topic 2: Grayson in Skem
A great social engineering disaster revisited
The second part of artist Grayson Perry's channel 4 series All Man was, for me, very depressing. It was mainly about Skelmersdale in Lancashire. Well no, it wasn't, actually. It was, in line with the theme of this excellent series, about concepts of maleness and the effects of the modern world on men. Had it been about Skelmersdale, it would have included the whole town which, north of the Concourse and in the Old Skem area is or was a fairly reasonable place. I say 'or was' because I've steered very well clear of the place for 30 years.
Fans of this website (and there are still a few) will know of my less than happy experiences of the place in the 1980s (see chapters 90 & 91).
Watching this film, someone who previously knew nothing of the place might have been forgiven for assuming that there had been a fairly recent decline of the Tanhouse and Digmoor (and Little Digmoor) estates into a concrete jungle of vandalism, violence and general hopelessness. The fact is that there hasn't been a recent decline at all. It was pretty much the same in 1982, not long after the place was built. The only difference is that it's the sons of the kids who gave me so much aggro then who are now carrying on their parents' hopeless way of life, although they seem at least to have caught up with drugs and hoods. Their parents were stuck 30 years in the past and appeared to know nothing of the world outside the confines of the southern half of the town. I stood out a mile as an alien from the distant future and aliens are fair game. (I say 'parents' rather than 'fathers' because the girls were pretty awful too, during my incarceration in the place.)
The Tanhouse, Digmoor and Little Digmoor estates were a scandalous disaster from the outset, a nassive failure of social engineering theories born of the arrogant cluelessness of 'experts'. Take people from what were then called the 'slums' of Liverpool, put them in bright new surroundings in the middle of nowhere, with lots of grass and trees, and design the estates like rabbit warrens, so the new inhabitants won't miss the sense of community they were alleged to have enjoyed before and - hey presto - they would all become happy and socially useful citizens. Many people who didn't have degrees in whatever you need to have a degree in to come up with such skyward-looking theories, tried to tell them it wasn't that simple.
Until disabused of it by Grayson's film, I'd harboured a secret silly notion for all those years that the place must have improved beyond recognition after 30 years and I'd even thought of revisiting it. Oh, dear!
Well, at least the police seem a rather different breed from those who hid away in the police station in the '80s and were always "rather tied up at the moment" whenever you called about some crime you were witnessing. The apparent arrival of machismo into their ranks is no bad thing at all.
Grayson is obviously an ideal person to be talking to those self-sentenced to nothingness by primitive instincts and confinement to a tiny, hopelessly outdated world. He was sensitive, perceptive and genuinely, even passionately, wanted to understand them and to compare their feelings with his own. Of course, his great weapon of defence was the camera crew. Without them he wouldn't have lasted five minutes, with his curls and flowery hat. Those lads are big snorting, snarling males when in a large group against a hapless lone passer-by but dissolve into turn-tail cowards before two or three. Even against one, they tend to prefer the remoteness of the brick to a close-up confrontation.
I hope at some time to be able to view properly the two works of Grayson Perry's art that resulted from the encounter. From what I could see of them on my small lo-def monitor, they looked powerful and inspired. Getting Grayson to express what he felt about about the groups he was put among during the series of three films was a great idea.