[I am only writing this because, although I watched only part of it, I felt the next day that the Guardian TV review had not done it much justice, so thought I'd pen my own review so I could sleep at night]
Remember when we last saw gypsies on TV? Binding themselves to scaffold, cementing their arms together in oil barrels as the Council heavies moved in. It was awful. But remember the time before that? Gypsy and Traveller weddings: all over the top glitter and glam [and battery powered light up flapping butterflies] with a mildly condescending incidental background music that suggested we as viewers were in on some joke. And before that, curse spewing heather sellers.
My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (C4) showed a culture that was somewhere close to those alien cultures a beamed down away team led by Riker would have to ingratiate through a dastardly tricky set of social graces. I always thought that The anti-Big Fat Gypsy Weddings was University Challenge. Turns out I was wrong - it was another show about Traveller culture.
Channel 4 scheduled Gypsy Blood with very little fanfare. It was put out as a one-off 95 minute documentary and was to portray the male roles in Traveller society.
Now I am not going to get bogged down in views and thoughts about theirs as a culture. That scenes of violence it showed are repeated in all society. I am not even going to bother with if the documentary was art or not. And, to come clean, I exercised the right that I am sure many will have expressed to those who found it unwatchable and turned it off half-way through.
What interested me was: why?
Why did I find this documentary unwatchable when I praised The Scheme (BBC1) so much in this blog and elsewhere? After all they were both showing me parts of society that I was not part of and, arguably, The Scheme with its hard hitting images of deprivation, drug use and despondency, on paper would be a harder viewing experience.
But we don't film TV on paper, son.
I make no excuses for reiterating my opinion that from the moment it was broadcast, The Scheme is the benchmark and touchstone for all these types of "snap-shot of modern Britain" docs.
Masculinity was the name of the game in Gypsy Blood. It seemed to me to be a daring one-up-manship between everyone concerned: subjects and documentary makers. I'll keep filming it if you keep doing it / I'll do more if you keep filming it. How much could each side bear?
Taking this flight of fancy further I imagine how the documentary was pieced together, please forgive another bit of scripting:
Look I am driving a white transit van!
Yeah, but we've seen this in My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. This is old news. What else you got?
Accelerating while I let my let me 7 year old steer?
Great! Roll camera!
And so it went on.
Hey - film this! Two of us men are in a front yard punching each other, bare knuckle style in their T-shirts, while more of us are watching!
Ok, it's a start - it'll do to set the scene for the documentary being about men...
Fine - here are two boys, they are under 10 and they are punching each other as we men are goading and watching them!
This is better - but do you watch anything else fight?
Hell yes... we make coc... I mean chickens fight. Chicken fighting, that's legit, right? Chickens fighting? Look they are pecking each other to a horrible death and us men are only half interested - like keeping half an eye on the summer BBQ. Oh! One is about die quicker than the other one! Go on finish him!
At least we are making progress? What else?
Dog fights! We men make dogs fight too!
And so it goes on:
What about your kids? The young girls in BFGW danced like their lives depended on it? What do the young men do? We have already seen them at the "grabbing" - nothing special - so do they do anything a bit more to show how manly they are?
Way Wayne! They learn how to fight then they fight. See, I am teaching my 7 year old!
Meh.
...that I am now calling a c**t.
You have another boy.
Which I am glad you brought attention to, I am also getting him to fight. He is only 18 months old, the c**t.
And on and on:
Do you hunt? Men hunt.
Yeah, of course - watch us trap a hare and rip it apart with me hands, in front of me kid.
What else do you hunt? A hare is a bit small.
We can get a couple of dogs to kill a fawn.
I'll try to make it interesting by tying a camcorder to the dog. People will think its art.
Look the dogs' killed a fawn, and now we are going to have a go at butchering it on this Black & Decker Work Bench in the front garden, with the young boys all watching. We don't know what we are doing with cutting it up - you would think we would, since we do this all the time. But we don't appear to.
We've seen this with the hare.
Wait, don't stop filming! I'll cleave it! I'll totally cleave it's face off. Take it's muzzle right off! Then I'll lick it and then get my 7 year old to punch it, the c**t.
It was at this point that I felt I had watched enough and switched off the telly for the evening. Well, that's not strictly true, it was when the documentary cut to some horses and I thought: Lord, they're not going to gut a pony now, surely?
I left it wondering 2 things. First I wondered if this was genuinely all for real - if this was a typical day, weekly or monthly set of activities. Then 2nd thing was how this Victorian lifestyle has survived.
One clue was from the only female I saw on screen. The boy's mother. She shrugged her shoulders at her eldest (the 7 year old) not going to school. "He doesn't like going and wants to play his DS instead". That's a tough one alright. Normally there would be a parenting book or something to refer to - it's a shame that this situation is so unusual. Soon we saw a the boy struggling to read a remedial book in class.
Could there be a connection? Poor education reduces options when confronted with hard situations in life and fighting is the next best way out? War is declared when diplomacy fails. It is a fair means to reply to bullying and there is little doubt that this culture feels a lot of bullying.
So why did I turn it off (aside from the casual animal cruelty)? I think it was because in The Scheme I saw a heart. It had real people struggling through real issues (many totally unsuccessfully) in their lives but with a gallows humour. Gypsy Blood, I get the feeling did not. If I saw a heart in Gypsy Blood it was probably because it had been ripped straight out a fluffy bunny rabbit and then punched repeatedly by men in front of a baying crowd of other men. And why validate that by watching it happen.
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