By Clive Bradley

Clapham Junction (Sunday, July 22, C4), written by Kevin Elyot - best known for the hit AIDS-themed play ‘My Night With Reg’ - was screened as part of Channel Four’s celebrations of 40 years since the 1967 Sexual Offences Act which decriminalised homosexuality. Following a group of modern gay men over a day and a half, its aim – presumably – was to show that homophobia is alive and well, and murderous, and present even in those places you don’t expect, like Channel Four itself and the dinner-partying middle class.

That might be a laudable, and radical, aim – to puncture the complacency of middle class media circles, at least; to address the often-heard claim that everything is fine now, prejudice a thing of the past. Elyot has referred to the rise in violent homophobic attacks – despite changes in the law, civil partnerships, and all the rest. And so, indeed, Clapham Junction opened with a civil partnership ceremony, smiling, cheering, champagne-swilling faces – and went on to show a homicidal anti-gay assault on Clapham Common – such as really take place.

But.

It would be hard to imagine a more relentlessly pessimistic, depressing, bleak account of contemporary gay life than this. It is not just that the film suggests that security and happiness are only islands in a storm of unabated hatred. Gay men themselves, in Elyot’s worldview, hardly seem deserving of happiness anyway. The rottenness isn’t just out on the common. On the day of his wedding, one of the grooms is downstairs seducing the waiter. There is scarcely a character who is not lonely, miserable – ‘tragic’ in all senses that word – or whose happiness is not based on an illusion. One of the heterosexual women makes the point – again, presumably, the film’s ‘message’ – that even if men are sniffing each other out behind bushes they don’t deserve to be brutally beaten. But this is hardly a profound opinion. Is that it? After forty years, is that the best we can say for ourselves?

No writer is under contract to present ‘positive images’, or somehow to ‘represent’ a wider community of which they are part. If this is how Elyot sees the world, then he’s entitled to write about it. But this was presented as landmark, celebratory drama, showing a cross-section of gay men – to reflect contemporary gay life – but consisted of characters straight out of a homophobe’s sketchbook. It was, to put it mildly, odd.

Especially odd was the decision to have one strand about a fourteen-year-old boy’s obsession with an older man who turns out to be a convicted paedophile – which culminates in graphic, and lovingly-shot, anal sex. Is this supposed to be challenging, edgy, difficult? The worthwhile statement here – that boys under the age of consent are not necessarily sexless victims – is hardly novel – the opening sequence of Queer as Folk made the same point nearly a decade ago, but without any of the overwrought ‘tragedy’, and with characters you could care about.

Like the other stories, in any case, none of this was even faintly believable. These were characters who rarely moved into two dimensions.

You can see why someone might want to say that ‘acceptance’ – gay weddings and all the rest – aren’t the whole story. But this bleak vision does an injustice to the generations of people who fought for that acceptance. What we have achieved may not be quite what ‘gay liberation’ was imagined to be. But it was fought for. And thanks to those struggles, it is, on the whole, much easier to be openly lesbian or gay than it used to be.

Right near the beginning was a scene which summed up the strangeness of this project. Rupert Graves, a gay screenwriter, is in a meeting with a Channel Four executive (Neil Pearson), pitching a film about gay life. He’s told it’s old hat; nobody’s interested any more; the executive ‘passes’. The point, clearly, is to say that even in these bastions of political correctness, you find a form of homophobia. Presumably this is based on some personal experience of Elyot’s (though even this wasn’t believable). But – hold on. Clapham Junction was commissioned by Channel Four... so its existence contradicts the claim being made in one of its pivotal scenes. I’m confused. If this was some sort of post-modern joke, it was lost on me.