In the first episode of All In The Best Possible Taste With Grayson Perry (Channel 4, Tuesday, 10pm), the Turner Prize-winning artist wore a big blonde wig, a tiny dress and a pair of black stilettos.
He walked down Sunderland High Street, which isn't easy in six-inch heels, and got talking to a good-looking young man. "You look better than 25% of the lasses here," said the young man. And then he leaned in over the transvestite's big fake breasts and added: "With another four pints, it could be 100%."
It looked like Perry's plan was working. He'd come to Sunderland to find out about what the working classes love, but his plan wasn't to interview people in the traditional way. He was going to get in among them, become like them, hence the dressing up as a woman on a night-out with the girls. And the results were wonderful: funny, thoughtful, witty and very nearly art.
The stated mission was to explore the relationship between class and taste, and the first subject was the working class. What was refreshing was the artist's open style, his relaxed intelligence and his unwillingness to judge. In popular culture, the working class have become something to sneer at, to laugh at. They appear on television only when they are being arrested or DNA-tested. But Perry's lip never curled; he just looked, and noted, and thought.
One of his first stops was a tattoo parlour where he watched a blue angel appear on a man's arm. He asked how much would a tattoo cost, and was told £900 for an arm. Interesting, said Perry; as a proportion of earnings, that's more than a fund manager might pay for his piece of modern art. Here in Sunderland and communities like it, people care about the canvasses on their bodies.
Then Perry noticed that most of the men in the town had tattoos, and most of the women wore the same kind of uniform: the big hair, the Tenerife tans, the skyscraper heels, all the kind of stuff the middle class dismiss as tacky and chavvy and cheap. What this is really about, said Perry, is tribalism. We pretend we are being individualistic but we're not – we're saying we belong to this group and not to that one.
Which was really the main point of this beautiful, clever little programme. We've become used to laughing at tat and tackiness but there's not really any difference between the taste of the middle class and the working class: it is all about what we love and what moves us. Perry found this out for himself when he saw an audience being moved to tears by a singer in a working man's club. The question Perry asked was: do people cry a more vintage kind of tears at Glyndebourne?
Then the artist tried to explain why we make these distinctions, why we sneer at the tacky, why we celebrate what he called the vanity of small differences. The conclusion was fear. We do not like the tastes of the working class because we are trying to distance ourselves from what we used to be. The point is that tackiness reminds us of where we came from, but even worse, in the years of austerity, where we might return.
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