Television
Girls on film
James Walton
To mark the 100th anniversary of women’s
suffrage — if a little oddly — Channel 4 on
Tuesday brought us a special girls-only edi-
tion of The Secret Life of Five-Year-Olds.
The cast were a mix of new faces and old
hands from previous series: among them Jet
who, like a primary-school version of a tradi-
tional Hollywood actress, has been playing a
five-year-old on the show since 2016.
Still, you can see why the producers keep
calling — because, by now, Jet has got the
tomboy role required of her down pat. ‘It’s
hard to make friends with just girls,’ she
declared early on, hitting the word ‘girls’
with exactly the right degree of scornful
emphasis. She was also very good at looking
genuinely baffled by everyone else’s desire
to play with dolls.
In this, of course, she met with the femi-
nist approval of the people with perhaps the
cushiest job on television: the two child psy-
chologists who watch the action on a laptop
and provide such expert insights as the fact
that Jet appeared not to want to play with
dolls. Less to their taste were those partic-
ipants who, within minutes, were marry-
ing off the prettiest female doll to the most
handsome male one.
But even if the girls’ girlishness was a bit
of a disappointment to the experts, the pro-
gramme definitely retains its considerable
charm. At the risk of going out on a limb,
I sometimes think kids say the darnedest
things — and on Tuesday, we got some espe-
cially cute responses to the question of what
they wanted to do when they grew up. One
girl opted for being an inventor, ‘but only
on Sundays — the rest of the days I’ll be a
vet.’ Still in full method mode, Jet explained
that, ‘My dream is to have an evil enemy so
I could fight him.’
Which just leaves the question of what
all this had to do with female suffrage. True,
by carrying out a couple of polls about what
to do next — one where only a few girls
were allowed to vote and one where they
all were — the programme established that,
on the whole, everybody preferred it when
they could. To prove they were as good as
boys — something that it didn’t seem to
have occurred to them they mightn’t be —the girls were also forced to do plenty of
science.
Even so, it felt quite a stretch when
another expert summarised what we’d seen
with the words, ‘I’ve been really impressed
by the pride they take in their gender — but,
crucially, they know it’s only part of them,
that they’re so much more than this.’ Call me
suspicious, but might that conclusion have
been preordained?
Hull’s Headscarf Heroes (BBC4, Mon-
day) began with a fascinating plunge into
the long-vanished, largely self-enclosed
world of Hull’s fishing families — and, with
it, the shock of realising that in 1968, the
year Apollo 8 orbited the moon, the city’s
trawler industry was still stuck somewhere
between Victorian and feudal.
The men would be away for three weeks
at a time, sailing 1,000 miles into the Arctic
Circle, with no medical back-up or rescue
ship and sometimes no radio operator. Yet
anybody who suggested this was all rather
dangerous was likely to be suspended from
his job.
Then, in January 1968, two trawlers
sank, with the loss of 40 lives. At the time,
Lil Bilocca, whose father, husband and son
were all trawlermen, was just another work-
er in a fish factory. But she soon began an
impassioned campaign for some wildly over-due safety measures, forming a commit-
tee with three other women. In the face of
her demands, the boss of the trawler own-
ers complained of ‘a lot of women getting
carried away on a wave of mass hysteria’
(among much else, an unfortunate meta-
phor). A few days later, a third trawler sank
and 18 more men drowned.
Monday’s documentary featured the
committee’s last surviving member, Yvonne
Blenkinsop, her eyes first blazing as she
remembered the campaign — and then
shining as she recalled the moment of vic-
tory. ‘Petal, are we going to be having these
things?’ she asked a minister after a meet-
ing with the government. ‘You are, my dear,’
he replied.
In the circumstances, the programme
could be forgiven for occasionally getting
carried away itself. By my slightly heartless
maths, its closing claim that Lil ‘saved untold
thousands of lives’ was more of a rhetorical
flourish than an accurate reflection of even
the worst that could have happened without
the reforms, before the Hull fishing industry
was essentially wiped out by the mid-1970s
Cod Wars. Nonetheless, this was a stirring
and hugely deserved tribute to a group of
women whose current status as Hull folk
heroes sadly came too late for Lil. When she
died in 1988, there was nobody at the funeral
except her family.In 1968 Hull ’s t rawl er in du st ry
was still stuck somewhere between
Victorian and feudala lemon, exactly positioned in the pewter
plate nearby (and still regularly replaced),
echoing an oval yellow form in the Miró. ‘If
I had another name for god,’ Ede mused, ‘I
think it would be balance, for with perfect
balance all would be well.’
The point about Kettle’s Yard is that it is
a completed whole. The most that has been
added to the house is an occasional tempo-
rary ‘intervention’, such as the delicate white
marks, like fingerprints, that Cornelia Park-
er has made on a window.
Over the years, however, the institution
has spread outwards, becoming Cambridge’s
contemporary art gallery and engulfing
a row of nearby shops. Now the architect
Jamie Fobert has deftly expanded the exist-
ing buildings still further, a tricky business
since the site is tightly confined by a busy
street.
The exhibition galleries, though not
much larger, are now better arranged. But
Actions, the underwhelming show that
inaugurates them, is a heterogeneous array
of this and that — photographs, films, old,
new. It lacks Ede’s virtue of harmony —
and indeed coherence — though there are
some good things scattered about, includ-
ing paintings by Vicken Parsons and Caro-
line Walker.
The alterations have made Kettle’s Yard
more like a normal museum, with a spacious
shop, café and education area, all of which
were doubtless necessary. But the things
that make it special are still the pebbles, the
lemon, and the way that Brancusi is posi-
tioned on the piano.