Another normal: Grayson Perry, Alternative Miss World, Middle of the Road and Alan Titchmarsh

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“I sometimes think the most dangerous words are ‘normal’ and ‘natural’,” Grayson Perry said this week in the first episode of his new Channel 4 series, Who Are You?

During the programme, Perry interviewed and created portraits of four people whose lives have much to tell us about subjectivity – how we experience the business of being ourselves – in twenty-first century Britain. To examine power, Perry looked to disgraced former cabinet minister Chris Huhne; for fame, he turned to reality-TV celebrity Rylan; for religion, he met a young white woman who converted to Islam; and for gender, he spent time with a young trans man of colour.

Four very different lives and four very different portraits added up to a fascinating examination of ideas seldom acknowledged in mainstream culture: the contingency and malleability of our sense of who we are; the fact that ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ exist not as absolute categories but merely as the working consensus of a given society at a given time; and, crucially, the thought and labour that each of us must continually, if not always consciously, invest in what Perry called “the lifelong artwork that is our own identity”.

The idea of identity as artwork strikes me as powerful because it emphasises the operation of agency, choice and taste involved in its creation and maintenance. One might decide to play by the rules or follow the path of least resistance because, as one of Perry’s subjects put it, “that’s the way it is”; but it is no less a decision than the choice to put on a wig or change your body or have unusual sex or do any number of things that make you happier.

The danger that Perry identifies in the words ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ flares when one group of people insists that their choices are not, in fact, choices at all but the right and proper way of things. If you aren’t like them, you’re making a choice not to be, and that makes you misguided, absurd, pathetic or dangerous. It’s always hard to be different but when times are hard, it’s even harder.

When times are hard, people get scared – for their money, their security, their family, their future. When people are scared, they get selfish and risk-averse. When people are selfish, they avoid empathy and seek scapegoats. And when people are risk-averse, they seek scapegoats among the weak and vulnerable, although they need to imagine them to be powerful to retain a sense moral indignation.

Scroungers, perverts, terrorists, job-stealers, plague-carriers – they’re the ones to blame. Disabled people are worth less, says a government minister. People with HIV should be denied citizenship, says the leader of a party on the up. If you can’t be considered a productive member of that modern golden calf, a Hardworking Family, the prevailing rhetoric goes, don’t expect to be valued by society or the state.

Under these circumstances, there’s a strong incentive for the choices people make about the “lifelong artwork” that is their own identity to be conservative and conformist. Last weekend, I saw two terrific shows that seemed to operate in unambiguous opposition this tendency – one explicitly and ironically, the other implicitly and sincerely.

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The former show, Middle of the Road, was created by Bourgeois & Maurice and David Hoyle and ran at Limewharf from October 17 to 19. To fans of the performers, the very title of the show constitutes a gag: in their different but simpatico ways, these three alt-cabaret luminaries have always been in the gutter, if not running wild.

David Hoyle, formerly ‘anti-drag queen’ the Divine David, specialises in brutally acerbic, politically radical diatribes against normative culture and exploitative geopolitics, delivered in abject-chic ensembles and seasoned with his own singing, painting and throwing the occasional abstract shape. Bourgeois & Maurice perform their own catchy, grotesque songs about climate change, political collapse, middle-class moral bankruptcy and sexual outliers in a register of alien exuberance and the couture of a mad cartoonist’s dream. All three specialise in sarcasm but their points are utterly sincere.

Middle of the Road was about the attempt to throw all this aside and just be normal. This choice was presented as a kind of bastardised conversion experience – less about seeing the light and striving for self-realisation and social justice, more about seeing the dark, benighted world of Daily Mail headlines, Lighthouse Family crooning and political scapegoating and thinking it looks quite comfy, actually. “I’ve wasted a lot of time trying to provoke thought or action,” Hoyle noted. “Anything that saves people from thinking or in any way being cognisant is a gift.”

Much of the satire was verbal, including a keynote speech advocating that we all “like things”, “tune out atrocities” and “keep on the straight and narrow” (“then you needn’t give a shit either way”), a panel discussion on the redundancy of the brain, and reeducation in which public figures are good (the Queen, Jamie Oliver) and bad (Rosa Luxemburg, “media whore” Malala Yousafzai).

And of course there was plenty of music, from the bracingly original to the deliciously repurposed. In terms of original Bourgeois & Maurice songs, Opinions superbly skewers the ease with which fatigue at having to think about the world falling apart can be overtaken by the relief of ceding responsibility (in this case to the People’s Republic of Bourgeois & Maurice), while the title song was a spot-on pastiche of an inoffensive power ballad. Cover-wise, there was Bourgeois’s grating version of James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful, with added machine-gun fire to evoke the singer’s military background; David’s bitterly heartfelt take on Katie Melua’s Closest Thing to Crazy; and the unforgettable sight of all three performers in Womble suits thrashing around to Mumford & Sons.

But it was also a strikingly visual production – striking for its considered banality. There were cleverly conceived video projections with a sheen of corporate blandness, including one in which Bourgeois & Maurice’s off-stage alter egos George Heyworth and Liv Morris gush about their roles (“It’s been such a great opportunity. I love it!” “It really keeps you on your toes, too!”), much to the horror of their on-stage counterparts.

The costumes into which the three performers were made over were equally blah: outfits of white, beige and occasional pastel or shit-brown, including Burton-boring suits and Gap-style ensembles of white roll-necks paired with stonewashed jeans (David professed to find a child’s finger in the stitching of his jeans – “what a stupid child!”). At one point, David suggested “let’s paint a rainbow” before unveiling a palette of magnolia, mushroom and oatmeal; at another, Bourgeois and an audience member used a roller to slather white paint over a colourful abstract canvas – then we were told to “sit and watch it dry”.

This emphasis on the visual seemed right given our culture’s increasing tendency to want complex things boiled down to untroubling and easily digestible iconography –see too the everything’s-fine placards that audience members were invited to brandish at the show’s conclusion. This was a show about the promise of convenience that accompanies the decision to go with the flow, to surrender the work of identity-making to the market and the tabloids and the brute we call Common Sense.

Yet watching the show was in itself an affirmative rather than a disruptive experience. Almost all those who had come to Limewharf knew what they were getting; was there a sense in which they – we – had come to have our own received wisdom reassuringly reconfirmed? Perhaps so – but if that received wisdom is rooted in being conscious of and taking responsibility for the formation of one’s identity, and rejecting the claim of the scared and the selfish to have ownership over what is normal and natural, then I’m all for its reinforcement.

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If Middle of the Road offered a grotesquely parodic image of corrosive, collaborationist insipidity, Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World 2014 was an exuberant spectacle of unabashed individuality in action. Where one was beige-bland, the other was fluorescent-fierce – Neon Numbers was the theme for the pageant, which took place at Shakespeare’s Globe on Saturday October 18. It’s a pretty splendid setting in itself, certainly compared to the staidness of most London theatres. Even so, one attendant told me “I think tonight’s going to be a bit more colourful than usual”.

This is Logan’s thirteenth AMW in 42 years. The event began in 1972 as a party at his Hackney factory-conversion flat, taking its format from Miss World and its judging criteria – personality, originality and poise – from Crufts. As Logan explained when I interviewed him prior to the event, it’s as much about what happens off-stage as on, and, four decades and several orders of magnitude later, it retains a sense of the social as well the spectacular.

There was a real buzz as spectators filed into the foyer, most clad in some kind of neon or at least making an effort, from glitter-wig epaulettes to squid-encrusted headgear, suits that lit up to outfits made of orange supermarket bags. Many were wearing items of Logan’s signature glass-mosaic jewellery. People who, under other circumstances, would be having photos taken of their outfits were taking photos of others’ outfits. The stage itself had been worked over deliciously, its neon-clad pillars looking like rockets to superglam Mars. In its mix of fantastical spectacle and audience-cajoling knockabout, the event fitted the groundling-friendly Globe exquisitely.

It’s slightly miraculous that, even as many of its veteran participants – including Zandra Rhodes, Fenella Fielding and Molly Parkin, all among this year’s judges, not to mention Derek Jarman, David Hockney and Leigh Bowery – achieve augustness, the event still feels transgressive, or at least defiantly different. Anyone normal-looking was in the minority and the brilliantly open design of the Globe made it plain that this constituency of the proudly abnormal was sizeable and of good cheer. There might be problems around the idea of ‘alternative’ events preaching to the converted, but when that congregation fills a cathedral of mainstream culture – as Gay Bingo’s tenth-anniversary blow-out also did at Hackney Empire this time last year – it’s exhilarating.

The pageant itself proceeded according to tradition. Logan is master and mistress of ceremonies, his outfit vertically divided into male and female halves. Assisted by a troupe of entertainers, he and his co-host introduce the contestants, who compete in three rounds: daywear, swimwear and eveningwear, the last accompanied by a brief interview. A few performances are thrown in between rounds too.

This year’s co-host was none other than Grayson Perry. Perry has AMW form, having competed in the 1986 event in Brixton: in one of its rounds, he wore a layer of mud; in another, he was crucified in a pink nightie. As presenters, he and Logan made a cute double act, Logan’s polite, slightly befuddled charm offset by Perry’s more animated presence and raucous, clattering cackle.

As for the 15 contestants, they delivered the pageant’s signature pleasure of the freakily outlandish executed with wit and at scale. “It’s got more professional – the costumes are very good this year,” said Sir Norman Rosenthal, who competed in the 2004 competition while a big cheese at the Royal Academy. (I spotted him because he was sporting the cock-adorned baseball cap Sarah Lucas designed for his daywear look.)

Indeed, the costumes perhaps tended more towards the grand than ever before, including a fair bit of Elizabethiana in the form of ruffs and bustles. Miss Pi Paulus wore three cartoonishly outsized inflatable contraptions ranging from jellyfish to octopus to cactus-beast; Miss Enigma offered a complex, occasionally malfunctioning portfolio of projected fractals, giant blue balloons and colossal illuminated fan; and Miss Zero + boasted a selection of head-to-toe latex outfits complemented by inflatable hair and balloons. These hi-tech ensembles were clearly to the judges’ taste as these competitors finished third, second and first respectively.

They were certainly splendid – and, in the case of Miss Pi Paulus, very funny – and there’s a magnificent redundancy in all that money splurged for the sake of showing off on one’s own terms. Still, I had more of a soft spot for the efforts that had more personality and were slightly more shoe-string, like Miss Three Sheets to the Wind, with her tit-mounted bubble-blowers and reckless crowdsurfing or Miss Nether Regions, with her homemade phone box and accompanying bollock-naked dog-boy. I was surprised Miss Neon Natal didn’t place: few can pull off both a minimalist posing-pouch swimsuit and a genuine neon-tube ensemble including an arrow pointed at one’s arse promising “FRILLZ”. In all, the vibe was one part Elizabethan pageant to two parts techno-Cockettes to one part SpongeBob SquarePants.

At this event as at Middle of the Road, the visual was paramount, though here that felt celebratory rather than sardonic. The costumes were (almost) all, with other memorable moments including entries from above: Logan’s descent at the start of the evening on a neon aerial hoop and reigning champion Fancy Chance’s descent at the end supported only by her hair, miming to Gateau Chocolat’s rendition of Nothing Compares 2U.

A little wit in the interview section went a long way (Grayson Perry to Miss Infinity: “Where would someone who is infinite go on holiday?” Miss Infinity: Bournemouth”) but for the most part the verbal got short shrift. Certainly, anything overtly political or worthy was a turn-off. Miss Zero + did get a cheer for wanting to vacation “far from Russia”, her homeland, but Miss Nine Daisy Wonder’s line-up of authority Aunt Sallys (Mr E Stablishment, Ms Multinational, a priest etc) got old quickly, and some contestants’ pledges, if crowned, to speak out on behalf of young people or gay rights set eyes rolling.

Not that the sentiment behind such things wasn’t shared by the audience; they just struck the wrong note. Alternative Miss World walks a tightrope between satire and sincerity; tilt too far one way or the other and the balance goes. The approach must be strictly Wildean, treating all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things with studied triviality. The event’s true potency – the gift of Logan-as-magus – resides in its world-upside-downness. It is not satire but carnival and to acknowledge in any but the most oblique and absurd way the reality of the world as it is, with its violations and injustices, simply bursts the bubble.

Where Middle of the Road rubbed our noses in business as usual, Alternative Miss World offers a glimpse of a missed alternative world, a parallel universe in which a night out at the theatre or – why not? – a night in watching TV offers an experience that is gleeful, exuberant, perverse, original and above all reflective of utterly distinctive individual sensibilities. Nor is this some alien visitation: as the Guardian’s backstage report on the event hinted, it’s not hard to discern the event’s deep connections to Britain’s indigenous folk culture, from mummers and maypoles to village fetes and Carry On smut – and, obviously, early modern theatre.

The costumes that filled the Globe were artworks of identity, exaggerated versions of the selves we could all have if we made different choices. The night was an idea of how our country could be if it really wanted. It proposed another normal, with the volume turned up.

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If you wanted a vision of the real normal of Britain 2014, you could probably do worse than watch The Alan Titchmarsh Show, which airs weekdays on ITV at 3pm. A typical edition might feature an interview with a game-show host or star of a TV drama, an item about pets, pudding or property, a song from Neil Sedaka and “the latest round in Alan’s Battle of the Sexes” (no, really). It’s basically Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge, down to the stage topiary.

Bizarre, then, to see Andrew Logan and several Alternative Miss World contestants appearing on Tuesday’s show in all their glory. This was a platform that potentially allowed millions of people who would never attend the pageant to appreciate its makers’ creativity. But for that to happen, they would have to disregard the considerable lengths to which Titchmarsh went to affirm their abnormality.

His scepticism and (only half-faked) apprehension were clear from his introduction, loaded as it was with phrases such as “with fear and trembling” and “wish us luck, audience”, followed by “I told you this is going to be weird”. While meeting Logan, Miss Nether Regions, Miss Neon Natal, Miss Katherine Wheel, Miss Zero + and Miss Pi Paulus, the host could scarcely have seemed less interested, rolling his eyes, fiddling with props and interrupting his guests as they tried to speak. Throw in the songs used to introduce them (Isn’t She Lovely and She’s a Lady) and Titchmarsh’s blurting of inanities like “You’ll go giddy in there!” as Miss Pi Paulus spun around and we were truly deep in Partridge country.

Wrapping the segment up, he even managed to evince a kind of bizarre pride at his haul of freaks. “All Loose Women could manage today was Grayson Perry and we have all this! Isn’t that wonderful?” Well, it was certainly an unusual afternoon for ITV.

Titchmarsh seems not to have known Perry was co-host of Alternative Miss World or, presumably, to have seen his appearance on Loose Women (which is ITV’s lunchtime discussion programme, hosted by four female presenters; Perry was on to promote Who Are You?) If he had, he evidently wasn’t unduly perturbed by Perry’s observations about the contingency of the white middle-class man’s privileged status (“it is an ethnic group as much as any other”) or the peculiarity of Titchmarsh’s own chosen costume, the business suit (“Men dress to look invisible in many ways, you know. The suit is about camouflage”).

Yet Perry’s appearance on Loose Women was, I suspect, disruptive to a higher proportion of its audience than was the Alternative Miss World item on Titchmarsh. Perry has a rare knack for communicating unapologetically subversive ideas in accessible and amiable terms. In a few minutes on screen, he touched on the pervasiveness of the male gaze, characterised the average wedding as an excuse “to spend 18 grand on a piece of performance art” and unpacked his idea that “identity is like an ongoing performance” without an irreducible ‘authentic’ core.

At one point in Who Are You?, Chris Huhne reminds Perry of the CBE he was awarded last year. “You’re the establishment!” he insists. Huhne has a point, and I think it’s an important and heartening one. Perry has indeed been taken to the country’s bosom. He won the Turner Prize. He gave the Reith Lectures. He has his own TV shows and, when he appears on other people’s (like Loose Women), the audience cheer and the hosts treat him as an honoured guest. And although he is that most normal of things, a white middle-aged heterosexual man, Perry’s popular appeal owes more to abnormalities – his transvestism and his irreverent scepticism about national myths and institutions. That such a person is on the fast track to national-treasure status seems to me to be a source of hope that our national identity is still willing to embrace another normal.

Perry earned his biggest round of applause from the Loose Women audience for his critique of stag and hen do culture. “I don’t mind people having a ritual,” he said. “That’s nice. But there’s something kind of commercialised about it now – it’s almost as if there’s a hen-party industry in the same way there’s a wedding industry and a baby industry and all these industries that are selling you tat you don’t need. Try a bit of imagination! Do it yourself! Do it in a different way!”

Make distinctive choices about the lifelong artwork that is your identity, the man in the dress told the quintessentially mainstream audience. Choose life!