A ‘look at these funny people’ doc that could have been presented by any TV hack: Grayson Perry's Full English reviewed

For around a decade now, Grayson Perry has been making reliably thoughtful and entertaining documentary series about such things as class, contemporary masculinity and modern secular rituals. (All a lot more fun than they sound, I promise.) Equipped with an infectious Sid James laugh and an impressive commitment to affability, he’s demonstrated a willingness to listen to opposing views, even to the extent of allowing his mind to be changed. He’s then turned his findings into both a convincing thesis and an art exhibition of some kind.

So what’s gone wrong in Grayson Perry’s Full English? The main problem, I think, was inadvertently laid bare right at the start of Thursday’s opening episode. In a quest to discover ‘what Englishness means today’, Perry told us, he’d be meeting people all over the country ‘who have a distinct idea of what English identity is’ – which, at a stroke, rules out most of the population. After all, not having a distinct idea of what English identity – at least not consciously – is surely central to English identity.

Well, not for the folks Perry talked to here, who almost by definition tended to fall somewhere between the unrepresentative and the pretty much bonkers.

His first encounter, for example, saw him taking to the English Channel with a bloke called Jeremy. A wedding DJ by night, by day Jeremy sails the waters off Dover objecting to the arrival of immigrants. Not that his attitudes are entirely illiberal. ‘These are human beings,’ he acknowledged with the air of one making a generous concession. ‘We’re not there to sink them.’ He merely wants to make the rest of us aware of the boatloads of foreigners crossing the Channel: something we apparently wouldn’t notice otherwise.

So what did we learn from this about England, rather than just about Jeremy? The answer of course was a firm ‘nothing’.