I couldn’t help sniggering when I read in the Guardian that Tony Robinson, the diminutive (5’4) droll most famous for being in Blackadder, is venting his miniature wrath over the tendency of women on dating apps to desire men taller than them: ‘Nowadays, you don’t pick on people’s looks, do you? It’s like kind of a new understanding over the last ten or 15 years, you don’t deride people for what they look like’ he scolded on Elizabeth Day’s How to Fail podcast, admitting he had seen his shorter than average height as ‘a problem in life.’
You’d think having a gorgeous young wife would have rendered Sir Tony totally uncaring about what the youngsters get up to
A quick peek at his Wikipedia shows that Sir Tony (a long-time member of the Labour party, knighted in the 2013 Queen’s Birthday Honours) has been gainfully employed as an actor since the age of 13 in the theatre, radio, television, films and as an advertising voice-over for cleaning products, including Vanish. But far from vanishing, at the ripe old age of 78, he’s still going strong. To say he’s had a successful career in a profession where around 90 per cent are out of work at any given time is to utilise classic English understatement somewhat. Because of this, he is a wealthy man with homes both here and abroad.
Sir Tony has been no slack in his private life, either. Three times married, his current wife Louise Hobbs is some 35 years younger than him. I’m not pointing the finger, as Mr Raven is some 13 years junior to myself, but it’s one of those amusing situations comparable to Stephen Fry and his spouse in that when you see a photograph of them together, you do initially think ‘isn’t it lovely to see someone that close to their adult child!’ before looking a bit closer and thinking ‘Ah…but not that close, perhaps. Silly me!’
You’d think having a gorgeous young wife would have rendered Sir Tony totally uncaring about what the youngsters get up to. But he gets in a right kerfuffle about the girls on Love Island: ‘Look at Love Island, every woman who is asked what bloke they want will always start by saying “I want a tall man” and then everyone else will laugh in collusion.’
Why is a 78-year-old man watching Love Island – and would he watch it if the bikini-clad babes doing all that mugging and hugging were of his vintage?
Of course, the Guardian is keen to back up the miserable old leftie:
‘Studies over decades show heightism leads to bias, yet it appears even today to be more socially acceptable than other forms of physical prejudice. The term “heightism” was first coined by the sociologist Saul Feldman in 1971. Dr Erin Pritchard, a senior lecturer in sociology and disability studies at Liverpool Hope University, believes much heightism is subconscious, but that it is ingrained. It has also not benefited from widespread acceptance movements. “You had the fat acceptance movement, and while there’s still issues, you would never go, ‘Well, how much do you weigh?’ But it’s perfectly acceptable for people to go, ‘How tall are you’?”’
But also recently in the Guardian – or the Good News Gazette, as I think of it – there was a fat girl having a moan about models being thin, so it’s basically any poor-me in a storm.
‘Live and let live’ used to be a popular liberal tenet before liberals decided that telling everyone else what they should be doing and thinking was a lot more fun. I’d bring it back and add a new one; like and let like, or even love and let love. Don’t try to push your way into dating groups that don’t fancy you; go and find a dating group that’s keen on your kind. It’s going to save a lot of aggro and hurt feelings all around.
Just as some people are going to be better runners – or writers – than others, some people are going to be more physically attractive. Babies smile at photographs of conventionally attractive people more; are we going to start re-educating them about beauty before they can count to two? Besides, very few apparent gifts are free in this life; with beauty comes the curse of witnessing its loss, either by natural decay or unnatural injections of plastic which invariably rob the most fantastic face of what made it special in the first place.
Before I was in a wheelchair, I was 5’9. I loved being tall. It suited me; I was a swaggering, swashbuckling show-off. Sometimes I used to actually pat my shorter friends on the head. I’m about four feet tall now; it’s weird seeing life from a child’s point of view. But I’ll have to grin (and occasionally) grizzle and bear it. I don’t believe for a moment that anyone should have to find people in wheelchairs as attractive as those striding along on their long healthy legs. I don’t see many public figures in wheelchairs – but I don’t believe for a moment that if I did, it would make being in a wheelchair any less annoying. In my opinion, the phrase ‘If you can’t see it, you can’t be it’ is one of the silliest of modern sayings. Rosa Parks never saw someone do what she did; neither did Barack Obama. Looking to others for approval (unless it comes in the obvious shape of getting paid) is one of the surest ways to court under-underachievement, self-loathing and mediocrity.
But if ‘Sir’ Tony really does ‘need’ to see an example of a rich, successful shorter man date/bang/marry a taller woman, there are many to choose from. The tall young starlet with the short mega-millionaire is a long-standing cliche, from Bernie Eccleston to Rod Stewart, who far preferred girls who towered over him. As he gamely chortled in ‘Blondes Have More Fun’: ‘You can keep your red heads/ You can keep your brunettes too/I wanna girl that’s semi-intelligent/Gimme a blonde that’s six feet two.’ The blonde he finally settled for, the ex-model Penny Lancaster, has been vice president of the Royal National Institute of Blind People and a fully-qualified Special Constable with the City of London police. She’s the catch, as much as him; when you can’t tell the difference, I guess they call it love.
So contrary to what Dr Prichard says – ‘We need more voices like Tony Robinson coming out and saying it, to show this is not all woke nonsense, [to] just sort of sit down and listen to what they have to say and go, OK, these are their lived experiences’ – we need, in the sexual arena, more people who don’t feel outraged at not being found attractive by those more attractive, and taller, than they are.
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