The artist Grayson Perry has been mining a profitable seam for a while now, making documentaries that in essence ask the English to explain themselves. Profitable in the widest sense, I mean – though obviously I hope and presume he is paid a fair wage for his work. The interrogations of class (in All in the Best Possible Taste With Grayson Perry), masculinity (All Man) and other forms of identity (in, for example, Divided Britain, which interviewed leavers and remainers about Brexit), in unhurried programmes directed by Neil Crombie, have all been fresh and illuminating. They are full of insights – provided by the endlessly perceptive Perry himself or by the interviewees who open up under his warm curiosity and direct, unaggressive questioning.
In the opening episode of the latest offering, Grayson Perry’s Full English (Channel 4), which is produced by Crombie but has a new director, things seem to have gone awry. Partly, I suspect, this is due to a growing sense of old ground being retrodden. Perry’s mission is to explore what people mean by “Englishness” through interviewing denizens of the north, south and the Midlands (collecting their donations to a planned exhibition on the subject that he will create when he gets home). “Is it an identity binding us or a fantasy keeping us stuck in the past?”
