VICTOR LEWIS SMITH

"From here to depravity"

Evening Standard Jan 1999

As FOWLER (editor of The King's English and late star of East-Enders) would tell you, our native tongue is a paradoxical affair. Don't get me wrong. I'm not anti-semantic (indeed, some of my best friends are words), but why is "dyslexia" so hard to spell, why isn't there another word for "thesaurus" and why do people who suffer from a morbid fear of long words have to refer to themselves as "sesquipedalophobics"? And, furthermore, whose cruel idea was it for the word "lisp" to have an "s" in it? The sibilance level reached mach 10 last night during Short Stories: For Love or Money (Channel 4), with transsexual Andie lisping so heavily that my TV set began sounding  Like a pressure cooker. His lifestyle was pretty steamy, too, and much of what he got up to would be unprintable in a family newspaper, unless the family in question were the Mansons. And so, following the example of a prudish  1930s judge (who Insisted that the phrase "making tea" be substituted for "buggery" during a lengthy case), I will euphemise in similar vein as I view the splendid documentary about Andie and his rent boy partner Terry, who made tea for pleasure and profit in their north London flat. "I'm half-Greek, half. Maltese, 32B bust, based in Hornsey," Andie told one telephone caller, "basically, I have breasts but I also have what you have between your legs" (in my case, that was my head, because I was already starting to feel faint). Let's put it this way. Andie's work involved not just "making tea", but also serving "cocoa" with "whipped cream and "Ginger Nuts". "I never knew what love was until I met Andie," said teenager Terry, clearly besotted with the transsexual paramour to whom he'd proposed in an Australian backpackers' hotel in Earl's Court (which reminds me, do male kangaroos suffer from pouch envy?). Although they now shared a flat and a bed, Andie's professional tea-making continued unabated, and the frequent presence of clients inevitably fuelled Terry's jealousy as he stood impotently in the back garden In one gloriously tragi-comic scene, he hung around outside the French windows, angrily listening to Andie's fake moans (or were they genuine moans?) and providing the crew with a detailed progress report on one customer who was stubbornly determined to get his full 30 quid's worth before leaving. "It took him ages to come," lamented Andie afterwards; but, more to the point, it had taken him ages to go. Andie's transsexual tea parties were racy enough (doughnuts, a finger buffet, the inevitable cappuccino, that sort of thing), but they were tame compared to the peripatetic menu offered by Terry, an exotic bill of fare not necessarily approved of by the National Federation of Proctologists. His most regular customer was Scat Paul, who gave a whole new meaning to the phrase "dirty phone call" by asking Terry to visit his Ladbroke Grove flat in a state of advanced of unwashedness Although Terry and Andie seemed superficially happy with their unconventional lifestyle, the former's obsessive possessiveness suggested that their conjugal bliss may end in a fit of Kenneth Halliwell-like, B&Q- style unpleasantness, especially if Andie's appetite for younger men continues unassuaged. When one penniless15-year-old arrived at the flat, shamelessly "'made his own tea" in public, and then asked Andie for a free cuddle, Terry was beside himself with anger, shouting "a cuddle? That takes the biscuit." Really he did. No euphemism intended. This was yet another congratulatory, starred, first-class programme from Blast Films, exactly the sort of enthralling and provocative documentary that Channel 4 was set up to screen. Too many fly-on-the-wall docs are either contemptuously patronizing or amorally voyeuristic, but Adam Barker and Edmund Coulthard clearly had a certain affection and regard for their unorthodox protagonists, and captured something that was outrageous and anarchic, yet also intelligent, with a delightful depravity reminiscent of Warhol's films in the early 1970s. BARRY Ackroyd's camera work didn't miss a trick, while Paddy Wivell's direction had me on the edge of my seat throughout, and my only regret is that I cannot tell you exactly what it was that Terry was required to do all over Scat Paul's face, because the tea-making analogy can only be stretched so far, and the naked truth is simply unprintable. Who said that the pen is mightier than the Sword?