Grayson Perry - All Man, Channel 4: the artist looks at masculinity, male suicide and repressed emotion in the North East

The Turner Prize winner interprets the idea of the ‘hard man’ into a beautiful work of art in his documentary series
Ben Travis5 May 2016

Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry has made forays into the world of TV a few times before, but his latest series is perfectly conceived.

The self-professed “life-long sissy”, known for his transvestitism, turns his interpretive eye to issues of masculinity in All Man.

The three-part series sees Perry look at different places and contexts where being “the man” is seen as important at any cost – where men are struggling to express themselves, bottling their deepest and darkest emotions, and having to find traditionally masculine means of venting their repressed feelings.

In the first episode, Perry looks at the ideal of the ‘hard man’, venturing up to the North East where he encounters cage fighters and mining communities – where many men are using traditionally ‘masculine’ acts to express themselves.

With his artsy background, Perry’s show is less interested in facts and figures, more focused on the thoughts and emotions of the individual men he meets.

At times the documentary takes on a more dreamlike and expressionistic quality, capturing the pageantry of ritualistic violence in combat sports, while watching some of the people that Perry meets begin to peel back their own layers and actually talk is transfixing.

Most wrenching are his conversations with the mother and friends of Daniel Turnbull, who committed suicide aged 30.

"Nobody wants to be seen as not being the man, everybody wants to be seen as being strong,” says one friend, who has Daniel’s face tattooed on him in tribute. “I just get angry when I think he didn’t say anything of what he was feeling at the time, because if he had have said anything of what he was feeling at the time I would have been there in a heartbeat.”

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At one point, Perry speaks to a man who simply describes the identity crisis for young men in mining communities, where they're sometimes no longer the breadwinner, in many cases leading to suicide, as “sad” – a word too inconsequential for such a worrying situation.

What sets All Man apart is that it’s not just about Perry’s understanding of his subjects – at the end of each episode, he creates an artwork that interprets everything that he’s encountered. Seeing the way his work affects those he’s met along the way is genuinely spine-tingling.

Channel 4, 10pm

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