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The Naked Civil Ser­vant is the best and fun­ni­est TV drama ever made. And I’m sorry, but it’s a sci­en­tific fact.

And like its sub­ject it could only have been made in the UK.  Even if Crisp said he hated Eng­land –and he did, over and over again.

So many lines in Philip Mackie’s superb screen­play for the Thames TV adap­ta­tion glit­ter like, well, the icy apho­risms that Crisp filled his epony­mous auto­bi­og­ra­phy with.  But it was Hurt’s break­through per­for­mance as Crisp which is most his­toric: ren­der­ing Crisp, as Quentin him­self acknowl­edged — and wel­comed — some­thing of an under­study to Hurt’s Crisp for the rest of his life.

The actual, quasi-existing Crisp, born Den­nis Charles Pratt in Sut­ton, Sur­rey in 1908, some­times sounded by this stage (he was nearly 70 when the drama aired) like a vin­tage car tyre los­ing air ve-ry slow-ly. And was almost as immo­bile.  Het­ero dandy Hurt injected a kind of rak­ish­ness – a hint of phal­li­cism, even – to Crisp’s defi­antly passss­sive perssss­sona that came across rather more invig­o­rat­ing and sexy than he actu­ally was.  Hurt ren­dered Crisp rock ‘n’ roll when he prob­a­bly wasn’t even up for a waltz. When Hurt repeat­edly intoned Crisp’s Zen-like answer to the world and Other Peo­ple and Desire in gen­eral – ‘If you like’ – it sounded slightly more aggres­sive than passive.

(And for me, Hurt­ian Crisp was fur­ther improved and made edgier by what I shall call Hoyleian-Hurtian Crisp: when I met the per­for­mance artist David Hoyle in the early 80s when we were both teenage run­aways to London’s bedsit-land he would per­form key moments from TNCS mid con­ver­sa­tion about the weather or who was on Top of the Pops last night, adding a dash of David Bowie and Bette Davis to the mix.  David always suc­ceeded in mak­ing these impromptu excerpts sound as if they were flash­backs to his ear­lier life.  Which, since he grew up a sen­si­tive boy in work­ing class Black­pool in the 1970s watch­ing a lot of telly, they were.)

TNCS, book and the drama­ti­sa­tion, is crim­i­nally funny pre­cisely because so much of what Hurt/Crisp says/declaims is so shock­ingly true.

The line whis­pered del­i­cately in the ear of the leader of a 1930s queer­bash­ing gang is now almost a cliche, but still has hilar­i­ous force: ‘“If I were you I’d bug­ger off back to Hox­ton before they work out you’re queer.”  Some toughs are really queer, and some queers are really tough. Crisp’s truths, par­tic­u­larly about human rela­tion­ships, are the truths told by some­one who has noth­ing to lose – largely because they’ve already lost every­thing to the bailiffs of despair. This is the ‘naked­ness’ of the Civil Servant.

Because it was one of the first TV dra­mas to depict a self-confessed and unapolo­getic — flaunt­ing, even — homo­sex­ual TNCS has been fre­quently mis­rep­re­sented as a ‘gay drama’. But Crisp’s sex­u­al­ity is not really what TNCS is about – or in fact what Crisp was about.

To a degree it is about being ‘out and proud’, or at least deter­mined to inflict one­self on the world, but not so much as a homo­sex­ual, and cer­tainly not as ‘a gay’, in the mod­ern, respectable, Amer­i­can sense of the word. It’s not even, thank­fully, a plea for tol­er­ance. Rather it’s a por­trayal of the heroic self-sufficiency of some­one who decided to stand apart from soci­ety and its val­ues, henna their hair and work as a male street pros­ti­tute – and then, lying bruised in the gut­ter, turn a haughty, unsen­ti­men­tal but pierc­ingly funny eye back on a world which regards him as the low­est form of life.  It’s the black­est and cheeki­est kind of com­edy — which is to say: the only kind.

‘I am an effem­i­nate homo-sex-u-alll’, declared Crisp to the Uni­verse, over and over again. And the Uni­verse had no choice but to agree. By being utterly abject Crisp forced the Uni­verse to do pre­cisely as he instructed. A blue­print for celebrity that was to be repeated many, many times by oth­ers before his death in 1999 and even more times after — though usu­ally rather less wit­tily and with less jaunty headgear.

Crisp added that as an effem­i­nate homo­sex­ual he was impris­oned inside an exquis­ite para­dox, like some kind of ancient insect trapped in amber: attracted to mas­cu­line males – the famous Great Dark Man – he can­not him­self be attracted to a man who finds him, another male, attrac­tive because then they can­not be The Great Dark Man any more. Hence the famous, Death-of-God dec­la­ra­tion in TNCS, after many, many mishaps and mis­recog­ni­tions: ’“There. Is. No. Great. Dark. Man!”’

Strictly 19^th cen­tury sex­o­log­i­cally speak­ing, Mr Crisp was prob­a­bly more of a male invert than a homo­sex­ual and often said that he thought that he should have been a woman, and even won­dered whether he was born inter­sexed (this despite famously dis­miss­ing women as ‘speak­ing a lan­guage I do not under­stand’ — per­haps because he didn’t like too much com­pe­ti­tion in the speak­ing stakes). Either way, he doesn’t appear to have been ter­ri­bly happy with his penis or even its exis­tence – some­thing homo­sex­ual males, like het­ero­sex­ual ones, are usu­ally deliri­ous about. But then again, per­haps rather than express­ing some kind of  proto-transsexuality Quentin’s Great Dark Man com­plex was merely set­ting up a sit­u­a­tion in which he could remain ever faith­ful to his one true love. Himself.

In Thames TV’s TNCS, which begins (at Crisp’s request) with a pretty, pre-pubescent boy as Quentin/Dennis danc­ing in a dress in front of a full-length mir­ror, Hurt­ian Crisp is an out-and-proud nar­cis­sist, who sim­ply refuses to take on board the shame that such an out­ra­geous per­ver­sion should entail. When he attempts to join the Army at the start of the war he causes apoplexy in the recruiters for being com­pletely hon­est about his rea­sons for doing so: he doesn’t mouth plat­i­tudes about ‘doing his duty’, ‘his bit’ or ‘fight­ing Nazis’. He just wants to eat prop­erly and the squad­dies he knows seem to have quite a nice time of it, load­ing and unload­ing petrol cans in Bas­ingstoke. His open­ness about his homo­sex­u­al­ity is pal­pa­bly less shock­ing to the Army offi­cials than his hon­esty about his self-interestedness. About his inter­est in himself.

Or as Hurt/Crisp replies as a preen­ing ado­les­cent youth when asked by his exas­per­ated, buttoned-up Edwar­dian petite-bourgeois father: ‘Do you intend to admire your­self in the mir­ror forever?’

‘If I pos­si­bly can.’

And boy, did he. TNCS, which aired slap in the mid­dle of the 70s, was prob­a­bly more of an inspi­ra­tion to the glam, punk, new-wave and new roman­tic gen­er­a­tion than to gays in gen­eral.  Hurt­ian Crisp and his hen­naed hair and make-up sashay­ing the streets of 1930s Lon­don sym­bol­ised in the 1970s the idea of an aes­theti­cized revolt against Vic­to­rian ideas of proper deport­ment and dull­ness that had dom­i­nated Britain for much of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury. The best British pop music had always been a form of aes­thetic revolt, and Crisp seemed very much his own spe­cial cre­ation, which is what so many teens now aspired to be. Crisp was taken for a real orig­i­nal and indi­vid­ual in an age when every­one wanted to be orig­i­nal and indi­vid­ual. Or as Crisp put it him­self later: ‘The young always have the same prob­lem – how to rebel and con­form at the same time. They have now solved this by defy­ing their par­ents and copy­ing one another.’

TNCS changed Crisp’s life and made him very famous indeed. A real­ity TV win­ner before such a thing existed, his prize was the chance to move to Amer­ica. Since he had loved Hol­ly­wood movies from child­hood and was later treated like a Hol­ly­wood star­let (albeit in air raid shel­ters) by Amer­i­can GI’s in Lon­don dur­ing the Sec­ond World War, no won­der he grabbed the oppor­tu­nity with both hands.

But if there’s any­thing to be learned from An Eng­lish­man in New York, the sequel to TNCS broad­cast on ITV recently, it’s that it may all have been a ter­ri­ble mis­take. Even if Mr Crisp never thought so.

Although Hurt turns in a tech­ni­cally fine per­for­mance, he seems to have become more Crispian and less Hurt­ian.  Per­haps that’s inevitable with the pas­sage of time (Hurt is nearly 70, the age Crisp was when he first played him). Or per­haps it’s sim­ply that his act­ing skills have increased.  What­ever the rea­son, it’s not a wel­come devel­op­ment here.  And I’m sure Crisp would have agreed.

But much, much worse is the redemp­tive reek of this sequel. Every­thing is made to turn on Crisp’s ‘AIDS {upper case back then, remem­ber} is a fad’ quip made in the early 80s and the trou­ble this got him into in the US – and why he was a good sort, really. Despite the things he actu­ally said.  So we see him adopt a gay artist dying of the ‘fad’, fuss­ing over him and arrang­ing for his art to be exhib­ited. We dis­cover him send­ing secret cheques to Liz Taylor’s Aids foun­da­tion. We even hear him explain what he meant by ‘fad’ (sup­pos­edly it was a polit­i­cal tac­tic: min­i­mize the gay plague to avoid a het­ero backlash).

Now, this obses­sion with redemp­tion may be very Amer­i­can and has of course, like many Amer­i­can obses­sions, become more of an Eng­lish one of late – espe­cially when try­ing to sell some­thing to the Yanks, as I’m sure the pro­duc­ers of this sequel are hop­ing. But if there was any point to Crisp at all it was that he was utterly unsen­ti­men­tal – except where roy­alty were con­cerned – and rel­a­tively free of the hypocrisies of every­day life.  This sequel sup­pos­edly about him is full of them. So for­give me if I’m unconvinced.

Crisp was invin­ci­ble in his deter­mi­na­tion to regard the US as the dream­land of the movies of his youth made real: Amer­ica was as he put it ‘Heaven’ where Eng­land was ‘Hell’. And why not? If you’ve spent most of your best years deprived of almost every sin­gle illu­sion that com­forts most other peo­ple, why shouldn’t you have one big one in your retirement?

And to be fair much of what he had to say about the friend­li­ness and flat­ter­ing, encour­ag­ing, open-hearted nature of Amer­i­cans com­pared to the mean-minded, resent­ful, vin­dic­tive Eng­lish is quite true, even today. But Crisp’s whole approach to life was even more at odds with Amer­i­can cul­ture, even in its atyp­i­cal NYC form, with its empha­sis on self-improvement, aspi­ra­tion, uplift and suc­cess. ‘If at first you don’t suc­ceed, fail­ure may be your style,’ said Crisp, who regarded him­self as a total fail­ure.  Could there be a more un-American world­view? Apart that is from, ‘Don’t try to keep up with the Jones’.  Try to drag them down to your level.  It’s cheaper.’

In an early doc­u­men­tary from the 1960s Crisp, sit­ting in his Lon­don bed-sitting room sip­ping an unap­pe­tiz­ing pow­dered drink he takes instead of prepar­ing food, which he can’t be both­ered with, that ‘has all the vit­a­mins and pro­tein I need but tastes awful’ he describes him­self as a Puri­tan.  Actu­ally Crisp was a Puri­tan with an added frost­ing of asceti­cism. Crisp was deeply sus­pi­cious of all plea­sure (save the plea­sure of being lis­tened to and looked at) and most espe­cially sex, which he described as ‘the last refuge of the mis­er­able’. And four years of house dust is a very good way of show­ing how above the mate­r­ial world you are.

It’s a very mid­dle class, mid­dle Eng­land, mid­dle cen­tury Puri­tanism – just like Crisp’s back­ground. But Crisp was also his own kind of revenge on him­self, or on the world that had made him — of which he was a liv­ing par­ody.  Ulti­mately none of us are really our own spe­cial cre­ations. The most we can hope for is a spe­cial edition.

Crisp’s Puri­tanism was part of the rea­son why he could never embrace Gay Lib (‘what do you want to be lib­er­ated from?’). He was recently sub­jected to a stern posthu­mous tick­ing off by Peter Tatchell, an orig­i­nal Gay Lib­ber, in The Inde­pen­dent news­pa­per prompted by what he sees as the ‘sani­tis­ing of Crisp’s igno­rant pompous homo­pho­bia’ in An Eng­lish­man in New York. Post-60s Crisp was appar­ently jeal­ous of a new gen­er­a­tion of out queers who were steal­ing his limelite: he wasn’t the only homo in town any more.

This broad­side was a tad harsh, and Tatchell some­times sounds as if he’s on the Army board that rejected Crisp (while accus­ing him of ‘homo­pho­bia’ threat­ens to make an absur­dity of the word). But I agree that the sequel does ‘sani­tise’ Crisp, though I think this a bad thing for dif­fer­ent rea­sons to Mr Tatchell. I also sus­pect there’s some truth to the accu­sa­tion of ‘jeal­ousy’, but I’d be inclined to put them in another form. Maybe Crisp didn’t want homo­sex­u­al­ity to be nor­malised because if it were it would undo his life’s work. Like­wise, I think Crisp would have loathed met­ro­sex­u­al­ity.

And as the sequel sug­gests, in one of its few insight­ful moments, one rea­son for Crisp’s fail­ure to answer the gay clar­ion call was sim­ply that he didn’t believe in causes, or the sub­ju­ga­tion of truth and dress-sense to expe­di­ency that inevitably goes with causes. Unless that cause is yourself.

Besides, like many ‘inverts’, Crisp was a great and roman­tic believer in Het­ero­sex­u­al­ity — the ideal kind, of course, rather than the kind that het­ero­sex­u­als actu­ally have to live, and which they exe­cute very, very badly.  He used to call het­ero­sex­u­als ‘real peo­ple’ (as opposed to ‘unreal’ homo­sex­u­als), but I sus­pect he thought he was the only real het­ero­sex­ual in town. And in a sense, he was.

I can’t leave you with­out point­ing out that while Quentin Crisp may have dis­missed Aids as a ‘fad’, Hurt­ian Crisp became more asso­ci­ated with ‘the gay plague’ than almost any­one save Rock Hud­son: lit­er­ally becom­ing the sound of the seri­ous­ness of the sub­ject. In 1975 het­ero Hurt plays the most famous stately homo in Eng­land. The suc­cess of this gets him to Hol­ly­wood, where four years later in 1979 he is cast in an even more glob­ally famous role — as ‘Patient Zero’ in Rid­ley Scott’s Alien: the first host for the ter­ri­fy­ing unknown organ­ism that enters his body by face-raping him and which pro­ceeds to kill-off in hor­ri­fy­ing, phallic-jackhammer fash­ion, his ship­mates. Two years before the first iden­ti­fied Aids cases in NY.

Eight years later, Hurt was the unfor­get­table fey-gravelly voice for those ter­ri­fy­ing tomb­stone ‘AIDS: Don’t Die of Igno­rance’ ads (com­plete with jack­ham­mers) that ran in heavy rota­tion on UK TV, urg­ing peo­ple to read the Gov­ern­ment leaflet pushed through their let­ter­box and prac­tise safe sex.

In other words, The Naked Civil Ser­vant had become a rubber-sheathed civil servant.

Old Spice: inter­view Crisp gave Andrew Bar­row of the Inde­pen­dent a year before his death.

Crispisms

In an expand­ing uni­verse, time is on the side of the out­cast. Those who once inhab­ited the sub­urbs of human con­tempt find that with­out chang­ing their address they even­tu­ally live in the metropolis.

It is not the sim­ple state­ment of facts that ush­ers in free­dom; it is the con­stant rep­e­ti­tion of them that has this lib­er­at­ing effect. Tol­er­ance is the result not of enlight­en­ment, but of boredom.

To know all is not to for­give all. It is to despise everybody.

You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open coun­try under fire, and drop into your grave.

I sim­ply haven’t the nerve to imag­ine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the plan­ets revolv­ing in their orbits and then sud­denly stops in order to give me a bicy­cle with three speeds.

It is explained that all rela­tion­ships require a lit­tle give and take. This is untrue. Any part­ner­ship demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn’t give enough.

The con­sum­ing desire of most human beings is delib­er­ately to place their entire life in the hands of some other per­son. For this pur­pose they fre­quently choose some­one who doesn’t even want the beastly thing.

The sim­plest com­ment on my book came from my bal­let teacher. She said, “I wish you hadn’t made every line funny.  It’s so depressing.”

Even a monot­o­nously unde­vi­at­ing path of self-examination does not nec­es­sar­ily lead to self-knowledge. I stum­ble towards my grave con­fused and hurt and hungry.

Some­one asked me why I thought sex was a sin. I said, “She’s jok­ing, isn’t she?” But they said, “No.” Doesn’t every­one know that sex is a sin? All plea­sure is a sin.