You read it in New Directions first!
This column – second to none in its admiration of ‘Footballers’ Wives’ (if you think we have got the apostrophe wrong, please contact Lynne Truss directly at Profile Books, 58A Hatton Garden, EC1N 8LX) – was the first to demand a gay team member to liven the proceedings. The good news is that the programme is to return; and, to the plaudits of all lovers of true parody, and to the great satisfaction of all readers of this magazine, it is to include a bi-sexual member of the team!
Why so belatedly, readers may well ask?
The Anglican Communion (where reality displaced fiction long ago, and where satire is redundant) has already appointed its bi-sexual bishop. A gay boy-friend among the footballers’ wives will be no where near such fun as a gay ‘spouse’ among the bishops’ wives at Lambeth 2008. Just picture those steep learning curves!
As a bi-sexual colleague joins Kyle and Jason in the sexual merry-go-round, we can expect some surprises. Will Jason make contact with his female side? Will Kyle abandon Chardonnay in favour of a more robust grape type, exchanging the full bodied white for the more muscular red – a broad-shouldered Californian Zinfandel, for example, or a tight-hipped Spanish Tempranillo? We can only guess.
And what of the Bishops of the Anglican Communion, now that the cork is out of the bottle? Can we expect the chairmen of Boards of Social Responsibility to find their true selves, and wall-flower suffragans to assert their true identity? Who can tell?
What is certain is that the real aim of the Anglican revisionists is to boldly go where television programmers have gone before. Like them, they want to be in the forefront of the sexual revolution, not merely to follow it. Soon there will be as many female deans in the Church of England as there are female detectives and pathologists on the BBC.
And why not? Like the ciabattati of the media, the middle managers of the Church of England long to set the agenda rather than to fall victim to it. That both are pathetically behind the beat is neither here nor there – at least to them.
GK