Simon Fanshawe Blog

I met someone the other day. Well I say I met him. I didn’t meet him in any accepted human sense of the word. I “met” him online. On Gaydar. We “chatted”. No we didn’t. We typed. We had no eye contact, no tone of voice. Well, I suppose, he did have a picture (assuming just for a minute it was his picture) But did I hear his voice? No. Taste him? Smell him? I guess one day Gaydar might have a scratch and sniff app. But not yet. And Touch? No. The most sensual of all is the one so crucially missing. No hugs, no kisses, no hands. Just the unfulfilled landscape of one’s own expectations. In fact through all the useless hours I have spent on gaydar, I have been wondering exactly through which of my five senses I was experiencing any of these men. Gaydar is essentially an inhuman experience.

When I ring Shaun he is checking the fire alarms at the Tyneside Cyrenians building. He’s their maintenance man. Not so long ago, if I’d rung him he’d probably have been drunk. He drank to pass the time. He was never an alcoholic, just a chaotic drinker. “I could take it or leave it. But most of the time I’d take it”, he says ruefully now. His is a classic story. For no particular reason he “fell by the wayside’ after school and for seven years drank and got into trouble. His parents threw him out. He slept rough, lived in hostels and generally failed to get it together. Eventually he went back to live with his dad and one night, after drinking, crashed his dad’s car. His dad threw him out again. It was the wake-up all. He’s not sure why, but since then, with the exception of the odd pint on a Friday night, he’s been teetotal. Now with a partner, Lisa and two kids, Ben, 2, and little Shaun, 6 months, he says he hasn’t got time to drink. It’ll be three years in September that he’s been the maintenance man.

This journey started when I met Brian and Amy at a conference. The plan was that I interview them in front of an audience of support workers. It was a gathering brought together by Support Action Net, which is a framework for organisations working with vulnerable people that are dedicated to getting closer to their service users’ social and emotional aspirations. These organisations want to relate to the clients they work with through their sense of self; through their passions, interests and abilities rather than their problems.

Over the months I have written about many people whose resilience, intelligence, quirkiness or ordinariness tell us a story about public service – the best and the worst of it. At the core of all these tales is a belief that in working to improve people’s lives we owe it to each other to be as imaginative, as innovative, as humane and just as brilliant as we can. To engage with the world to make it a better place and, let’s face it, brighter, sunnier and more fun to be alive.

John Inman is dead. But Mr Humphries is alive and well in a number of surprising hearts. Mine included. “Are You being Served?” ran for a gratifyingly suggestive 69 episodes between 1972 and 1985. And many gay men hated it. We protested against it. But in the last ten years or so, reassured by retro and equipped with a political and social confidence we never had before, we embraced the mince and took John Inman to our hearts. One gay friend claims he has never shrieked “I’m free!” – even in his weakest moments. But he’s the only one. What changed? Society changed.

A contribution to a conference, called ‘A Mirror Up To Nature’, on censorship and freedom of speech organised by Equity 30th November 2006 at The National Theatre

I won’t speak for very long although I do notice that you have got these things that you always have at conferences, these feedback forms. I did do a conference recently and there was a pile of them as I left and I just thought, well I will have a look at what they have said about me. So I sneaked a peek and somebody had written next door to my contribution: ‘If I only had an hour left to live in my life I would want to spend it listening to a speech by Simon Fanshawe.’ There was an asterisk at the end and I turned to the continuation page and they had written “because it would seem like eternity”. So I won’t go on very long.