Simon Fanshawe Blog

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.

Public service dilemma of conscience versus bigotry
Simon Fanshawe
Wednesday February 21, 2007
Guardian

My friend Brendan is a doctor, and a Catholic. I have another friend, also a Catholic, called Seamus, who is an adoption social worker in a Catholic agency. They have both been wrestling with their consciences in the past few weeks.
The NHS grants Brendan an exemption from performing abortions on the basis of his beliefs. And all three of us think that is absolutely right. On the other hand, the government has denied Catholic agencies an exemption from providing adoption services to gay couples. And we all think that’s right too. So when is conscience really conscience, and when is it just cover for bigotry?

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.

Ian Fife is 62 and always wears a small sailing cap. It started, he says, because his girlfriend likes to sunbathe and, since he’s pretty thin on top, he was getting burned. He is a property journalist for South Africa’s Financial Mail, and one of the sharpest and most interesting property developers in South Africa.
His chosen area to acquire buildings is a district called Hillbrow, which sits above the city centre of Johannesburg. Nowadays it is almost always described in the news as “the drugs and crime capital of the city.” In the 50s and 60s, however, it was the most bohemian area in the country and the site of South Africa’s first gay bar.

Simon Fanshawe on Leroy, 19. Tall, good looking, Leroy has ‘mus-cols’. He tried dealing drugs but decided it was not ‘worth dying for’. Now he is doing a part-time training course for young volunteers in peer mediation and conflict resolution skills. Today Leroy believes in education but had to lie his way into college

Leroy is 19. He told me his story at a conference I was chairing about community conflict. After the opening, the delegates all went off to yak about the policy in hand and I went to meet four young people I was going to interview in the plenary about actually living the issue.

Good manners have become unfashionable. It’s thought authoritarian to point out that someone’s behaviour is bad, that there is a right and a wrong way to do things. Being called judgmental is an accusation. There were good reasons for this. Many of us used to be judged by who we were, not how we behaved.

But in the last century, we saw an explosion of personal freedom, which enriched our lives beyond measure. However, we have come to value individual freedom far above the collective good. As a result, we are in danger of having no manners at all.

He’s a Home Counties boy who flays the middle-classes from his base in Yorkshire, a shy man whose inner turmoil comes out in his plays, a comic writer of world renown - yet the critics are divided about his reputation. Simon Fanshawe on a very modern Molière

Alan Ayckbourn was explaining how his plays become hits to a man who runs amusement arcade slot machines in Scarborough . First, they’re tried out in the resort’s theatre, next they transfer to the West End, “then, if I’m lucky, they go to America or Holland or wherever. And each place they go, I get paid.”

“More Vodka, please” goes up the shout. The shoes have come off. The feet are tucked under the star on the sofa in the press office of the National Theatre. The umpteenth liquorice roll-up has been smoked and as it’s a Friday evening a second double seems entirely reasonable after a long week and only the second complete run-through of her new play, Battle Royal about the marriage between George IVth and Caroline of Brunswick which opens on December 9th. The PR obliges and the conversation about Greek tragedy, because of her huge success on Broadway earlier this year with Sophocles’ Elektra, and Caroline continues, punctuated by much amusement and the throatiest of laughs, somewhere between Tallulah Bankhead and a much rougher sandpaper.