Best TV of 2014: No 6 – Grayson Perry: Who Are You?

Among all the excellent drama and comedy this year, one documentary series really stood out. In Grayson Perry: Who Are You?, Britain’s most agreeable potter travelled around the country discussing identity with people from a broad spectrum of backgrounds before interpreting his chosen subjects as works of art for display in the National Portrait Gallery. From disgraced MP Chris Huhne to TV presenter Rylan Clark to a group of Belfast Loyalists, via a short stay with some members of the Jesus Army, he studied them like an anthropologist, but also seemed to come to each with a fully open mind.

In a television landscape dominated by Simon Cowell and various poor imitations, Perry is the antidote. In this show, as in his 2012 series All In the Best Possible Taste, he took a genuine not-just-for-telly interest in his subjects, getting to know them and reserving judgment until he’d spent time with them. And it was neither a “You’re fired” judgment or all-out adoration that went into each of the resulting portraits, although he was often blunt about his reservations. Did the plus-size women he sculpted really acknowledge the health problems associated with being “very, very fat”? Did the deaf couple who celebrated when they found out their eldest daughter was also deaf accept the anger evident behind their passionate cleaving to deaf culture? And even when, as the medium demands, he did have to declare what he thought of each subject, his judgment came from a place of being judged himself, as a transvestite.

His choice of subjects threw up some genuinely surprising and heartfelt moments. His time with Jazz, a young man who was born a girl, and his mum was so incredibly intimate it almost felt like intrusion, but Perry somehow removes that tabloid element, despite the presence of cameras. Many were talking for days afterwards about his sitting with married couple Christopher and Veronica Devas, who are living with the slow decay of his Alzheimer’s. Perry described the effect on both of their identities as a “random bombing raid on the city that makes up our self”. He’s got insight, he’s got poetry. It’s so much more than you usually get from modern television.

At the moment, the great thinkers of TV can be counted on one hand. Where our primetime schedules used to bulge with James Burkes, David Attenboroughs and Desmond Morrises, this kind of dangerously original thinking is rarely judged suitable for popular TV audience consumption.

Who Are You? was like watching (almost) live ruminating from inside Perry’s head. The thoughts occurred, he’d lip-chew, uncertain as to whether he’d chosen the right word, then he’d move on to some quietly profound conclusion. It was restrained of the producers not to constantly apply a lightbulb graphic above his head, so blatant was the on-air thinking at points. There was something incredibly honest about it, for all of TV’s constructs, the editing process and the multiple takes. You get the feeling that with Perry, what you see is what you get. Without gushing like an emotional hydrant, his responses always seem honest, considered. He’s either the most brilliant communicator on television at the moment or a terrific con man. I’d vote for the former. Imagine a Grayson Perry chat show.