At last, boring lesbians

Whenever a lesbian appears on British TV, you can pretty much assume two things:

1. Andrew Davies has some involvement: he specialises in 'sexing up' drama, and told friends that Tipping the Velvet would be on every lesbian's Christmas present list.
2. Said lesbians will be sent up from the Sad Heterosexual Male Fantasy department, i.e. women more used to posing in Nuts magazine faking it for the dads rather than merely being lesbian having rounded lives of their own.

Those days are over. We are in a new world, in which it's OK to be a boring lesbian who doesn't (or hardly ever) cavorts titillatingly for men who forgot to switch off the TV after Top Gear.

How do I know this? Because I sat through The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister last night. I'd vaguely heard of Lister before - she was an early 19th-century Yorkshire landed aristo and mining entrepreneur who wrote a 4 million word diary detailing her (surprisingly active and semi-open) lesbian love life, her social life and her business dealings, with the juicier bits in code.

The BBC has triumphed, if it was actually attempting to normalise lesbianism by making it boring. The acting was, of course, magnificent, as it always is in Period Drama. Yet the nuances, the complications, the thrills and the disasters of this woman's life were rendered dull by omission. Even with 90 minutes to play with, all these things were communicated by the occasional frown and overcast sky (good in their own way, but there was just so much shoehorning of facts into didactic dialogue rushed through in a second). All men were, of course, dull, evil or boorish (oh, OK, I see their point). It was an identikit Period Drama with a touch of soap opera, which just happened to be about a Daughter of Bilitis.

Weirdly, the following programme, a documentary (Revealing Anne Lister) featuring Sue Perkins tracing Lister's life, was far more dramatic (!), interesting and informative, despite being half an hour shorter.

I'm a bit wary of the casting - Perkins is gay, so she'll do - but she is always intelligent and empathetic. She drew on the work of a number of formidably informed and down-to-earth academics and local historians to produce a dual narrative: a personal story in which Lister alternates between appalling, selfish and reactionary, and proud, strong, modern heroine, and a much wider cultural history taking in the change between landed aristocracy and industrial dynasties, the nature of female friendship, Northern social hierarchies and much much more. Watch that, then watch the dramatisation.

PS. Lister's life was pretty short on amusement - between the bouts of lovemaking, she abandoned lovers to the madhouse, fought vicious turf-wars with rival industrialists and chased heiresses in a coldly predatory manner (she's a Thatcherite). So when the misery overwhelms you while watching the drama, remember that Anne Lister and nasty Mr Rawton are played by Maxine Peake and Dean Kelly, who were lovers Veronica and Kev in Manc scum drama Shameless.