Mary Beard’s Forbidden Art, review: an adventure into the absurd and the downright disgusting

It’s hard to know whether or not one should recommend an episode of a TV programme that features an unexpurgated screening of Martin Creed’s Sick Film – a film of people being sick.

For what it’s worth I gagged and looked away. Personally, I’d prefer to watch Question Time 2015-2021, the Peter Jackson cut, than see that again.

That said, however, Sick Film and its self-explanatory companion piece S--t Film did perfectly illustrate the point presenter Mary Beard was trying to make in this first episode of her otherwise excellent new series, Mary Beard’s Forbidden Art (BBC Two). The point was that some art has always been off limits to someone somewhere; one person’s beyond the pale is another’s Sunflowers.

The Romans, Beard’s specialist subject, had no problem with statues of the god Pan having explicit sex with a she-goat (which, as Pan is half-goat himself, takes some unpicking). So maybe it’s just we 21st-century prudes who can’t deal with watching someone depositing a turd and walking off.

There have been several series these last few months about supposed taboos, such as breastfeeding your boyfriend or having sex with a flatbed scanner (I made that last one up but it’s bound to be a thing somewhere). Mainly they’ve been to do with how one person’s obscenity is another’s normality, and how they’re all thriving in the cultural petri dish that is the Internet.

Few of these series have worked, however, because the presenters and/or voice-overs have adopted the very British pose of giggling embarrassment.

By contrast Beard struck just the right tone, bringing erudition but not pretentiousness to about as reasonable a discussion as you could hope for of what is “forbidden” and why, and how, it changes across the centuries. She also took the time to note that who decides who sees what – be it dead bodies decaying, menstruation and miscarriages or the aforementioned puking and pooing – has historically been the preserve of the posh and the professors, and generally male ones at that.

With that in mind, Beard was the perfect compere, neither high-brow or low-brow but a sort of cheery, all-knowing all-brow. The only strange omission was that her definition of “art” excluded popular film and television.

I am certain that the hotel manager emptying his bowels into a suitcase in The White Lotus last year stirred up much more debate about what should and shouldn’t be shown than a Martin Creed video. Not that I’m recommending you look up either of them - not until your dinner has settled, at least.