Episode 3 How to Be Bohemian with Victoria Coren Mitchell

This programme contains strong language.

In this series, I've been taking a walk round the mythical,

mind-expanding and morally ambiguous land of Bohemia.

Back in the 19th and early 20th centuries,

it was an exclusive destination,

home to cliques of artists, agents provocateurs and sexual adventurers

who threw caution, convention and often their underwear to the winds.

But that's the past. It's vintage, it's shabby chic.

This time, I'm hurtling into the modern age

and quizzing contemporary contenders for the title "Bohemian".

Aaaargh! Aaaaargh! No!

A Bohemian is not mediocre. You're not average.

You're not medium.

I do have a propensity for taking my clothes off.

That was erotic, and we both starting laughing...

And we both came at the same time.

It was one of the best screws I've ever had.

To be honest, I've never met anybody as normal as me.

In the last 60 years, the idea of Bohemia has been

increasingly popularised...

..with some weird results.

"Top five world's best Bohemian cities."

Guess what's number one?

No, you're wrong. It's Kathmandu in Nepal.

So what does it mean,

if anything, to be a Bohemian in post-war Britain?

Are these men and women still an elite, or has Bohemia spread

so far and wide it's now everywhere?

Are Bohemians still the torch bearers

for an alternative lifestyle?

Or have money and marketing polluted

any purity Bohemianism might ever have had?

# I gave you the warning

# But you never heeded it... #

THUNDER AND RAIN

SLINKY JAZZ MUSIC

The story of Bohemia since the Second World War is reflected in

the changing fortunes of one small area of London's West End.

Soho.

In the 1950s, at clubs like the Colony Room

and the Caves de France, a hive of radicals, libertines,

all-day drinkers and artists clustered together.

Since the 19th century, the most prominent citizens of Bohemia

had almost always been artists.

Now, a painter emerged here

whose work appeared to push Bohemia's boundaries

even further than his predecessors.

Francis Bacon.

Bacon's Bohemia was part dark and dangerous,

part top-end and glamorous. He was equally happy at home with gangsters

and aristocrats, living, as he said, "between the gutter and the Ritz".

His late-night drinking bouts in Soho spilled over

into obsessive casino gambling,

but that's true of us all.

What did he get up to apart from that respectable pastime?

Well, he was a sexual masochist who enjoyed being beaten up,

and he favoured boyfriends with shady pasts,

in one case having a seven-year relationship with a man he met

when the fellow broke into his studio to burgle it.

A bit like speed dating, only slightly less socially awkward.

Bohemian artists had flouted moral conventions well before the 1950s.

But Bacon's dark and controversial art

stripped the Bohemian lifestyles he portrayed of any romance.

Homosexual sex was illegal...

..yet one canvas appeared to spy on two men in the act.

Another showed a sprawling figure with a syringe.

Bacon's lifestyle would certainly be definable as textbook Bohemian.

And I think the way in which he expresses that in his art is...

I mean, it's very clear, it seems very direct.

It comes absolutely to a head with the famous dark Triptychs,

painted when his lover George Dyer died

on the eve of his great exhibition in the Grand Palais in Paris in '71.

George Dyer was found dead in the bathroom of the hotel.

Bacon represents a very important point in art,

at which art seems deliberately to have become uncomfortable,

that if art was too likeable,

then the artist wasn't really doing it right.

Bacon's brazen exposure of the dark corners of his own life

reinforced the idea of the unconstrained Bohemian artist

for a new generation.

I said, "I'm not one of the Realists",

I said, "I'm an Impressionist!"

Pop culture even picked up the cliche to play it for laughs.

LAUGHTER

Well, metaphysically, I thought it was really quite solipsistic.

In the film The Rebel from 1961,

Tony Hancock relished the role of the wannabe artist,

studiously striking the pose of the pretentious creative,

and adopting the most outre abstract style.

JAZZ MUSIC

MUSIC ENDS

Finished. Marvellous.

That's worth 2,000 quid of anybody's money, that is!

JAZZ MUSIC

Sent up or straight,

this Bohemian stereotype is one many artists

still find it hard either to reject or fully embrace.

Maggi Hambling is one of Britain's most celebrated

and outspoken artists.

As a student, she knew Francis Bacon

and drank in Soho haunts like the Colony Room.

Now a revered painter and sculptor, one of her best-known works

is the public statue of Bohemian pin-up, Oscar Wilde.

I came up from Suffolk to art school in London in the '60s.

They encouraged one to be oneself.

And so I dressed up in a full length, black leather coat,

I dyed my hair crimson,

and wore my mother's fox fur around my neck,

and I looked like the keeper of a brothel,

and the other girls in the first year came to me for advice

on contraception,

but I hadn't a clue what I told them because I hadn't a clue myself!

A lot of people would say that you're a Bohemian,

and you tick an awful lot of the boxes.

Some of your work's been controversial,

you're a freedom fighter in your personal life

and your feeling about what people should be allowed to do.

You're wearing an Yves Saint Laurent shirt covered in paint.

What do you think the word Bohemian means?

What is a Bohemian?

Well, someone who lives outside the rules, I think.

Someone who makes their own rules.

Somebody who has no truck with other people's idea of how to live.

You know, artists starving in garrets,

Bacon getting drunk in the Colony, Quentin Crisp...

People with their own way of living.

Is smoking Bohemian?

I don't know, either one smokes or one doesn't.

You see, this political correctness, of which there was none in Soho,

and personally, I wouldn't go along with it.

You know, in Soho at the Colony or something,

people were what nowadays would probably be called

extremely rude to each other.

I mean, they said what they thought, said what they felt.

In her art, Hambling has observed noted Bohemians up-close,

amongst them her lover Henrietta Moraes,

muse and model to Bacon and dubbed by some the Queen of Bohemia.

Yet, like her 19th and 20th-century predecessors,

Hambling's own immersion in this world has come at a cost.

Do you feel the pressure of people being interested in how you live,

and looking to you for a sort of life example of freedom?

Would you rather that they just looked at the work

-and had no interest in who made it?

-Absolutely.

And you don't think the artist has a sort of responsibility in a way

to show us how to live truthfully or freely?

Well, one is... You know, as an artist,

one is a seeker after the truth in one's work, OK?

And as you also happen to be a human being, I suppose, you know,

the seeker of the truth, living truthfully,

living openly as you choose to live, I suppose that goes alongside,

but, I mean, there is a lot of mythology goes on.

I mean, for Bacon, if he were here today, I'm sure

he would be saying that his work was the thing,

and the rest was the rest, and I think it's the same

for any artist who's committed to this madness

of trying to make things.

Maggi Hambling is clear where she stands.

But historically, many Bohemians deliberately courted comment.

APPLAUSE

How do other contemporary artists feel about the expectations

of the art crowd?

Well, it's about time a transvestite potter won the Turner Prize.

LAUGHTER

Erm... Mainly my lover...

One that's widely known for his distinctive autobiographical work

and arresting alter ego is Grayson Perry.

Do you think the idea that the artist should look like an artist

has become so engrained that

if you turn up in ordinary men's clothes people are disappointed?

I do feel that sometimes.

But I was a transvestite before I was an artist,

and I think the problem is, with a lot of around the artist's role

and the idea of Bohemian-ness, is how self-conscious it is.

I've actually heard an artist say, "Oh, yeah, we'd better get drunk now

"because that's what they're expecting of us."

You know, especially if there's a lot of money in the room.

Access to artists is often the thing that rich collectors

or people want, it's because they somehow feel that there'll be

some kind of creative energy that will rub off on them or something.

When people come to my studio,

I still feel obliged somehow that my studio should somehow

look like a studio and be all kind of messy and ongoing,

when in fact, you know, it's much better if it's more organised.

THEY LAUGH

Do younger artists feel the same weight of expectation?

Are they keen to play the Bohemian part?

It kind of looks halfway between a vagina and a cock.

And I quite like that.

This is Camberwell College of Arts, where Maggi Hambling once studied.

Now, it's nurturing a new generation of British painters and sculptors.

Lewis Henderson, Beth Lloyd

and Phoebe Mulrooney are in the final year of a BA in Painting.

Ever since the first Bohemians, and probably before,

people have looked to artists to live in a different way,

to dress in a different way, to have different hair,

to have freer ideas and stronger opinions.

Do you think that's still true?

Do you think the artist is still an outsider figure?

I think artists are the antennae of the race.

They're connected, they're fully, like...

They're the most important thing.

Being an artist, like, from the clothes you wear,

from the way you walk, you make it up, you do it yourself,

you invent your own language.

The first Bohemians, though, the original Paris Bohemians

of the 19th century, they were literally starving for their art.

If I offered you the Bohemian deal,

if I said you can be an artist your whole life,

but you'll never sell a painting, you'll never be rich, would you say,

"Then I won't bother being an artist, I'll go and get a job?"

No, because it's something that you're passionate about.

That's the thing with art.

If you're not excited or interested in the topic that you're...

making paintings, sculptures or installations from,

then it will show and it won't work as a piece

of art, it won't be art, it will be, erm...

I don't know, a boring job.

How much do you care if people like your stuff? How much are you

thinking, "Oh, I should probably make that a bit more accessible?"

I don't care. I have no... I don't care what anyone thinks.

When I paint, I am turning my life into something.

You know, I don't care about making money

and I don't care if someone hates it,

because this is what I do, I'm a painter.

It seems that, like their 19th-century predecessors,

these young creatives still believe in "art for its own sake."

But do they also share the attraction to the hedonistic life?

One image of the Bohemian of the past,

particularly in the modern era of painting,

is of the hard-drinking, hard-partying person.

Is there a pressure to have a bit of that in your lives?

I think people just love the myth of the artist

and they like to project it upon my work to give it some added value,

but, you know, it's rubbish. It's rubbish, you know?

Are you the artist of a perpetual hangover?

No, you're not. It doesn't matter.

But then again, a lot of things are accepted nowadays.

So, a lot with, like, sexuality or religion or...

-Well.

-So...

-That is the big question.

Some people would say Bohemia has won. Everything's fine now.

You can have whatever sex you want with whoever you like,

you can say whatever you want, you can live however you want.

Do you think that's true? Do you think...?

-We can live however we want to live?

-Yeah.

Well, no. Because of the amount of money it costs to live,

the majority of people can't afford rent,

and I think actually becoming an artist as a career is very unlikely.

Yeah, but I think maybe that's what being a Bohemian is,

because, like, it's not conforming to the idea that you have to have,

like, a career and make money from what you do.

A lot of people just choose to conform,

and from a conformed situation, it's very, very difficult

to make things, make creative things,

and, like, it's when someone breaks that mould which is really exciting.

So, here are some young people

still willing to flip materialism the finger.

And yet, far from being "for its own sake",

most art today has been co-opted

into the much vaunted creative economy.

It's thought about in terms of money, jobs, culture, exports,

the cornerstones of Britain PLC.

Francis Bacon is now much more likely to be discussed

as a sort of commodity that raises stratospheric prices at auction

than a painter who committed unpalatable truths to canvass.

SONG: "Please Don't Touch by Johnny Kidd & The Pirates

# Well, don't you touch me, baby I'm shaking so much

# Well, there ain't no other woman that makes feel this way... #

Back in the '50s and '60s, along with Bacon's naked grappling men

and syringes, a whole new type of outsider art was emerging,

that would also turn into a massive money-spinner,

but was initially a shocking assault on mainstream culture and values.

# Shake so much... #

SCREAMING

Rock and roll was a primal scream

from rebellious, testosterone-fuelled young men.

They were the new Bohemians.

One of the things that made them so new,

apart from their audacious sounds, is that they came from

and were talking to a predominantly working class culture.

Few people would have ever invest in oil paintings.

Everyone could afford a bit of vinyl.

# Please don't touch

# I shake so much... #

Stylish, sexy and now within reach,

this new way of life had a massive appeal to the nation's youth.

# I shake so much... #

And just like the artists before them,

this latest counter culture was drawn to Soho.

This is an article from the Daily Mirror in 1957,

The Teenagers Of Soho, and it's describing a new breed of person

flooding into this rather seedy Bohemian area.

"These new after-dark citizens of Soho are typists, nurses,

"factory workers. They are students, dreamers, bank clerks."

Why are they here? Why have they come to Soho?

They've come to listen to rock and roll music,

to hang out in bars. They're not necessarily Bohemians themselves.

"Josephine Osmond, 17, a hairdresser from Southend, told us:

'I like to drop in from work with a girlfriend.

'It's a cheap night out and I leave to be home by 11 o'clock.

'I don't come here for boyfriends'."

That's a respectable person with a job, that's not a Bohemian,

but they're consumers of Bohemia.

They're following in the footsteps of these new stars,

pop stars, they're hanging out in bars, they're listening to music,

and this is the point

where Bohemianism starts to be democratised.

It's reaching a new and much bigger audience.

GIRLS SCREAM

SONG: Good Times Bad Times by Led Zeppelin

# In the days of my youth

# I was told what it means to be a man...#

In the '60s, it seems like people stopped looking to visual artists

to be the proponents of the avant garde, the leaders of youth.

The baby boom massively expands Bohemia.

All of the kind of Bohemian lifestyles of those '60s

rock gods and pop stars,

they were kind of emulated by their fans and there was a slackening

of cultural convention around clothing and hair styles

and how you decorated your house.

You know, my parents were too old. They were post-First War generation.

But I remember them registering the impact of the social

and cultural revolutions of the '60s. I think we all did.

So there's a moment when Bohemia becomes kind of mainstream.

ELECTRIC GUITAR RIFF

A long way from Soho, in the Salford of the '60s, a young teenager

was growing up hungry for the new Bohemian fashions and ideas.

What sort of messages were you getting from the culture

that, for example, your father wouldn't have had?

Well, my dad didn't have any casual clothes.

You know, he spent his life in a suit, really.

He didn't have any casual clothes at all.

There was no leisurewear before 1959.

You couldn't get any shirt other than white.

And, other than the style, what message were you,

as a '60s teenager, getting from musicians

about how you should be living?

If you look at Keith Richards, you know,

he's never lived an ordinary person's life.

He's lived the life of a king.

He did what he wanted.

Every guy wants to live like that.

You know, like the Stones, you know, going around in a gang,

you know what I mean?

Like when they were living in Edith Grove

in a kind of beatnik, communal mode.

You know, where nobody tidied up

and, you know, it's much nicer

than being conscripted into the armed forces.

MUSIC: The Look of Love by Dusty Springfield

Bohemianism's move beyond an arty clique to the youthful masses

owed much to rock and roll,

but surely even more to the much cited '60s sexual revolution.

Fancy-free Bohemians had always acted on their appetites,

but now, at least seemingly,

everyone was at it.

I think, now that people aren't sort of bound by things like marriage,

you get much more sort of real relationships with people.

People don't have this incredible possession thing about each other.

A woman can approach a man on a completely level sexual basis,

because she's not going to get pregnant.

There's so many people to love.

I mean, you can't just love exclusively one person.

You can't just pick one and love them.

Marriage and moral affairs

are just reverting back to the Stone Age more or less, isn't it?

Have any woman you want, when you want.

One woman who embraced these new opportunities was Molly Parkin.

When she first arrived in London in 1949,

she was a wide-eyed Welsh chapel girl,

but, by the '60s, now a painter and fashion editor,

she was divorced and embarking on a sexual odyssey

with, as she puts it, countless lovers.

You see, as the artist, you can do whatever you like,

because that's me and I was 73 and he was 23,

and that's my final intercourse, really, with this chap.

I was with friends and this absolutely, utterly gorgeous surfer

from Melbourne came up and he started talking to me.

He said, "You're gorgeous." He said, "Any chance?"

And I said, "Any chance of what?"

And, so he said, "Well, any chance of a fuck?"

I said, "Excuse me," and I went to say, "This has got to..."

And he pushed his tongue right in.

We ended up doing it in the gents' lavvy,

and then the Mexican cleaner came

and pushed his mop underneath the door.

Was that erotic?

And that was erotic and we both died laughing.

We both came at the same time.

It was one of the best screws I've ever had.

In the 1960s, when it was quite a revolutionary time

in terms of everyone felt liberated to have their hair differently,

to dress differently, to have more sex than they'd had before,

did you still feel the forces of convention?

No, because I moved in a racy, fast

and gloriously free environment

and there was freedom. It was sexual freedom, especially for women,

because the pill was there

and women and girls were now having sex lives like men had always had,

and that was a glorious atmosphere to be in.

I read in the paper recently

-that you had had sex with a whole Welsh rugby team.

-Yes.

-And my question there is really one of...

-Two of them, actually.

-Just two of them?

-Two teams.

-Oh, two teams.

-Emotionally speaking...

-Yes.

..I'm terribly bourgeois.

My awful disease is - if I go to bed with somebody,

I rather fall in love with them. Not always in that order.

But were you free from that?

No. There's a lot of love in that bed.

Every single one, with their shiny brown eyes and their black hair

and the sweetness of their smiles,

and the... Just it was just so affectionate.

It's only another bit of the body going in a different part, isn't it?

It's like holding your arms out and putting them round a person.

That's how I see it.

It's no big deal one way or the other,

and, in the Bohemian world, you know, the act of sex, sexual act,

is just a friendly gesture like shaking hands.

What about when you're in a relationship? When you're married?

The Bohemians that we've looked at of the past,

William Morris, some of the Bloomsbury Groups,

-they wanted open relationships...

-I don't believe in that.

I think that, if you're married, you should just be with the person.

-Oh, that's interesting, so...

-But, at the same time, having said that,

with the second husband, when we went to New York

and lived in the Chelsea Hotel,

it was me who organised the orgies there,

but we did hold hands all the way through...

-Oh, you and your husband?

-..and loved.

It was OK to take part in an orgy if you were holding hands together

-as a sign of closeness?

-Yes.

We did it together, as it were.

Did you not feel jealousy, though?

No, I'm not a big one for jealousy, darling.

Why would I be jealous when I've got so much going for me?

What's to be jealous of?

Well, I think that would be my worry.

I'm certainly delighted

for everybody to have sex with everybody,

but when I see stories about the open marriages and the lovers,

I think, "That doesn't seem very gypsy

"to not mind, to not get angry and passionate and jealous."

-It seems a bit...

-Yeah, but you might have your own amazing lover.

Having said that, of course, I did kick my first husband out

when I discovered his infidelity.

So was it the deceit? Was that the problem?

So you wouldn't mind your husband taking part in an orgy

if you were there and you were doing that together?

Yeah, if we were doing everything together.

But, I mean, I can't think of a single person

who wouldn't have loved all of those sexual experiences that I'd had.

I didn't have a shred of guilt and why would I?

I was spreading affection and love, wasn't I?

And receiving it back, as well, in bucket loads.

MUSIC: The Look of Love by Dusty Springfield

Molly's experiences may have been wholly positive,

but it soon became clear that the new Bohemian sexual freedoms

could also give carte blanche to old-fashioned sexual exploitation.

It was a situation ripe for satire.

SITAR MUSIC PLAYS

Malcolm Bradbury's comic novel The History Man, and its BBC adaptation,

introduced a wide audience

to the free-loving, pot-smoking academic Howard Kirk,

outwardly a model progressive Bohemian.

-How are you doing?

-Oh, fine.

But, as played by the swaggering Antony Sher,

Kirk is revealed as a sexual predator

trying it on with students and colleagues alike.

You're very attractive.

I think you deserve serious attention.

Yes, I gathered you'd been researching in the sexual field.

No, that's all finished and published.

No, this would be purely for pleasure.

Whose?

The History Man depicted a dark side to the sexual revolution.

But that wasn't the only way it satirised Bohemia's 1970s expansion.

"There are Bohemians on every street corner,"

its author Malcolm Bradbury noted.

These were the people who shopped at Habitat and boiled brown rice.

Bohemia was threatening to become

a tame, aspirational, middle-class lifestyle choice.

Yet, traditionally, Bohemians had shocked the bourgeoisie.

Aubrey Beardsley's risque illustrations

provoked Victorian polite society.

Eric Gill made a disturbing fusion of sex with sacred subjects,

and a new crop of Bohemians were about to horrify middle England

in a whole new way.

MUSIC: Incendiary Device by Johnny Moped

Punk was a kind of very brutal, sparse kind of Bohemianism.

It wasn't, like, all tasselled silk and opium.

It was more kind of, you know, sniffing glue and old school shirt.

The punks were nihilist Bohemians.

They didn't propose anything.

They were kind of honest Bohemians in a way.

Their art was anti-art, their clothing was anti-clothing.

Even their kind of drug taking was kind of crap drugs

and kind of anti-intoxication intoxication.

MUSIC: Pretty Vacant by Sex Pistols

I was there at the beginning.

I was there at the Sex Pistols' first ever gig,

where they emptied the room in St Martin's.

TV and restaurant critic AA Gill remembers punk

from his art school days.

The one thing you know about Bohemians

is that they're aggressive, they're difficult, they're angry,

they're existentialist,

and that existential, Camus-like personal fury at the world,

the sense that... what I want is the most important,

the only truth is to be absolutely honest and selfish to yourself.

I mean, that was punk,

except it was more about safety pins and ripped trousers.

It was very violent, as well.

I do... I remember there was an awful lot of people...

I spent a lot of time in accident and emergency

holding friends together.

This paper is boring, mindless and mean.

It's full of pornography. The kind that's clean.

Punk was an unexpected offshoot of Bohemia.

Not so poetry.

The two combined in the form of John Cooper Clarke,

whose own creative quest led him, in the 1970s,

to the career of performance poet.

Soon, he was opening for the Sex Pistols.

Are you embarrassed about being a poet?

Not really, but, I mean,

people can get entirely the wrong impression, can't they?

Poet - it's a fella that skips around

with a butterfly net, isn't it?

Like a death at a birthday party,

you ruin all the fun.

Like a sucked and spat out Smartie,

you're no use to anyone.

You're a young man, you're leaving school, you're thinking what to do,

I mean, how could you possibly think that poetry

was a viable career option?

Yeah, whoever thought, "I need money, quick.

"I know, I'll write poetry."

The worst news I ever got at school was -

"These are the best days of your life."

I thought, "Crikey, I'll open a vein now."

I hated every second of it at school, you know,

so to hear that, it's a real downer.

So I think I sort of, ever since then, I must have, at some point,

said, "I ain't going to wind up like that.

"I'm going to plough my own furrow even if it's a lonely business."

The pest pulled up, propped his push-bike at a pillar box,

pulled his 'peen, paused at a post and pissed.

In the 1980s, Cooper Clarke took a further step

away from the mainstream.

This particular part of the planet...

Earlier Bohemians had dosed themselves

with laudanum, absinthe or cocaine.

He took heroin and eventually developed a full-blown addiction.

..pull up and peruse the problem while pickpockets picked pockets...

Substance abuse has been a big theme in Bohemia,

if abuse is the right word, which it might not be.

Do you think that that sort of experiment aids creativity?

-Stifles it?

-No, I just think, for some reason that I don't know,

it comes with the territory.

There's not many artists that didn't have a drink.

When you're kind of relying on the intuitive part of yourself

to kind of work,

there's got to be a kind of clocking-off point.

You know, around tea time.

Was it like that for you, though? I mean, when you were a junkie,

was it, "Right, clock off," or did they go together?

Oh, no, that's a... All bets are off with that shit.

I'm afraid the old poetry lark got put on the back burner

for a decade or so.

What about getting older? Do you still feel like a Bohemian today?

To me, I'm the last normal guy alive,

so, in that, yeah, I do feel conversely a bit, yeah, Bohemian.

Out of step.

Out of step because I come from...

To me a Bohemian world is where you can...

If you think it, you can say it, and you can think what you like.

MUSIC: Don't Leave Me This Way by The Communards

Elsewhere in the Bohemian world, saying and doing what they liked

were joyous, confrontational,

out-and-proud pop band The Communards.

# Don't leave me this way

# I can't survive

# I can't stay alive... #

The keyboardist was Richard Coles.

His recent autobiography details a past life of drugs and casual sex.

But in 2005, he was ordained as a priest into the Church of England

and is now vicar at St Mary the Virgin in Finedon near Peterborough.

If homosexuality had been, in your teenage years, more "normal",

more generally out, if marriage had been a thing, all of that,

do you think you would have gone to London and become a pop star?

No. I think by nature I'm a timid person

and I think I probably would have been Mr Chips,

if homosexuality hadn't intervened...

Though that's perhaps assuming things about Mr Chips

which it's not safe to do, but nevertheless!

I think I am by nature, if I can say that, quite a conventional person,

but homosexuality kind of rescued me from that.

When I arrived in London in 1980

and met Jimmy Somerville and various other people,

we absolutely celebrated throwing off

the constraints of heterosexism

and the patriarchy, all that kind of stuff.

And so to arrive in a place where all of a sudden

you can make up your own life is this extraordinary liberation.

I think some are born Bohemian,

and some have Bohemianism thrust upon them,

and I think I had Bohemianism thrust upon me

and even at my most Bohemian,

there was always a vicar struggling to get out, I think.

See, now, I think you're absolutely at your core a Bohemian

because obviously in the '80s

you were living in the traditional Bohemian way,

you're taking lots of drugs,

you're having lots of sex and so on, as people understand it,

but you then entered the church and that's not just finding God,

that's really embracing discipline after chaos, being a minister.

But you've just exploded that by writing a book

in which you tell everyone that you went dogging,

did a load of Charlie, and pretended to have AIDS.

-Yeah.

-I mean, if that doesn't epater la bourgeoisie, what does?

Oh, well, it would be a mistake to think the church is a bourgeois...

a sort of crucible of bourgeois convention, quite the opposite.

The church is fundamentally and always has been,

in spite of appearances,

a profoundly radical countercultural world-challenging organisation.

I think the reason why I'm in the church now

is because I never could, perhaps it's true, never could abandon

that captivation to Bohemianism and indeed to radicalism.

Well, I think, I mean, even in a much bigger way, it strikes me

that particularly in the performing, artistic world,

but also more generally,

atheism has become such a boring kneejerk orthodoxy

that being a believer is already a sign of free thinking.

I always feel a bit sorry for match-ready atheists,

if I can put it that way, because it's great to grow up

thinking that you represent the counterculture.

Then you find out that you've become mainstream and

it's more people like me who perhaps represent the counterculture.

# Ahhhh... Baby!

# My heart is full of love and desire for you... #

Richard and his colleagues used shock to confront prejudice.

Have attitudes changed in 25 years?

Are the same tactics necessary now?

You often hear people say that in this day and age

with everything online in our permissive, liberal society,

no-one's shocked by anything any more - we're unshockable.

But if that's true, why is the online world

in a constant state of outrage?

It's like the internet is a third porn, a third corpses

and a third blue-haired matrons going, "Ooh, you can't say that.

"He should be fired!"

Why are the tabloids constantly campaigning for politicians

to apologise, and usually succeeding?

If we're actually more shockable than ever,

is it the role of the dutiful Bohemian to press those buttons?

For some, the answer's a resounding yes.

These days, Soho rental prices have shunted the most risque clubs

and cabaret acts out to more distant parts of town.

So I've come to East London to watch some rather extraordinary drag acts.

First up is a performer billed as

The Virgin Mary, aka Virgin Xtravaganzah.

# Se-e-e-e-eriously-y-y-y! #

CHEERING

Have you ever felt disapproved of?

My husband's family is Mormon,

so this is probably...

not what they really wanted their son... But nothing's ever been said.

Homophobia's different though.

Walking down the street in a face full of make-up,

I feel a lot of disapproval, on a regular basis.

If you're walking down the street in make-up

-and you sense people's disapproval...

-Yeah.

..does any part of you think,

"Oh, I wish I was wearing a boring shirt and trousers,"

or do you think, "Screw you, I'm putting on more?"

Um...the latter.

Absolutely, because I feel that it's good for people to see things

that is not something they see every single day.

I feel it's kind of part of being a drag queen to not take cabs

all the time.

But to actually ride public transport

because this stuff happens, and it's good that it happens.

Wahhhhhh!

Do you like my look?

-Do you like my look?! CROWD:

-You look like a girl!

Another drag artist who has doled out shock in various guises

is Jonny Woo.

Whoo! Whoo!

HE SCREAMS

# Oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah... # Come on, sway!

Jonny is known as the ringmaster of Shoreditch and tonight,

donning one of his more conservative outfits, he's the headline act.

Give us a kiss, darling.

CHEERING

'It's all about shocking.'

Even when I... even when I go on stage,

I don't know, maybe this is why I'm not more successful!

I kind of go on stage with this view

that I really don't want the people in the audience

to like what I'm going to do, a lot of the time.

I kind of think, "Fuck them," you know.

"I'm not here to entertain you, dear."

What is the benefit of shock?

Why is that good for us as a species, to be shaken up?

It makes you kind of rethink, kind of, like, your status quo.

Regardless of the fact that we have probably some of the most

liberal laws in the world regarding sexuality,

in this area kids still get beaten up, they still get attacked.

You know, the law might come in and say it's fine for me to get married,

and it might not be acceptable for you to say something homophobic now

but it doesn't mean that you're not thinking it.

Well, equal marriage is a fascinating topic, really,

for the question we're asking,

because if men and men are now marrying each other

and women are marrying women,

have the gay people who were Bohemian in a way

just by nature of their sexuality

been sort of sucked into bourgeois values?

Well, first of all, I don't think sexuality...

being gay makes you Bohemian.

But it once did.

I think it once did, but that was quite a while ago.

Well, this is the thing about me running around

in a pair of high heels and a pair of knickers.

I wasn't showing off against straight society,

I was showing off against my own kind.

Because in the '90s, the gays had already lost out.

They'd given up Bohemia by this point. They'd kind of...

It was all about lifestyle. It was all about money.

It was all about conforming within themselves.

You know, kind of...

I think Bohemia had left the queer building by about that point.

Yeah, look at you sucking back your craft beer. That's it, isn't it?

That's Bohemia for you, isn't it, darling?

Make a girl like me thirsty just looking at you.

I know there have been points in this series when I've been

a bit wry about Bohemia and a bit suspicious

and I've been stuck in my bourgeois, conventional place

going, "I don't know about this," but...

This is the sort of Bohemia that rings my bell.

I think Jonny Woo is amazing.

He's so challenging, even to his own audience,

even to people that have come to see him.

# Ha-ha-happy! Shoreditch

# Show me the way to be free... #

For me, this kind of Bohemia is an incredible contrast

with the staidness of Bloomsbury,

with their twee little country houses.

This is the two fingers up to convention,

this is a person getting out on stage, being totally challenging,

wearing whatever they want, with wit and humour

and self-consciousness and a tiny bit of anger.

He's slightly frightening.

But beautiful, and this, I think, is what Bohemia is for.

This total energy that says "I'm human, I can do anything I want

"and I won't be ordinary."

And this kind of Bohemia, I want to be part of.

But although Jonny Woo is a proper, challenging,

grit-in-the-oyster Bohemian,

I'm not sure he's what most people today would think of

when they hear the word.

MUSIC: Rebel Rebel by Rickie Lee Jones

I'm going to put "Bohemian" into Google,

just to see what other people seem to think it means.

There's an article about Samantha Cameron here.

"She is known for her Bohemian streak -

"she has a dolphin tattoo on her ankle -

"and for mixing designer brands with high street fashion."

Cressida Bonas, Prince Harry's occasional girlfriend.

"Is she too Bohemian to marry Harry?"

asks the Daily Mail nervously.

"She's a dreamy, arty Bohemian sort who loves to spend her weekends

"dancing at raves."

This person's a girl on her blog. "I'm a modern day Bohemian -

"short on money, super-creative, peace-loving, romantic,

"poetic and emotional. I live each day in wonder."

"Natural and Bohemian stone circle vegan yurt wedding."

That's like fridge poetry.

Lots of fashion stuff.

Bohemian soap.

This is great, this sentence goes to an unexpected place for me.

"Inspired by the free-thinking style of the great British

"Bohemian tradition, our patchouli fragrance is an intricate scent

"that harks back to long nights at the Cafe de Paris in the 1890s."

Do you want to smell like a 19th-century Paris backstreet?

Buy this perfume.

The existence of all these products being described as Bohemian,

it goes to the heart of what's especially slippery about the term.

Free expression and creativity

and big money get sort of tangled up together,

so there's something remunerative for companies

in identifying what's alternative.

So then, what is alternative? If everyone's alternative

and that's being sold, what's the genuinely alternative thing to do?

From 19th-century Paris onwards, every generation

has wrestled with the dilemma of genuine and commodified versions

of alternative living.

But in the 21st century, the phoney version has threatened

to eclipse the bona fide one almost entirely.

All right, fucksticks?

In 2005, a new sitcom, Nathan Barley,

exposed viewers for the first time to a tribe

just emerging on the streets of newly trendy East London

who all seemed to work in new media.

Check it out, yeah?

Trashbat.co.ck. My website. Never too late, yeah?

Right from the start, Barley is revealed as a vapid poser,

obsessed with his own cool credentials.

Nathan Barley was amazing when I first saw it.

I think it's a work of genius.

It's still as fresh as paint.

In other words, all the kind of critique of kind of ludicrous,

Victorian-bearded hipsterdom,

the sort of thing we see around here,

sort of track lighting and distressed plaster

with a bit of brickwork showing on the wall

and people showing their arse cracks and drinking exotic cappuccinos

is still exactly the same, except more so.

You know, riding around on stupid little bicycles

and being obsessed with their mobile phones.

It's all exactly the same, it's as fresh as paint.

Because what Nathan Barley was about was the death of Bohemia.

Nathan Barley was a premonition of a new type of fraudulent hitchhiker

through authentic country of Bohemia - the hipster.

So what exactly is a hipster?

Um...a Bohemian?

Just walk down Peckham Rye...

No, isn't a hipster, like,

an uncreative trying to look like he's creative.

Trying to be creative,

someone trying to be a little bit out there when they're not

because everyone walking down Peckham Rye looks like that.

-So do we, to be fair.

-Yeah, I hate to say it!

I mean, fuck knows. What is a hipster?

I mean, I suppose hipsters are self-proclaimed Bohemians.

But, I mean, I've never been convinced

that facial hair is an alternative to thought.

The whole problem for Bohemia

is that capitalism has become so effective at commoditising lifestyle

that the minute you kind of wear your scarf in a different way

or put an earring in your forehead, everybody else is doing it

and it costs, somebody is making money out of it.

I think convention now is really the sort of capitulation to consumerism.

The way we're absolutely enthralled to getting stuff

and doing the things we need to do to earn the money to get the stuff

without really having any powerful critique of that,

um...outside that system.

Although, of course there is, and I think the real Bohemians now

are people probably trying to live beyond consumer culture,

and that, I think, is quite fascinating,

and I'd love to see where that goes.

Living beyond consumer culture isn't easy today.

SHOUTING

This is what you're doing to fucking London!

This is our cultural heritage!

On February 5th 2015,

the Metropolitan Police ended an occupation by squatters

of the 12 Bar in Soho's Denmark Street.

Police, stay where you are.

Huh! I'm staying here!

Known as Tin Pan Alley,

from the 1950s this was the epicentre of London's music scene.

Home to guitar shops, venues and recording studios

buzzing with bands from the Rolling Stones to the Sex Pistols.

Some of its lots are now scheduled for corporate redevelopment.

The occupiers call themselves Bohemians 4 Soho

and certainly not hipsters.

Nine days before the raid,

I visited the site and talked with Craig Temple,

a musician who has worked and played here for years.

We're standing up for Denmark Street and what that represents.

It's where Black Sabbath recorded their first album,

where the Kinks recorded their early stuff,

Rolling Stones recorded their early stuff, the Yardbirds,

everyone from that kind of era of the swinging '60s in London

recorded in that studio.

On a much bigger scale, it represents

freedom of music in the UK, freedom of expression.

You live in a kind of itinerant hand-to-mouth way

because you're putting your commitment to music first,

and it's art for art's sake.

Does that make you a Bohemian,

and if so, is that a position you take pride in?

I'm just a guy who plays a guitar and sings and writes songs,

that's just what I do.

But the level of sacrifice I've had to do in order to be

a touring musician for the past nine years has been ridiculous.

Relationships, out the window, money, out the window,

security, out the window.

It comes with the territory.

A lot of people say Bohemia is dead, there are no Bohemians

any more, and yet, this place closes down, and almost overnight

it's full of people calling themselves Bohemians

having a protest.

What does that mean? Is Bohemia alive and well?

Of course it's alive and well.

I mean, the majority of people only pay attention to what they're shown.

If people really want to see true counterculture

and true Bohemianism, you need to scratch beneath the surface.

We're sick and tired of how there's one haircut and a beard

and that's the height of fashion,

I don't want people like that to be representing my generation.

I don't want someone pouting in front of a fucking camera on a phone

to represent my generation.

That's it. I feel like people have been lamenting

the death of Bohemia almost since the day it was invented.

And they try and sound wistful, and they try and say

"It's such a shame Bohemia's all over."

But actually they're relieved

because it's neutralised, it's safe if it's over.

It never is. It's just happening somewhere else.

Yeah, people are always trying to say

that this is dead and that's dead,

but it's not, the nature of rock and roll is giving the finger

to the man on a regular basis. It's true rebellion. It's true freedom.

Well, that's definitely one of the nicer squats I've visited.

Bit chilly, they need a bit more loo paper,

but seems like a very friendly, gentle vibe, quite '70s,

how I imagine the '70s hippie scene would have been.

But they are Bohemians. They call themselves Bohemians.

They're definitely in it for the sake of art.

They're making music and painting pictures

in the face of oppression as they see it.

Not very scary, they're not very shocking to me,

because - at the risk of sounding like I'm 100 -

they're polite, nice, lovely young people.

I was impressed by them.

I wish there were more of them on the Tube,

not the ones that shove you out the way

listening to their mobile phones.

And Bohemians aren't supposed to care what people think,

but if they care what I think, I think they're charming.

MUSIC: Last Living Souls by Gorillaz

70 years after Francis Bacon lit up its clubs and bars,

the erosion of Soho's eccentric and independent character -

and some say that of Bohemia too -

continues unabated, replaced by something bland and generic.

Pretty much all of the behaviours and symbols of Bohemian-ness

are now pretty universal.

You know, tattoos and drugs,

and different sorts of sex and "outrageous behaviour",

if you cycle through Camden Market

there's a supermarket for all of that all the way through, you know.

It's like, it's just, it's orthodox now.

You know, we are all Bohemians now.

By this stage you could certainly say that Bohemianism

has played its final cards.

And yet, I think Bohemians have been saying

for as long as anybody can remember, "We are the last Bohemians."

They were saying that in Paris in the 1850s.

They were saying it in London in the 1890s.

The generation of the '20s in London

certainly thought they were the last Bohemians

only to have themselves supplanted by the Soho gang of the '50s.

So, it goes on. I suspect it always will.

MUSIC: Bohemian by Joel Sarakula

# Because I am

# A Bohemian

# A modern Stone Age man

# A Bohemian... #

So here we are at the end of the journey.

And what can we conclude?

Well, nothing, obviously.

I mean, you know the options. I've really warmed to the Bohemians.

I've really gone off them. I've become one!

But it would be awfully bourgeois of me

to offer that kind of neat conclusion, or of you to want it.

People have been feeling themselves to be

outsiders, questioners and rebels

since millennia before the term Bohemians was coined

in 19th-century Paris.

Do we like these people? Do we approve of them?

Do we accept them? These are irrelevant questions.

They don't care.

Whatever we, as the mainstream, assert,

they, as Bohemians, will be external to.

Of course, we could look at ourselves in relation to them.

One important way of defining our own moral codes

and social conventions is by examining

who is challenging them, and why.

We could do that. Or...you know.

We could just get our kit off, cover ourselves in paint,

and dance in the road.

When you look back, do you think that's the right way to live?

I mean, now, crikey, yeah. Oh, I'm the luckiest guy alive.

I only ever did what I wanted.

Most of the time.

We do need Bohemia. We do need Bohemia. I believe in Bohemia.

I wouldn't be wearing a spotty scarf if I didn't believe in Bohemia.

I wouldn't like to say that I'd put everything

in the hands of the Bohemians.

But it would be wonderful if everybody was like me, wouldn't it?

SHE LAUGHS