A ‘look at these funny people’ doc that could have been presented by any TV hack: Grayson Perry’s Full English reviewed

For around a decade now, Grayson Perry has been making reliably thoughtful and entertaining documentary series about such things as class, contemporary masculinity and modern secular rituals. (All a lot more fun than they sound, I promise.) Equipped with an infectious Sid James laugh and an impressive commitment to affability, he’s demonstrated a willingness to listen to opposing views, even to the extent of allowing his mind to be changed. He’s then turned his findings into both a convincing thesis and an art exhibition of some kind.

So what’s gone wrong in Grayson Perry’s Full English? The main problem, I think, was inadvertently laid bare right at the start of Thursday’s opening episode. In a quest to discover ‘what Englishness means today’, Perry told us, he’d be meeting people all over the country ‘who have a distinct idea of what English identity is’ – which, at a stroke, rules out most of the population.