Jem Clarke is five foot because of a genetic condition. He's spent 50 years putting up with rude comments, thanks to the last acceptable prejudice.
In February, at Prime Minister’s Questions, Keir Starmer said to Rishi Sunak (five foot seven), ‘Is he starting to wonder if this job is just too big for him?’
If Starmer can make us titter at this line, then we’re still, as a nation, open to a good chuckle at the expense of the shorter man. Worse still, despite the fact that Rishi has seven inches on me, I was one of those titterers.
Had I become heightist? I am five feet tall, thanks to a genetic disease, multiple epiphyseal dysplasia. It messes up the length of my bones and the ‘jauntiness’ of my joints.
In America, it’s classified as a mild form of dwarfism. Dwarfism is really an umbrella term for any genetic condition that restricts growth. So across the pond, I’m a very tall, little person. Over here, I’m a very small, short person. I straddle two stools – which is quite impressive for a man my height.
When people meet me for the first time, I have always played along politely when they place me in the pantheon of famous short people: ‘Same height as Tom Cruise?’ they ask.
‘Ooh, you are complimenting me. No – lower.’
‘Billy Joel?’ Lower.
‘Jamie Cullum?’ Lower.
‘James Cagney?’ Lower.
‘Michael J Fox?’ Lower.
‘Diminutive pop star Prince?’ Lower.
‘Ronnie Corbett?’ Lower.
And so it goes on, until they run out of names and I have to explain I stand equal to Danny DeVito and Don Estelle (Lofty in It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum). Danny is now four foot nine, having shrunk through his age and condition, but was once, like me, five feet.
On the spectrum of the short-arse males you may know and love, only Jimmy Krankie is below me, and he’s not included on the list any more, owing to some Olympic-swimming-team-style ruling-out rigmarole on grounds of gender.
I have far greater need to be narked than Rishi. And yet I’m not.
When I was in junior school, my nickname was Midget Jem. My best friend was a mixed-race lad with a lisp who answered to the name of Dolly Mixture. In print, this sounds utterly offensive and the ’70s sure were cruel (but simple).
Yet the bizarre thing is that we both understood, aged seven, the cleverness in our classmates’ naming us after two different sorts of Bassett’s confectionery items that perfectly, puntastically fitted our physical characteristics.
It didn’t feel like bullying, because having a nickname was like having a code name, and we were part of a larger gang of re-named kids, including Dr Teeth, Wolf Boy, Stinky and Squarehead.
Far worse than having an offensive nickname was not having any nickname at all. Ask Simon. Who was Simon? Exactly.
By the time I was mired in puberty, however, things had got serious. The mid-1980s was a progressive and oppressive time. Everything felt political and personal. How much more so for my adolescent self, who suddenly found that short is not equated with cute when you’re 16 but the size of a nine-year-old.
When BBC2 began showing a new sitcom starring a Christopher Ryan, who’d just played Mike in The Young Ones, I was well up for it. Ryan was only a shade over five feet and something of a hero, having played the cool but forgettable fourth housemate.
It seemed radical having the shortest housemate as a sex symbol. But this was the era of Dudley Moore, Hollywood ‘sex thimble’, and the not gigantic Henry Winkler’s Fonz.
I had a big problem in 1987 with Chris Ryan’s new show, A Small Problem, though. Its allegorical anti-prejudice premise was that all people five feet and under were rounded up and put into ghettos. However allegorical the intent, I thought they should have picked a characteristic that there wasn’t real-life prejudice against – such as having blue eyes or freckles or blond hair or being called Jane.
I wrote a letter to the Radio Times, saying, ‘It’s bad enough other children on the bus yelling, “F**k off, dwarf,” without the BBC fanning the flames.’
So I became the first person to get the word f**k published in that magazine, while simultaneously winning an imaginary award for ‘Best letter unintentionally replicating Adrian Mole’.
My letter was explosive. According to Mark Lewisohn’s Radio Times Guide to TV Comedy, it caused one of Radio Times’s largest-ever mailbags.
All the ingredients of what goes on today were there back in 1987. I was offended, I caused a load of people to strongly agree and others to disagree in public with my view, and then something got cancelled.
I wrote a letter to Ronnie Corbett, asking if he wanted to join my anti-heightist movement. I received a lovely, handwritten response. He said his shortness is what propelled him from being a civil servant into showbusiness. If there’s one thing worse than tall men, it’s a successful, happy, short man.
I planned an abortive mission to get supermarkets to lower the heights of all their shelves. I had T-shirts printed with the legend ‘TALL MEN CAN CROUCH. SHORT MEN CAN’T HOVER.’
But I never actually went ahead with the day of action, because of scant interest from the media – and from my best friend, who was meant to be dropping me off at the supermarket. My activism petered out.
When I went to university as a mature student, I did a thesis on euphemisms and dysphemisms (rude words used rather than polite ones). I looked into what words and phrases are used to celebrate or denigrate the short and the tall.
Midget began as a polite alternative to dwarf when a writer is referring to someone with dwarfism. But by the late 1990s, the word midget had become pejorative, having been used as a dysphemism for a good three decades or so.
I noted that 88 per cent of all written articles about the pop star Prince mentioned his height, and often used the word ‘diminutive’.
It’s the latching-on to a word by journalists, for the joy of using a variety of synonyms, to give a piece a bit of poetic sizzle, that sometimes allows a word to become over-used, infected with ‘shade’ to become slightly patronising or insulting. The word woke is going through a similar journey now.
In broadcasting, though, no such semantic trickery is required to mock the not-so-tall. The words small and little aren’t used positively – not because there is any grand agenda; just because they mean less as well as short. This is so engrained in our linguistic DNA that the usage passes unconsciously out of the most professional and nuanced of mouths.
Exhibit A is the terrific but over-tall Jeremy Vine – if ever a man didn’t need to ponce about on a penny farthing to look down on the world… When summarising the look of a multiple sex offender who’d just been arrested on screen, he said, ‘What an insignificant, little man’, with all the deserved disgust loaded onto the word little, despite the fact that the criminal was sitting throughout his arrest.
There’s no problem with Vine. It is the language’s fault. But do give the unicycle a rest, Jez. It rankles in the same way as when a supermodel takes me out to supper and wears heels.
There are plenty of height-dissing micro-aggressions within our culture. It’s no surprise that a Swedish study of 338,000 short men showed that they were 56-per-cent more likely to attempt violent suicide than the average-size Bjorn.
More optimistically, a pan-African study of primates revealed that the smallest monkey in a troop actually has, on average, a longer life than the second-tallest member.
According to the Zeta monkey theory, the tiny, limping monkey at the back – who you’d think would soon be either abandoned or eaten by a passing, short-haired something – is safer. He never gets involved in physical fights for leadership of the troop, as the current leader doesn’t see him as even a remote threat to the top job. Why are we now all imagining a really hairy Michael Gove?
Which brings us rather nicely to the primitive-monkey part of the human brain, which we still live with, and which is lit up when it comes to physical attraction.
Regretfully, I can report from careful research into many a midnight dating show that the ladies are still hard-wired to list ‘smaller than me’ in their top three red lines when it comes to romance or even basic afternoon rutting.
What cultures and countries deem attractive does change. But that change can take centuries. I know my own red lines of what I find attractive are alarmingly non-negotiable: must bathe at least weekly; can’t look like Auntie Elsie; no cross eyes. I am now at peace with the fact that I have to wait for Ian Krankie to die before my next date.
Still, I’m also happy that women can say on live TV that they don’t find men shorter than themselves attractive. We little folk can deal with honesty up front – it’s preferable to endless euphemisms.
As for Mr Sunak, my advice is to load your front bench with oddballs like Stinky, Dolly Mixture, Wolf Boy and Squarehead. Fly your five-foot-freak flag without fear.
Besides, if you try and get up on your high horse about it, the fall might kill you.
The Oldie May 2023
