Getting on with Greer (From This Is Local London)

Getting on with Greer

10:11am Thursday 28th April 2005 in

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Not many academics can boast a photo shoot in Vogue magazine, or claim to have appeared on a hit reality TV series. But then Professor Germaine Greer is no ordinary professor.

She has a literary back catalogue the size of a small library, a Phd from Cambridge (in Shakespeare's comedies) and a professorship at Warwick University. But it still feels like she has something to prove.

Greer comes to artsdepot on Wednesday next week for an evening of debate and discussion.

If any other personality was concerned, a profile interview would be published ahead of the event. However, Greer does not give press interviews. She only speaks on radio and TV because she is afraid of being misquoted.

However, I did catch up with her in December at a more modest version of the Evening with Germaine Greer series. I was at The All Saints Arts Centre, in Finchley, to present the show, but it rather felt like Greer didn't want anyone else to be on stage.

We were introduced backstage, where she didn't bother to hide her dismissive glare (my dress and high heels, perhaps gave offence). She made a comment about my scarf: "What's it called?" she quipped, wrongly implying it was made out of animal skin. I am reminded of several other female journalists who have fallen victim to her vitriolic attacks.

She famously laid into the feminist Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore after she repeated false allegations that Greer had a hysterectomy: "So much lipstick must rot the brain," thundered Greer, describing Moore's appearance as, "hair bird's-nested all over the place and three fat layers of cleavage".

Waiting to go on, I suddenly became an audience for her monologue. She spoke about how difficult it was for her to look after her sick mother in Australia single-handedly without help from her siblings, and about the rainforests. Here we were, two people in a room (admittedly she happened to be Germaine Greer), and she was giving me a lecture.

She may be the queen of feminism, but she was not very good at making this young woman feel secure and empowered.

Part of the problem might have been that All Saints Arts Centre is a lot smaller than she had imagined: the audience numbered about only 40. It still didn't prevent her charging a hefty £1,500 fee for the evening (she uses the money to help save the Australian rain forests, where she lives half the year).

So, my personal reservations aside, what is it that makes Greer such an enduring draw? Undoubtedly, on stage she is at her best. In fact, she is a fantastic public speaker spontaneous, quick, funny and naturally extremely intelligent.

She began with a discussion about an obituary she had read the day before. It was about Hermione Lady Cobbold, daughter of Lord Lytton, owner of Knebworth House, and wife of the governor of the Bank of England.

She complained that the article only made reference to her in terms of whose daughter or husband she was. She spoke on how difficult it was to grow old as a woman.

"I'm 65, and at my age, you either shop at Evans, or you buy a sewing machine," she said.

The author of the 1970 treatise on sexual liberation, The Female Eunuch, then went on to take questions from the audience. Her answers revealed that she has become a fan of Madonna and Italian men (they make better lovers, apparently), but thinks Bridget Jones and Jordan have done a disservice to feminism.

Coincidentally, someone asked her whether she would ever appear in a reality TV series.

This was before the contestants of Celebrity Big Brother had been revealed.

She said she would do it for the money so she could buy up plots of disappearing rainforests.

She had written in the Guardian her reason: "My nightmare would be having to endure the twittering of a bunch of has-beens and wannabes, interested only in themselves and how they come across. Having to listen to such wittering all day, every day, would be like being chained to the bar in the Groucho club without a drink."

But here (obviously having already agreed to do Big Brother) she said she had turned down an offer from the show because of the way animals are treated on it.

After taking part in the programme, she said she left it early because her fellow contestants were humiliated. She still maintains she would degrade herself again so she could raise money for charity, but adds: "What I wouldn't do is be drawn into complicity with the degradation and humiliation of others who I consider, rightly or wrongly, to be weaker than myself."

But I rather think it is because, however clever and full of trail-blazing ideas she is, she is simply not very good at getting on with people.

u An Evening with Germaine Greer is at artsdepot, Nether Street, North Finchley, on Wednesday, May 4, at 8pm. Tickets are £14 (£12 concessions).

Call the box office on 020 8369 5454.