TV review

THE scene appears to be a normal 21st wedding anniversary dinner with parents and their three children round the table - until you learn that both parents are women.

Dad Clive became Sheryl after 15 years of marriage and fathering three children. Mum Bernadette is back as part of the family after initially walking out on learning her husband intended to change sex.

Back in the 1970s, when Stephen became Stephenie, she had no choice but to leave her children. It was a condition of her treatment that she cut all ties with her family.

With a tabloid title and the prospect of yet another sex change documentary, Real Life looked like being a further episode in TV's worrying obsession with gender confusion and cosmetic surgery.

Happily, it emerged as something quite different because we heard not only from the two men who wanted to be women but also their families.

The trauma and unhappiness that Clive and Stephen, both suffering from gender identity disorder, went through was equalled by the distress and confusion their wives and children felt. Taking stories from different eras also helped contrast changes in attitudes towards those having sex changes.

The current Big Brother has shown viewers some of the dilemmas and uncertainties facing such people through watching how transsexual Nadia is coping inside the house.

Despite a penchant for dressing up in women's clothes, Clive was married with children. After 15 years, he felt he couldn't go on as he was and announced his intention of becoming a full-time female. Shocked wife Bernadette walked out, leaving him to bring up the children. Eventually, she returned at the instigation of Sheryl's father, who was worried about his grandchildren.

Twenty-five years ago, the decision of Stephen to change sex literally tore the family apart. At that time, treatment was only available on condition that the patient left their family for good.

Stephenie, now 50, had surgery to become a woman and enjoyed a successful career as a model. Sheryl is still unhappy as, because she's overweight, surgeons are delaying the operation to give her female genitalia.

Interesting as the two women's stories were, the impact on their children gave you pause for thought. Bullying and getting into trouble were common among the children in both families.

While one of Sheryl's sons told her new mum, "Whatever makes you happy", another burst out laughing and had to leave the room on hearing the news.

Stephenie thought she was doing the right thing by breaking contact with her sons, believing that the more success she had as a woman, the prouder they would be of her. The trouble was son Mark found out the truth when he was eight, after a newspaper revealed Stephenie's secret and someone in the school playground told him: "Your dad is a woman".

No wonder he went off the rails, not caring whether he lived or died. He's resentful that while the family was struggling to survive, his mum was spending money on surgery. Nowadays, they meet up a couple of times a year but a mother-son relationship is lacking.

Mark's wife Helen said what he was undoubtedly thinking, that Stephenie is "a selfish, self-centred person - not a family orientated person".

Sheryl and Stephenie agree on one thing, that they had no choice but to change, whatever the consequences for those around them.

NoFit State Circus, Stockton International Festival

THERE'S an element of Emperor's New Clothes about contemporary circus which rejects traditional sawdust-style presentation in favour of sinister, in-your-face excitement.

Without a mustachioed ringmaster or any other kind of introduction, the cackling performers are laughing but the audience doesn't automatically get the joke. There is some imagination in a lithe, camisole-clad woman juggling iridescent hoops while drinking from a teacup, but does her stony expression require half-hearted applause?

Without any seating, those who have stood for some hours already that day find the spectacle more than a little challenging on the legs. Constantly being jostled by a selection of alternative performers - a woman pushes a pram through the throng with a pretend package of 200 Players Navy Cut cigarettes replacing the baby - tests our reserved British manner to the limit. There's plenty of ability to observe: eight people who appear to have been strung up by the neck suddenly burst into life as rope artists and four Victorian swimsuited women repeat the moves using material instead of rope. We may have lost the lion-tamer snapping his whip at the moth-eaten former king of the jungle, but today's health and safety circus gives us a trapeze artist anchored to her perch by a guy rope - there is still the threat of a nasty rope burn, of course.

This curtain-raiser for the 17th festival comes complete with mournful music, half-understood poetry, unintelligible pronouncements and a man positioned in a tin bath 20 feet above our heads. I can't wait for the next stage, when an animal cracks the whip at a growling male form displaying an impressive set of yellowed fangs.

Viv Hardwick