A Bald Man Cries...

So Lib Dem MP Mark Oaten puts his recent dalliance with a rent-boy down to pressures of work, a mid-life crisis and the loss of his hair. Clearly, I've been doing things wrong, haven't I? When I had my mid-life crisis (a few years early, admittedly), I just stuck to buying rusty American sports coupes and driving them around winding country lanes, frightening the yokels with my V8 rumble. Since then, I've confined my middle-aged bloke activities to playing with my model railway. I can't say it ever crossed my mind to experiment with homosexuality by engaging the services of young male prostitutes. But then, I'm not a member of parliament.

Still, if hair-loss is the stimulus for turning gay (and there we all were thinking it was in the genes), it does raise some interesting questions. Is Captain Jean-Luc Picard actually on a five year mission to bugger as many rent-boys on as many alien planets as possible? Are Ernst Stavro Blofeld's attempts at world conquests actually an attempt to repress his rampant homosexuality (although, curiously, the campest Blofeld was the one with hair: Charles Grey in Diamonds Are Forever)? As for Kojack - clearly a gay romanctic triangle between Theo Kojack, his boss (the older man) and Sgt Crocker (the young stud), disguised as a detective drama.

What really fascinates me are the implications for soap operas. Does Oaten's revelation actually mean that the rivalry between slap-headed thug Phil Mitchell and wimpy Ian Beale in Eastenders is really some kind of courtship? Will all the violence and threats culminate in Phil planting a huge smacker of a kiss on Ian's lips? Did Phil only marry Kathy, Ian's mother, as some kind of surrogate for her son, in an attempt to suppress the developing homosexuality which accompanied his hair loss? Even more disturbingly, will future episodes feature Phil's even more slap-headed brother Grant groping Kevin Wicks' arse - will there be a cliffhanger in which Peggy comes down into the bar of the Queen Vic one morning to find her son Grant rolling around on the floor, naked, with Patrick Truman (who still has his trilby on)?