FILM

UK 2011 97 mins Dir: Jes Benstock

If you've a high tolerance of exceedingly camp middle-aged men and retina-burning primary colours, this is the outsider (performance) art documentary for you. Never knowingly under-dressed, sculptor and 'living legend' Andrew Logan has been the organiser of the unruly Alternative Miss World contest since 1972. Jes Benstock's suitably exuberant film intersperses the pageant's colourful history with preparations for the 2009 event, peppered with Gilliam-esque cut-out animations. Along the way, there are archive footage walk-ons for all the usual suspects (Derek Jarman, Divine, etc) and interviews with the likes of Brian Eno and Grayson Perry, plus plenty of outrageous reminiscence ("There were blow-jobs everywhere!").

Sixty-six year-old Logan won his first fancy dress contest on Coronation Day and recalls dropping acid at Oxford in the sixties, which probably explains a lot. Billed as a celebration of personal transformation, his Alternative Miss World has always appealed to outsiders and the in-crowd alike, embracing glam, punk and, latterly, the millennial misfit/freak boom. The contest was won by men until 1985, when the prize was awarded to a robot. Although endless footage of chaps dressed as giant phallus-wielding meringues and the like can get a bit tiresome, Benstock leavens it with some terrific anecdotes (Logan's encounter with the young Tony Blair, the obese contestant who broke the catwalk, etc) and accounts of the pageant's endearingly shambolic organisation. Perhaps most interesting is how it has responded to outside events, being banned from Chislehurst Caves in 1986 in a ludicrous AIDS scare and later putting a defiant two fingers up to Clause 28. The contest's growing international reputation means that contestants now flock from as far afield as Russia and Nigeria, where they are still shamefully denied the basic human right to parade around in preposterous costumes. (Robin Askew)

website www.britishguidetoshowingoff.com/

Opens: November 20

Copyright Robin Askew 2011