The 1969 film All Neat in Black Stockings is based on a novel by Jane Gaskell, a prize-winning writer whose literary output over three decades consists mainly of fantasy novels. Her mid-1960s’ vampire romance The Shiny Narrow Grin has been acclaimed as the Twilight of its day, and some say is superior to it.
Parents And Children in Shakespeare — Polonius The Helicopter Parent
Polonius is the ‘wretched, rash, intruding fool’ in Hamlet who comes to an untimely end when Hamlet accidentally stabs him. Hamlet’s farewell words are often taken as a definitive epitaph for Polonius, the father of Ophelia and Laertes, who does indeed earn every one of those descriptors.
Traditionally, Polonius has been played as a pompous windbag who, while not actually deserving such an end, isn’t much mourned. He’s never been a ‘fashionable’ character. Unlike other personae who have a greater imaginative impact, Ophelia and Rosencranz and Guildenstern, for example, Polonius hasn’t been seized on and reinterpreted for different audiences.
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Hats Off And Goodbye to Arnold Wesker
Chips With Everything by the playwright Arnold Wesker, who died recently, opened at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1962, and the following year there was a production in Wimbledon which a gang of us went to see.
This was an outing arranged by the more culturally and politically aware members of our group, and which those of us still paddling in the shallows of cultural activity was approached with more anxiety about theatre etiquette than anticipation of seeing what we didn’t realise was a significant piece of theatre history.
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Prime Suspect’s Jane Tennison v Happy Valley’s Catherine Cawood — Hats In The Ring For Female TV Detectives
It’s time for another match-up between female TV detectives — this battle sees Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison of the pioneering Prime Suspect taking on the formidable force of Sergeant Catherine Cawood from Happy Valley.
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Hats In The Ring for Breakfast At Tiffany’s — Truman Capote’s 1958 Novella versus the 1961 Film
The movie Breakfast At Tiffany’s is a swoony, delicious, captivating film. Its main character is Holly Golightly, delectably played by Audrey Hepburn. But the film is a very different work from its original source — a novella by Truman Capote.
Holly is a girl from Tulip, Texas, a child bride who escapes to New York and reinvents herself as a Manhattan socialite, a kooky, gorgeous, tough yet vulnerable girl about town who throws wild parties and entrances rich men. She eventually finds love with the struggling writer who is her neighbour.
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Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park — Jane Austen’s Flawed Women
Mary Crawford rocks up at Mansfield Park, home of Sir Thomas Bertram and family, and starts to have some fun. She’s the new girl, not in town but from Town, who brings to the country folk of Northamptonshire more than a whiff of the sophistication and worldly attitudes of the metropolis of London.
We love her — what’s not to love? Mary embodies the qualities which ride high in contemporary preferences. She’s attractive, entertaining, witty, lively, quick-thinking, flirtatious.
[Read more…]The Good Wife and ‘Mr Kalinda’
‘Mr Kalinda’ is actually more than a little unfair and inaccurate, even on the basis of our first meeting with Jason Crouse, who becomes Alicia Florrick’s go-to investigator in the latest (and perhaps the last) series of The Good Wife now showing in the UK.
It’s the second episode of series seven, and Kalinda’s ghost hovers in the air as Alicia sets out to hire a new investigator. Who could fill those spike-heeled shoes, we wonder, as three candidates present themselves for the role. One is quickly eliminated, and Alicia has to choose between Amanda Marcassin and Jason Crouse.
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Revisiting the Gilmore Girls — Emily and Lorelai
We know from the get-go that we are expected to be on Lorelai’s side. We are directed to support Lorelai as she struggles to stand up to Emily, her snobbish, controlling, manipulative, interfering mother.
Well, when you put it like that, why wouldn’t we side with the plucky single mother-of-one’s determination to remain her own woman and to exercise her right to live by her own values? Go Lorelai!
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The Beat Goes On: Beat Girl — retro 1960s films
As aspiring Beat Girls, our Girl Squad, as we didn’t say back then, responded promptly to the discovery of Edmond T Greville’s film, Beat Girl, which was first released in 1960.
With its depiction of teenage rebellion and its insight into the jazz club and coffee bar milieu of London’s Soho, not to mention the presence of Adam Faith, Beat Girl promised to be a movie we could relate to.
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Hercule Poirot’s Christmas — Hats Off To Christmas Sleuths
So you dread the quarrels and arguments which will inevitably occur at your family Christmas gathering?
No matter what the tensions, your party will be an oasis of calm in comparison to what goes on at Gorston Hall, the mansion of mega-rich patriarch Simeon Lee, the setting for Agatha Christie’s novel, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (which, in the USA, was titled Murder for Christmas and then retitled A Holiday For Murder).
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Dickens’ Damaged Women — Esther Summerson in Bleak House
I wonder if Esther Summerson in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House is as unpopular with today’s young readers as she was in my student days? How we sneered with contempt and impatience when her diffident, self-effacing voice took over the narrative.
The coyness and self-consciousness with which she reveals her story and her character still jar today. How can you read, ‘I don’t know how it is I seem to be always writing about myself…you tiresome little creature, I wish you wouldn’t!’ without wanting to hurl the book at the wall?
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Songs About Fathers And Sons
The complex relationships between parents and their children are the enduring stuff of books, plays, music, art. Every human emotion is explored through the prism of this primal bond.
Songs about fathers and sons are shot through with ideas of admiration, rivalry, bafflement, inadequacy, disappointment, rejection, acceptance, regret, anger, forgiveness.
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