Writer and novelist
The theme of rural or provincial innocents abroad in the wicked city is a familiar source of comedy and satire.
In the 1967 British film Smashing Time, starring Rita Tushingham and Lynn Redgrave, the innocents are Northern girls Brenda and Yvonne, and the city is London in the latter throes of its Swinging Sixties’ phase.
There might not be a better time to become acquainted with the world of Isabel Dalhousie, the amateur sleuth who is the main character in Alexander McCall Smith’s Sunday Philosophy Club series.
The series follows Isabel’s life in Edinburgh, a privileged life which is lived at a gentle pace, in which personal and social problems are tackled with thoughtfulness and consideration of moral and ethical issues. Wow. Sitting up straighter?
Among the estimable body of work produced by the author Jill Paton Walsh is a series of four detective novels featuring Imogen Quy, an intriguing addition to the genre of amateur sleuth.
Imogen is a woman who abandoned her medical degree at Oxford University to follow her boyfriend Frank to America, where, yes, you’ve got it, she is dumped by the bounder.
SPOILER ALERT: This article refers to story points in the film
The title of the 1961 film, No Love for Johnnie, directed by Ralph Thomas and starring Peter Finch as Labour politician Johnnie Byrne, suggests that its focus is on love rather than politics.
Johnnie’s unhappy personal life is indeed essential to the narrative, and the three women with whom he is involved provide plot points and insights into his character, but it’s the political story which has real bite and verve.
Some people welcome a drift towards a cashless society, lauding the advantages of virtual transactions in which no actual money changes hands. This school of thought may underestimate the social and economic benefits of cash.
Furthermore, real solid money in the form of pennies and sixpences and shillings and two-bobs and half-crowns in the UK (and their decimal successors, although they haven’t become embodied in the national imagination in quite the same way) and folding notes of different hues, have for decades not only weighed down our pockets but have coloured the way we speak and the way we see the world.
You had to be young, really young, and perhaps a girl, to give Tell Laura I Love Her the whole-hearted, weepy, emotional response it deserved.
The song, originally written and recorded by Ray Peterson in 1960 and released in America, was initially judged to be ‘too tasteless and vulgar for the English sensibility’. Yeah, right. Welsh singer Ricky Valance, who died recently at the age of 84, took this on the chin, and took his own swoony, maudlin version of the song to the top of the UK charts in October 1960.
On May 7, 1945 the BBC in London interrupted its scheduled programme with a newsflash. The war in Europe was over. The following day would be a national holiday. The celebrations which swept through the country on VE-Day are well documented — the celebrating crowds, the dancing, the street parties, the bonfires, the flags and bunting, the relief and thanksgiving that the darkest hours of suffering and danger were over.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill broadcast to the nation at 3pm on that day and gave an impromptu speech to cheering crowds in central London. Later that evening King George VI made his wireless address to the people.
Andrea Newman, who died recently, was a British author who is best remembered for her novels which became steamy, gripping television dramas about characters whose family relationships are fraught with sexual tensions and desires.
ITV’s must-see series of 1976, Bouquet Of Barbed Wire, is a compelling narrative based on themes from Greek tragedy, including incest, sexual obsession, betrayal and interfamilial violence, depicted by attractive well-spoken actors and situated in the affluent, upper-middle-class metropolitan elite.
The drama was ground-breaking in its psychological exploration of taboo subjects and its presentation of women with strong and complex desires.
London Weekend Television’s series The Gentle Touch (1980-1984) was the first British police TV drama series with a female lead. Welcome to our screens, Detective Inspector Maggie Forbes.
You paved the way for those who followed, and provided a template of characteristics developed by writers and actors who went on to create a number of strong female detectives with complicated professional and personal lives.
My new novel in my series of Modern Jane Austen Variations is called She’s The One and has its basis on the main plot of Mansfield Park. Its characters are modern versions of Jane Austen’s, and the significant events in Austen’s novel have their counterparts in my contemporary story.
Mansfield Park rarely takes top place in Favourite Jane Austen Novel polls but I believe it has a heroine in Fanny Price who is perfect for our times.
