In praise of…

Downton Abbey – After a long, long wait while the Royal Mail got its post-festivity backside into gear, I finally sat down to the first three episodes of this highly lauded ITV show. My expectations were high, having enjoyed Gosford Park repeatedly and taken guilty pleasure in Past Imperfect and Snobs, and I wasn’t disappointed:  it was excellent. JF has hit upon a formula: in each episode, the eldest daughter of the house has a new suitor and her mamma (Elizabeth McGovern) and grandmamma (scene-stealing Maggie Smith) machinate to have the entail on the property removed, but fail. Around this basic weekly routine, Fellowes builds many other plots about the lives and hopes, identities and activities of the house’s inhabitants. As much as it bears something in common with early Star Trek episodes, where Kirk’s weekly love interest imperils the Enterprise and its crew, I think it’s quite a nifty device in this series as it means Fellowes can draw out other plot strands as subtly and lengthily as he likes without making the series seem ‘slow’. Add a few salacious details such as class-straddling gay affairs and young men dying suddenly during sex and it’s a great show. Add Maggie Smith, Hugh Bonneville and Penelope Wilton on top of that, and it’s gripping TV.

 The only jarring thing for me, really, is that they all sound so very common! In fact the ‘middle class’ cousin sounds a hell of a lot posher than his supposedly upper class girl-cousins who don’t even manage to do 21^st-Century upper class let alone Edwardian!  It is ITV, I suppose. Actually, it did occur to me that when the likes of Wendy Hiller and Peggy Ashcroft were available for hire, an actress sounding the way Maggie Smith does would only ever have got a role as a housekeeper. She’s bloody good as the scary grandmother, though – and her scenes with Penelope Wilton are pure gold.

Topshop nail polish – Sorry to go all girly on you and I’ve never liked Topshop, but this stuff is just fabulous. Great shades and my nails, which were painted on Sunday, have yet to chip, in spite of swimming and cooking and knitting – all activities which knacker weaker polishes.

The BFI – Not only is it London’s only decent rep cinema, but the pre-screening talks are a treat. Little did I know, when I turned up for a screening of Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby, that I would gain a new perspective on the film.  The showing was preceded by a UCL lecturer giving a talk about the movie and it was interesting to learn that the inception of the film – in which everyone except Cary Grant’s character is clearly bonkers and yet their logic prevails wherever he goes and think he is mad; where perceptions of ‘madness’ are down to individuals not being in complete possession of the facts – took place while the director’s wife was suffering a breakdown from which she never recovered. Somehow, that makes the combination of frustration, love and lunacy more understandable.