The Bluestocking, vol 80: RTD, motherhood and Doctor Strange in a waterpark
Happy Friday!
This week I've written about the life of a princess (bad) and hosted Week in Westminster, where I *think* I have finally understood the difference between the various options for leaving/not leaving the customs union, and perhaps even managed to turn them into bearable radio. That's Saturday, 11am, Radio 4.
Also, this panel is now online - I talked to Sherlock's Amanda Abbington, Philip Collins of the Times, Almeida young leader Darren Siah and the Spectator's Sam Leith about the art of the political speech. Why are politicians generally so bad at them? Why was Tony Blair - who Phil wrote for - so good? How did everyone not die of boredom in the past when people gave, like, three-hour speeches? (I'm chairing another Almeida panel in June on why women fall out of the literary canon. Join us!)
See you next time!
Helen
Russell T Davies on why he has always wanted to shoot a dog
In 2001, he bounced from Queer as Folk into another gay drama, Bob and Rose. It might be my favourite of Davies’s work, simply for the unlikeliness of its subject matter as raw material for a romantic comedy. Bob (Alan Davies, in maximum puppy-dog mode) is a gay man. Rose (Lesley Sharp) is a straight woman. They fall in love.
Davies was attracted to the story because he was tired of TV executives trying to get him to write a more conventional tale: the midlife crisis of a married man who realises he is attracted to other men. But writing it forced him to overcome his own prejudices. “A friend of mine fell in love with a woman, and the prejudice that he faced from us gay men – and from me, I didn’t believe it for a second, I thought he was mad, I thought he was having a nervous breakdown, I thought he wanted children, I thought she wanted his money.”
He and his friends were “vile” about the relationship – “we’d meet each other on trains and sit there bitching about him” – until he finally sat down with the man and had an honest conversation. A bit drunk, at two in the morning, he asked him all the intrusive but fascinating questions that swirled around: how did they have sex? Was he still attracted to men? What happened when a hot guy walked in the room? “And he answered it all: he answered it all with ‘love’. He simply loved her.”
Yes, it's me, interviewing my bae RTD about Doctor Who, Queer as Folk and his new series on the Jeremy Thorpe case, A Very English Scandal. May I take this opportunity to urge you to go on All4 and (re)watch Queer As Folk? The first 10 minutes are a masterclass in hooking the audience.
The motherhood trap
Heti’s narrator imagines having a “drop-gorgeous child with Miles,” her partner. Yet both Miles and the narrator are also disdainful of their friends who are mothers. “They want you to be in the same boat they’re in,” he tells her. “They want you to have the same handicap they have.” For her part, Heti’s narrator sees motherhood as disabling because she believes it is used to keep women under male control. “A woman must have children because she must be occupied,” she writes. “When I think of all the people who want to forbid abortions, it seems it can only mean one thing . . . that they want woman to be doing the work of child-rearing more than they want her to be doing anything else. In this mindset, a mother’s time is taken up by child-rearing to the extent that she can be only a mother. Only when the narrator realises that her own mother has not, in fact, been swallowed up by motherhood—is, in fact, enjoying her later years, “alone in a house by the sea”—does she begin to relax.
My former colleague Stephanie on Sheila Heti's Motherhood.
Lesley Manville Has Waited Long Enough
There’s something striking about the approaches of these two actors: Mr. Day-Lewis, the method actor, giving over his own life for a year to learn to sew couture, a process that would engulf him in such a depression that he swore he’d never make another film, and the practical Ms. Manville, literally taking care of her own mending between film shoots and O’Neill scenes.
There is an assumption embedded in the figure of the artistic genius — that every faculty must be directed toward the art, leaving life behind. The genius is, of course, a designation rarely extended to women. He’s a man who can create wonderful things but can’t manage himself, so he has women do it for him. Even as she plays such women, Ms. Manville challenges all that: She is the great artist who can take care of herself and everybody else, too.
Lesley Manville, here, demonstrating that she is clearly better at acting than Daniel Day-Lewis given that she doesn't have to faff about Methoding all over the place for months before shooting starts. Daniel Day-Lewis however, clearly better at Being An Actor, which involves creating a cloud of mystique around you. And scarves.
Always here for Glenda Jackson:
Quick links:
It always weirds me out that Cannes bans flat shoes on the red carpet. I mean, just eff off.
I made it through 10 minutes of this documentary on David Mamet directing his own play before I bailed because it was making me so nervous. "WHAT'S HE DOING?" he bellows. "NOW WHAT'S SHE DOING?" No wonder actors take so many drugs.
"Did David Letterman forget about Markoe? This seems to go beyond memory lapse into disinformation. I emailed Markoe, a friend, and asked her why she thinks she may have slipped Letterman’s mind. She wrote back, “Because we were having sex, maybe he remembers me as an intern.” On Letterman and women comedy writers.
Some of you will know my strong and unfashionable opinion on prawnography (what? I need to get through spam filters). Always amazes me that the Coalition of the Perpetually Woke has so little to say about the racism which runs through the industry and the work it produces. Here's a Zeit investigation into a popular new sub-category: refugees. Grim, huh?
"I stared at the cursor. Eventually, I typed “nytimes.com” and hit enter. Like a freaking dad. The entire world of the internet, one that used to boast so many ways to waste time, and here I was, reading the news. It was even worse than working." This person is bored by the modern internet. I feel this.
Guest gif: the minute I spent looking at Obama gifs was the most relaxed I've felt all week.
See you next time!