I got around to a bit of it today. I've been telling myself for some time to clear out our bedroom. I have clothes that date back to the time when I wore suits to work, through the time when I wore joggers 24 hours at a time. They were stuffed deep in the wardrobe, in a chest, in those shallow boxes you keep under the bed, and (hope my Mum-in-Law doesn't read this) piled on the floor. Added to this, I think I've never thrown away a pair of shoes. I have a tall laundry basket full of old ones I never use. Today, I made a beginning, clearing the wardrobe. It was easier than I thought, although I went through things one at a time, I threw away everything except two unworn pairs of trousers (size 12, imagine me in a size 12!) which I gave to the children.
I also kept a jumper. Monsoon. Pink knitted cotton with buttons sewn on to form a heart shape at the centre. It had been Nina's favorite, she wore it for years and I had held on to it. I never kept any of the children's baby clothes. While they were small we were all living in a one bedroom flat and didn't have the space. I'm not too sentimental about things in general in any case. The jumper carries some poignancy though. A pink flash of pre-pubescence, pre exams, pre employment, pre serious boyfriend, pre grown-up.
My grown -up Nina rang me to let me know that she had the option of tickets, thanks to her volunteering work for Oxfam, for an audience with Andrew Davies if I was interested. "I knew you'd be up for it" she said, when I stopped gushing. Andrew Davies, author and screen writer was responsible for the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (the Firth and Ehle version). That's my all time favorite TV thing of all time, ever ever ever. He's done loads of other stuff I like too, including Middlemarch, Tipping the Velvet, Bleak House, and most recently Little Dorritt. I was sky-high with excitement.
It turned out amusing and, if I'm honest, a teensy bit disappointing. Nina, Holly and I met up with the rest of the Oxfam contingent at the Library. I was glad to see my Oxfam friends, who I hardly ever see these days although I worked there on and off for three years. Everyone seems unchanged, A a little more gaunt perhaps. We made up around a third of the audience, the front of which was a sea of permed hair and cardigans. How strange human demographics are.
Andrew Davies has every right to be smug, and that's how he came across. It was as though he had himself written Pride and Prejudice without any help from Jane Austen at all. He drew attention to the parts of his work that I had thought were the weakest, the prettying up of drab female characters, and the beefing up of the male, the heavy-handed sexualising of the relationships. These cliches were his triumphs it seems. Most amusingly, towards the end, a member of the audience asked him how he avoided cliches. He had just described his invention of a rainy wood chopping scene invented to give a reason for a female character's attraction to a male. There surely could never have been a greater cliche. This was topped by another question, "What prompted you to take up writing?" The answer: because I wanted to have my own voice, I thought I could do it better.
I still love the man's work. My sneering is the product of my own envy. Andrew Davies is highly skilled and successful. He can afford to be confident in his ability and if that comes across as arrogance, he's earned it. I don't know who first said 'never meet your heroes', but they were right. I came away bemused, and regretting that I had gone. Some of the magic of those truly great dramatisations had been lost for me.
Oh, and I would like to point out that the exclamation mark I used further up the page there, I meant it. Me, a size 12? Who would believe it now?
No comments:
Post a Comment