Television
Under threat
James Delingpole
The other day my wife told me she was trying to write a novel. Of course I did what any man would do in this sort of situ- ation: I had a glance at her manuscript, told her it was crap and what did women know about life anyway? Then I screwed up the bits of paper, chucked them in the fire and told the silly cow to stop wasting her time and mine. 'But it might make us a bit of extra money,' she pleaded. 'I'm man enough to keep my family,' I replied. `Don't you castrate me!'
Not really. I'm just trying to imagine what it's like being a character from a Fay Weldon drama. And I'm not exaggerating either. The scene I've just described was drawn directly from her latest novel-cum- TV-series Big Women (Channel 4, Thurs- day).
Perhaps it is a mite unfair to have a go at poor Fay after all the stick she has taken recently over those well-intentioned remarks she made (taken out of context from a Radio Times interview) on rape. But I'm going to anyway because frankly I feel threatened and disempowered. Not, I has- ten to add, by all the unpalatable truths she supposedly has to reveal about the male sex, but by the surprisingly widespread miscon- ception that she's a half-way decent writer.
Because if Fay Weldon really is a half- way decent writer, I might as well give up now. There's just no way I'm ever going to be able to come up with characters as implausible, dialogue as risible or plot-lines as absurdly melodramatic as the ones she offers us in Big Women.
Let's begin with dialogue shall we? Two spectacularly clunky examples spring to mind, both of them involving token gay characters who — this being Fay Weldon — constitute the only sympathetic males in the series. In the first, a man says of his boyfriend: 'Richard's resting again.' Now most of us will have brilliantly deduced from this that Richard is an actor. For Wel- don, however, this is not enough. So she has the character add (camply): 'He's an actor you know.' God, she must think her viewers are stupid.
And she's probably right, because I can't think of any other reason why they'd have stayed with the series as far as the third episode in time to hear Richard's boyfriend deliver the poignant line: 'We're beginning to die around you. And you haven't even noticed.' What on earth can he mean?' the stupid viewer wonders. 'The episode's set in the Eighties. Hmm. Now what might have increased gay men's mortality rate in the Eighties? The Rubik Cube? Duran Duran? The Sinclair C5?' Fortunately, Fay is on hand to elucidate. 'Aids,' someone says. But the stupid viewer is still baffled. 'The gay plague,' the person adds. Aha! Got it!
Perhaps I'm wrong — this is the first of her dramas that I've seen — but I get the impression that Fay Weldon is not a mis- tress of subtlety. If she were, she presumably wouldn't write scenes like the one in the cre- matorium where the titular big women interrupt the oppressively patriarchal male vicar's dreary address to rant noisily and lengthily about the evils of men. Sure that sort of scene makes for strong drama but is it really how women would behave at their best mate's funeral? I rather suspect not. In fact, if I were one of the sisterhood, I think I'd feel seriously betrayed by Weldon's sug- gestion that to be a strong woman you need to act like a hormonal nutter.
Yet the worrying thing is, there are peo- ple out there who actually take Weldon's work seriously: among them actresses in the league of Daniela (This Life) Nardini and Anastasia Hille (from the amazingly excellent Kavanagh QC — the series that gives middlebrow drama a good name). Why else would they have agreed to get their kit off and prance around embarrass- ingly for ten minutes in the first episode, unless they genuinely believed in the artis- tic integrity of Weldon's work?
As I say, I'm judging Weldon on the evi- dence of only one series. It could be that elsewhere she demonstrates a magisterial lightness of touch and never once allows her subtle, rounded characters to stand up like the cardboard cut-outs in Big Women and spew forth tedious political tracts.
I hope so, anyway. I may be a foul, Gaia- raping, phallus-wielding male but I still prefer to give Big Women the charitable gloss: that Fay Weldon is a wise, intelligent woman who writes exquisitely but can't be bothered because she knows she'll get paid just as well for drivel she has tossed off in ten minutes; and not the uncharitable one: that Fay Weldon is grotesquely overrated; can't write for toffee; and is so barking mad that she really believes that all men are as ghastly as the Neanderthals she portrays in Big Women. But that's enough lit. crit. I'm off to give the wife a good slapping.
Previous page
