I’m on a new bender.
…It’s almost as good as alcohol.
Current obsession is now OFF the Holocaust and back ON the Brits.
…This is due in large part to saving my sanity. And finally streaming Call the Midwife, (which everyone has told me I needed to have already watched six months ago, and only took me this long because it has to do with things medical, and I hate medical things.)
Once I used up all my French and Saunders options by mid-weekend (together and separately), I decided to give it a “go” anyway.
…And it’s fantastic.
…Which is a no-brainer when you immediately see in the opening credits that Heidi Thomas co-writes and produces it. (Goddess of Pen-and-Ink who gave us Cranford.) The woman just has freak skilz in period pieces…I’m telling you. It’s her, and Bill Gallagher’s work on Lark Rise to Candleford for best of the current adaptation artists, and Julian Fellowes for freakishly just inventing shit that seems like it was.
(Damn you Downton and your cocking cliff-hangers!)
…Anyway…
…By late last night (aka very early this morning), I was travelling over to linked “suggestions” in my Netflix streamer, all of which I had seen before… popping me onto the Janet McTeer train with Songcatcher , which forced me back into Albert Nobbs, (a film she totally stole from Glenn Close, great pal, or not…) …filling in with supplemental YouTubing interviews, which lead to her theatre work, and haunting her ridiculously stellar reviews and character insights study time as Nora in A Dolls House (for which she won everything you can win in every country she played it in)…then phasing naturally into that one time she and Harriet Walter were the warring queens (literally) of West-End and Broadway.
…Which brought The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, after work, slamming a shit-ton of her stuff onto my Amazon wishlist, and now coming a sort of odd full circle with Daphne.
…Which in the world of Kevin Bacon-law, links both McTeer, Lady Cora Crawley (née Elizabeth McGovern), a Julian Fellowes double hit via Geraldine Somerville (of Gosford Park fame), overt society excess, theatre, creative process, war, and the lavender leanings lifestyle, into a freak-world where all of my recent projects and obsessions eventually converge (like they almost always do.)
Its like swimming in a giant pool of irony.
On total accident.
…Weird.
…But awesome.
…And just goes to prove how totally influential my “teachers” are. Giant Janet McTeer amongst ‘em.
…So…off now I go, to watch her 6’1″ Amazon frame, dwarf tiny Geraldine Somerville. As a most excellent Gertie Lawrence, in a shameless, camptastic display of everything-excess.
Ta-ta, kids.
~D