From 8:10 PM to 9:40 PM, it was often hard to tell which part of you was being stimulated more by Sherlock: the eyes, or the brain. For while the script bounced along with a winning combination of screwball, rat-tat-tat dialogue and parkour-like plot leaps, Paul McGuigan’s direction was of movie-like sumptuousness. You lost count of the moments that looked a million dollars. A shot from above of Mycroft (Mark Gatiss) closing his umbrella, and ducking into a café, out of the rain, had a sense of choreography to it; 221b Baker Street has never looked more sumptuous.
McGuigan seemed to particularly revel in the scene where Adler—trying to retrieve her phone—jammed a syringe into Sherlock’s arm, and he floated off into a wiggy state of narcoleptic wooze. As Sherlock collapsed backwards, drugged, the camera rotated once, twice beside him—sometimes you couldn’t tell if he were falling up, or down. As he finally came in to land, his face was the same color as the white-waxed floorboard he was bouncing off.
Here, in a dream, Holmes found himself on a moor—Adler beside him, on a chaise longue. They were two incongruous, pale, elegant town creatures in all this brutal, wet green. Holmes could still not speak: insensible on barbiturates, his bed rose up out of the moss like a benign tombstone, and Holmes fell upon it, winking out of consciousness, carried into the next scene.
It was as distractingly beautiful a piece of cinematography as you’re ever likely to see, and—accompanied by David Arnold and Michael Price’s lush, weeping soundtrack—left you walking away from the television after ninety minutes feeling like you’d just been fed lobsters, champagne and truffles through your brain.
The day after broadcast, an ill-tempered kerfuffle kicked off across a couple of blogs, accusing Moffat’s script of misogyny. Irene Adler had ended up being rescued by Holmes, the argument went. She fell in love with him and then had to be rescued by him, like some courtesan Snow White. Obviously, as a strident feminist, my “Misogyny Alarm” is always on red-alert—but I have to say, it didn’t ding once during Sherlock; save for a momentary sigh over just how many high-class call girls I’ve seen on television over the years (approximately six million), compared to the amount I’ve actually met (none).
For Sherlock is a detective story, not a news show. It doesn’t care about statistics, and nor should it. All I could see were two damaged people making a mess of each other’s lives, while Martin Freeman did his patented “Martin Freeman eyebrows” from the sidelines. And, obviously, some of the best television this country has ever produced.
Two of the biggest-hitting columns in this book—on my hair.
I WISH TO COPYRIGHT MY HAIR
I cannot, in my life, claim to have invented many things. No medicinal breakthrough. No plastic compounds. No movement in figure skating. True, I was part of a committee of fat children in the Midlands who conceived, in 1988, of the Cheese Lollipop—around 50g of cheap Cheddar speared on a fork, and sucked on during marathons of CBBC classic Cities of Gold—but I was just a cog, though a rather large cog, in amongst other equally gifted and gigantic cogs. It’s also true that I was part of that same committee of fat children who, having all moved into their adolescence, came up with the Sherry Cappuccino one desperate Christmas. The curdled layers of Nescafe and Somerfield Ruby will live on in the minds of all those who experienced it. Indeed, they probably also live on in the cups we used. It was viscous stuff.
That aside, however, it’s clear that, in a version of It’s a Wonderful Life where I took the James Stewart role, and plunged suicidally off the bridge, Bedford Falls would simply shrug, and carry on with the eggnog, same as they always did. I haven’t really contributed to mankind’s magnificent struggle one iota.
However, there is one meager, paltry innovation I feel I can lay claim to in my otherwise uncreative life, and that is my hair. On Halloween 2003—note the date, hair historians, as I’m sure there must be, somewhere. Maybe at De Montford University, Leicester—I made drunkenly merry with a can of spray-in gray hair paint. On waking in the morning, I looked in the mirror, and was astonished at what I saw. What I saw was The Hair of My Life. The Hair of My Soul. I had one icy whoosh of hair over my left eye. A blue-gray streak. A frosted lock. It looked a bit Eleanor Bron, a bit Morticia, a bit the wise monkey elder in The Lion King. Clearly, this was the Recipe of Me. I went to the hairdressers, and got them to make me semi-gray permanently.
For the first three years, me and my hair were very happy. True, old people were apt to come up to me at bus stops and commiserate (“Ooooh, you’re like me. I went completely gray at twenty-nine, after I had shingles. You want to get yourself one of those dye-jobbies from Boots.”), but I felt I was on some kind of Hair Quest. I felt I was pushing the boundaries. I felt I was creative.
Then the bomb fell. Last summer, my brother Eddie—the maverick Cheese Lollipop committee member who, in 1988, had suggested we concentrate our cutlery research solely on the fork—rang me from Brighton.
“I’ve just seen a woman with your hair,” he said. “In Peacocks,” he added. “Buying leggings.”
Initially, I was flattered. I visit Brighton quite a lot. It was not outside the realms of possibility that this woman had seen my hair, and simply been inspired. I couldn’t blame her. I am in the possession of hair dynamite.
Then my sister, also in Brighton, rang a month later.
“I’ve seen FIVE WOMEN with your hair,” she blurted out, immediately.
At this point, I must admit, I felt bad. These women had, fairly obviously, not copied their hair from me. They had copied it from the woman who copied me. They did not know their hair history.
The way things were going, there was every chance that my hair would go down in history as “origin unknown.”
Then, a week before the end of the school term, things escalated dramatically, albeit mainly in my mind. Outside the school gates one morning—as startling as the sight of a polar bear—there was a mother with my hair. On my own territory! Bold as the slightly brassy gray tone her—clearly inferior—hairdresser had come up with!
While dealing with the fear of dying in hair-dying obscurity had been unpleasant, this new scenario was a different kettle of fish altogether. I think all women know what another woman stealing your signature style means. I recalled, from my teenage years, my friend Julie’s fury on noting that a female classmate had appropriated her then-trademark—a Puffa jacket, worn with badges on the elasticated hem.
“It’s war,” she said, flatly, smoking a cigarette in Burger King, as you could, in those days.
And of course, this hair-stealing woman was, indeed, declaring war on me. For who would ever copy the hairstyle of someone they saw every day, if they thought they looked worse with it? The hair-stealing mother believed my hair looked better on her. That it was, by and large, a good hairdo, but ruined by the addition of my face. She was dissing me. This was clearly the act that would lead to the outbreak of war.
But just how does one fight a Hair War? Unsatisfyingly, this is the question I am currently stuck on, with another five weeks of the summer holidays to go, until I face my follicular nemesis again. The way I see it, I’ve got only three options. 1) Kill her—the sensible but possibly immoral option. 2) Kill myself—irresponsible, given my prominence in the pick-up rotation. 3) Get an entirely new do—frankly, I might as well be asked to traverse to Mordor to cast the One Ring into the Crack of Doom. I’m thirty-two. I’m too old for that kind of quest. This is the hair, for better or worse, I will die with.
So here I am, backed into a hair standoff I never asked for. I can’t believe there aren’t government guidelines on this kind of thing. I’m tearing my hair out.
So that’s the color. But what about the size?
CHICKS WITH BIG HAIR ARE MY CHICKS
Until the age of twenty-five, the biggest fear in my life was that I would go bald. If I considered it for even one second, I had the kind of sweaty, spiralling panic tha
t other people describe on being stuck in pot holes, or standing at the top of the Empire State Building.
My fear of hair loss was based in cool analysis of fact: as a teenage girl, I was quietly unappealing.
“You have a round, ruddy face, such as a peasant’s,” my sister told me, at one point, using her “helpful” voice. “Like a Halloween pumpkin—but not as sexy.”
As we were also poor, I didn’t have the resources—such as fashion, makeup, or cocaine—to increase my allure to the viewing eye. Simply, then, my hair was a precious commodity—as I could grow it very, very long. Long hair is pretty much the only beauty you can acquire if you have no money at all.
By the time I was thirteen, my hair was down to my hips. I had tended it assiduously. Nothing was too good for it. I would sit around, eating jam sandwiches, whispering, “Grow! Grow!” at my head, in what I deemed to be a voice encouraging to follicles.
At one point, I read in a nineteenth-century guide to beauty that rinsing with a beaten raw egg would add luster and shine. Consequently, I spent nearly two years walking around with an eggy, slightly sulphurous air. I was less “nymphette,” and more “omelette.”
Over these years of intense hair cultivation—I was essentially a “hair farmer,” tending the hairfield on my head—my focus shifted, slowly but significantly, from having “long” hair, to wanting “big” hair.
“This is basically a ‘hair cape,’ ” I realized, looking down, when I was around fifteen. “I look like Captain Caveman. I don’t need length. What I need, is width. This hair needs to be predominantly based on my head. I’m going bouffy.”
Turning, again, to my nineteenth-century guide to beauty, I noted that Victorian women would achieve their gigantic updos by padding out their hair with “rats”: tiny pillows they would pin to their heads, and then arrange their own hair over, in a series of billows, knots and waves.
Keen to have my hair in an updo the size of a hat, I started to use “rats” myself. At the time, however, the only things I could find in the house that approximated “rats” were the tissue-paper liners for the terrycloth diapers my mother used on the babies.
While seeming, at first, to be securely fixed to my head, these liners would regularly fall out while I stood at bus stops, walked through parks, tried to purchase goods at a grocery store, etc. Then I, and anyone else around, would all stare at what appeared to be a giant sanitary napkin on the floor, which had just fallen out of my head.
“My rats,” I would explain. It never seemed to make things better.
In the years since, I have, thank God, worked out how to satisfy my Hair Larging urges in a slightly more practical way—essentially by taking half the length off, then backcombing for ten minutes solidly every morning, in the way other people do yoga, or walk the dog.
As I joyfully embiggen myself into the vague silhouette of Chewbacca, I have time to reflect on just what it is about big hair that I find so elementally appealing.
Firstly, there is the obvious matter of perspective. By having big hair, it makes my body look smaller in comparison. As far as an aid to looking slimmer goes, this is the easiest one ever conceieved of. No fad diets, corsetry, optical illusion spray tanning, or artful couture: just a massive do.
Secondly, when it comes to wanting to look glamorous, there’s something winningly practical about having huge hair. Heels cripple you; the bugle-beading on an expensive dress will chafe. Huge hair, on the other hand, can’t fall off. You never leave you hair in the back of a cab. It’s unbreakable, unstealable, and, most importantly of all, costs nothing. Aimed with a comb, you can whip your do up like egg-whites into a gigantic hair meringue, without it costing you a penny. Big hair is the party-do Marx would have backed, for sure.
And finally, while I am not prejudiced against people with small hair—as far as I know, there as never been any “small hair on big hair” violence recorded on “the streets”; we are not in conflict—there’s something about big-haired chicks that makes me instantly inclined to like them. The iconography of big-haired women is compelling: cackling bar-maids in tight leopardskin; Rizzo in Grease, backcombing in the school toilets; Tracy in Hairspray wailing “But our First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, rats her hair!” when the teachers condemn her beehive. Dusty. Alexis Colby-Carrington. Winehouse.
It’s the hair of the working-class girl on the make; on the town. A party helmet. A gigantic hair aura, indicating holy razziness—such as the Virgin Mary would have had, if she’d been in the Ronettes.
Hair takes us, naturally and easily, to the most famous hair of the twenty-first century. Not my own, alas—although it is something I am working on all the hours that God sends—but that of the Duchess of Cambridge, née Kate Middleton, our future Queen of England.
The Royal Wedding in March, 2011 was one of the big media events of the last ten years. Broadcasters and newspapers the world over wondered just how they could make their coverage truly reflect the grandeur, history and emotion of this occasion. On the one hand, this was something that would be included in encyclopedias, and be thought to reflect upon the age. On the other—two young, cheerful people in love. How best to report on this juddering disparity? How? HOW?
Thankfully, I knew: just write down everything Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet said on Twitter throughout the ceremony.
THE BEST ROYAL WEDDING EVER
It might have been a Royal Wedding but, really, there was no pressure.
Should William and Kate have turned on ITV1’s Six O’Clock News the night before their wedding—perhaps in their bathrobes, in face packs, eating Shreddies—presenter Julie Etchingham would have soothed their nerves:
“This wedding,” Etchingham said, standing outside Buckingham Palace, “is an opportunity for optimism about the future—in a moment when our history is marked by tough economic times at home, and DISASTER and DEATH all around the world.”
Well. That is quite an implication to take on board: that your wedding will, in some way, negate the effect of the Fukushima nuclear plant leak. However confident in your frock, finger buffet and vodka ice luge you may initially have been, it’s got to be a bit of a jolt when the news tells you that your nuptials have the perceived ability to counteract radioactivity.
But the joy of something like a Royal Wedding, of course, is that everyone does go a little bit nuts around it. Last week wasn’t a normal week. It was like the last day of the school year, or Friday at Glastonbury: everything upside down. Nothing usual. The shops ran out of bunting, lager and charcoal, the news disappeared from papers and TV, and what would normally be a workday turned into a holiday where it was perfectly acceptable to be sitting on the sofa at 11 AM, blind drunk, using an enormous foam rubber Union Jack hand to ferry peanuts to your mouth.
And so it was that the eve of the Royal Wedding had all the novelty of the day you move house—displacing all your usual objects and routines, and ending up with a supper of sardines and marmalade in the front garden, using only tablespoons. Odd conversations happened. On Thursday’s episode of political show This Week, for instance, Richard Madeley claimed that the next day would see the marriage “consummated” at Westminster Abbey—an event inexplicably left out of The Times’s souvenir fourteen-page Order of Service.
Later in the show, presenter Andrew Neil asked him if he, Madeley, would “Get rid of Charles, and make William king?”
Madeley replied, “Well if he was gaga, obviously,” with the kind of breezy certainty that suggested that, should our heir apparent actually “go gaga,” Madeley would step up to the plate and finish Charles off with a spade, as if he were an old badger knocked down by a car.
As the sun set on April 28th, 2011, it was clear that this was a day that would live on in everyone’s mind as the day Kerry Katona [@KerryKatona] tweeted, “Best of luck Kate and Wills. Hope it doesn’t end like my last two,” and Jeff Brazier [@JeffBrazier] (former boyfriend of the late
Jade Goody, of Big Brother fame) made his big Royal Wedding statement: “Wills, I think your missus is fit. And for that reason, I just want to say, ‘Well done.’ ”
Friday April 29, 2011
8:35 AM. It seemed that Kate Garraway had got the short straw: ITV1 had sent her out of London, away from the wedding, to Buckleberry—home of the Middletons. This is Middletonia. Middletonaria. Middletonton.
In a strapless dress and slightly incongruous furry bolero cardigan—it was colder than everyone thought it would be—Garraway was sitting outside Buckleberry’s pub, surrounded by locals. One of them was holding a giant rabbit, which is wearing a Union Jack top hat.
“Buckleberry has become the center of the universe!” Garraway said—patently not true either in terms of the wedding (those international news crews aren’t camped outside Westminster Abbey for nothing) or the composition of the universe (it has no observable center).
We cut away from Garraway to the crowds lining the Mall. A huge cheer had gone up, and the director clearly wished to see what it was. Alas—it was a huge Portapotty-emptying truck, at which the crowds were cheerfully and ironically waving their Union Jack flags. British crowds know exactly how to behave on a Big Day such as this, when the eyes of the world are upon them. You cheer the oomska-wagon with just as much fervor as you would cheer Princess Michael of Kent. It’s one of the sly perks of being a subject.
Class-based bitchiness, meanwhile, is one of the sly perks of being a TV news anchor. Alistair Stewart had been outside the Goring Hotel since 6 AM, reporting on the nothing-happening emptiness that would, eventually, be stepped into by Kate Middleton on her way to the Abbey.
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