Month: September 2017

Goodbye, Mr Bennet

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COLIN FIRTH may have been many people’s idea of the ultimate Mr Darcy in the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice.

And Jennifer Ehle was a particularly spirited Elizabeth Bennet.

But deserving of equal praise should be Benjamin Whitrow, who has just died aged 80, as an occasionally weary-looking Mr Bennet. He was nominated for a BAFTA for the rôle.

Who can forget his grave expression, with a just-perceptible twinkle in his eye, when Mrs Bennet threatens never to speak to Elizabeth again after she refuses her absurd cousin Mr Collin’s offer of marriage?

He adds: “Well, there you are, Lizzie, an unhappy alternative is before you. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr Collins and I will never see you again if you do.”

Audiobooks let the listener’s imagination take charge

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While listening to an audiobook you can conjure up your own images — what the characters look like, how they’re dressed, what kind of landscape the story is set in.

When these stories are transferred to television or film some of the magic can disappear.

I remember a long time ago listening to a radio version of Johanna Spyri’s classic children’s book Heidi, a story of an orphaned girl who goes to live with the grumpy grandfather in the Swiss alps.

Then, the same story appeared on television, and I was quite cross. The Heidi and the grandfather were from someone else’s imagination, not mine, and they didn’t seem right to me.

But I still remember the radio version in detail.

Similarly Barbara Sleigh’s The Kingdom of Carbonel (“the King of the Cats”) and Audrey Feist’s Wind Whistle Farm.

Thankfully, neither of these made it to television, so my childhood memories haven’t been shattered. But I still remember the “thump squeak” sound of the wooden leg of the evil Clint limping along the floorboards in Wind Whistle Farm and Mrs Catnip, the retired witch, from The Kingdom of Carbonel (the first time I came across the word “widdershins”).

Memoirs from Mrs Hudson’s Kitchen

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MRS HUDSON is possibly the most famous landlady in literature — presiding over the comings and goings of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson at 221b Baker Street in London.

She meets the clients, the villains and the Baker Street Irregulars, and gives her views on Victorian society — and women’s roles and rights — and explores the recipes she would have prepared for her famous lodgers.

Taken from a long-running series of columns in the Sherlockian journal Canadian Holmes.

 

Kirstie is miffed

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Kirstie Allsopp, doyenne of Channel 4’s long-running Location, Location, Location property search programme, is “slightly miffed” that her fellow presenter Phil Spencer is inundated with voiceover work, and she isn’t.

Perhaps it’s her “Sloaney” accent, she thought.

But no, says her agent (incidentally the same one as Spencer) . . . it’s basic psychology.

Most buying decisions are taken by women, apparently — and women don’t like to be told what to buy by other women.

Hmmm.

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