Fading stars still dazzle
MINI series like FEUD: BETTE AND JOAN (Saturday, BBC2) are meant to evoke memories. Watching Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon slug it out as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, Hollywood grand dames losing their grandeur, you can’t help recalling a bygone age of cinema.
It might not be the films of Davis and Crawford you recall but you’ll think of films like them with strong, complex women in leading roles. You might also lose yourself in the lovingly recreated, early-Sixties look of this Emmy award-winning drama, where every detail, from the fridge handles to frocks, is spot on.
It’s the dawn of a new era and the passing of an old one that starts this mostly true story with a crisis. Drinking too much, trying to keep her skin in suspended animation with sinkfuls of witch hazel and ice cubes, Crawford watches new starlet Marilyn Monroe lap up press attention.
She might be bitter but it hasn’t clouded her insight and she knows tastes have changed. She also knows she needs to earn money. She visits her agent, asks him for jobs, he offers her the part of Elvis’s grandmother. Methodically, she orders up a mountain of books with women in them and starts reading.
She finds Henry Farrell’s novel, Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? about a pair of ageing Hollywood stars holed up in a crumbling mansion, bound together by hate, guilt and alcoholism. She persuades Bette Davis, a similarly fading star by this time, to join her, despite the fact that she loathes her and that the loathing is mutual.
The rest as they say is history, or a bit of history plus gossip, myth and good writing. It’s a yarn with pace and depth and anything that offers you two famous actresses, playing two famous actresses, playing two famous actresses, deserves a round of applause.
Ryan Murphy’s script is stuffed with great lines too. When gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Judy Davis) wined and dined the pair, trying to get a whiff of the rivalry, they blanked her, making out they were great pals before asking what was for dessert.
“We’ll skip it,” snarled Hopper. “I’m already getting diabetes.” The first two episodes, back to back as BBC2 screened them, wouldn’t have disgraced the cinema, now or in the Thirties. There’s another six episodes to go, though, and that might be a problem.
Close to the end of the first hour, I was tiring of the tit-for-tat snipes, the manoeuvres and the outmanoeuvres. Somewhere by the middle of the second, I felt it might not be memories of classic films being stirred in me but more Tom And Jerry.
Broadcast in a Sunday teatime slot, BORN SILLY (C4) seems to be Channel 4’s bid to get the pre-teens on board. It’s Candid Camera for kids, with parents colluding as stunts are pulled on unsuspecting youngsters.
Aimed at the younger audience, there’s an earthy strain to the humour, with one little girl being duped by a talking, flatulent goat, and a brother and sister pair in a TV shop, suddenly seeing their dad, in 68-inch, panoramic technicolour, sitting on the loo.
They were generous enough to giggle at this but in general, the pay-off reactions of the kids were disappointing. There’s an obvious reason for this. To be a child is to be bewildered by the world. Whether a goat talks or a man gives you an eye pad instead of the promised iPad, none of it’s that surprising.