It’s Blanchett to the rescue in lockdown
running for Congress again, she’s helped by a Republican man who can’t keep his hands in his pockets, persistent but obviously in full pursuit.
Some may still argue these are grey areas, but Blanchett’s character tiptoes courteously through this minefield to offer some quite sensible reasons why the amendment might be bad for women. She reveals there are few laws that actually force women to do anything except in North Dakota where a wife “must have the permission of her husband to make wine”. Quite right, too.
This is a delicate, counter-intuitive way to tell a story where the issues were, as it turns out, far from clear-cut at the time
STEPHENSON’S ROCKET
WE always want comedies to be funny. Who doesn’t need a good laugh? But The Kemps: All True was well short of TV gold. It certainly needed funnier lines than the “purest pee in pop” from three-kidneys Martin Kemp (Yes, “that much is true”). The dead tortoise under the floorboards? Slow burn. The recording studio in a van? Didn’t strike a chord. Were all the jokes meant to be off-key? Real people playing themselves in a self-mocking way is far too knowing. Funniest bit? The “revelation” about Ross Kemp. Was it a hit?
(Not this one). and certainly worth revisiting as a drama. Equal rights were crashing down the road like a steamroller, and few dared to stand in their way. Schlafly does. It’s what we called free speech.
The Secrets She Keeps (BBC One, Monday) was an above-average new thriller with an unexpected face. Laura Carmichael, aka Lady Edith from Downton Abbey, was the lead. She was nothing however like the glamorous aristocrat wafting down to dinner every night in her best evening wear.
Here, she was a convincing psycho in suburban Sydney, wearing a drab pinafore uniform and armed with a mop and bucket at a greengrocers. Even Mrs Patmore wouldn’t have stooped to this and if she had done, dear Carson would have intervened and had her returned immediately to the comforts of Blighty.
But Carmichael was terribly good at mad-and-bad. For some reason, she had taken against a local lady, pregnant with her third child, who must have frequented the corner store.
So our out-of-sorts shop assistant decided (spoiler alert) to find her way into people’s attention with her own fake baby bump. I was convinced. By the end of the episode, she was inspecting a property near to the smug marrieds.what was her intention? Probably just afternoon tea with a long-bladed knife at hand.
My favourite moment? Here’s one especially for dads.when the married couple went to her father’s to celebrate his birthday, one of his lads bounded down the stairs shouting, “Dad! Have you changed the wifi password again?”
Of course he has. It’s what we dads call “fun”.