Country Mouse
Marooned again under Lockdown 2, I find it difficult to know if we are part of a wider trend.
This time, we are abandoning the TV drama series all our friends are watching and have urged us to watch, too.
Call it Chinese Meal Syndrome or the law of diminishing returns. We gave up first on The Haunting of Bly Manor on Netflix. And now we have abandoned The Undoing.
Oldies are doubly resentful of the theft of our precious time for the simple reason that we have less of it to spare.
No offence, as they say, to The Undoing lead Hugh Grant, but am I allowed to point out the calamitous decline in his legendary good looks? Or is it simply the shock of his not having had ‘work done’, as we have come to expect of Hollywood participants?
It was eerie to see his face, juxtaposed with that of his co-star and near-contemporary Nicole Kidman, playing his wife, whose complexion was as smooth as a millpond.
Kidman wore just the one pained expression throughout, although at least her nostrils could still flare. Even Donald Sutherland’s welcome appearance as her dad was not enough to stop Mary double screening with her iphone.
‘Mary! Don’t you care who actually murdered the Hispanic flasher whose name I forget?’ We concluded that neither of us did. Navigating the oversupply of screen dramas is not easy. However, the arts documentary doesn’t tyrannise with choice – and we find it rarely disappoints.
Maggi Hambling: Making Love with the Paint was no exception to the rule. Disarming, charming, witty, serious, moving, engaging and surprising. The 75-year-old ‘controversial’ artist smoked throughout and, swigging directly from a can of it, remarked that Carlsberg Special Brew had been one of Ben Britten’s favourite drinks.
For all her clowning, cross-dressing and love of mimicry, Maggi Hambling is deadly serious about her own art. It deals directly with the eternal verities of love, death and transfiguration, as well as triumph over adversity. Hambling is bold and, unlike me, ambitious.
‘That was one of the most agreeable and intimate offerings this reviewer has had the privilege to witness,’ I told Mary – who reminded me that making off-the-cuff comments on a reality TV show does not turn me into a latter-day Sheridan Morley.
I first came across Maggi in the late 1970s at Wimbledon School of Art, where I was a student of Fine Art and Maggi was one of our tutors. Armed with a full grant, funded by generous taxpayers, I would often spend the morning in bed before taking a taxi from Wimbledon tube directly to the local tavern, Ye Olde Leathern Bottle. Here Maggi regularly joined the students for a tankard before we repaired to the life class.
In those days, it was a rarity to see a woman dressed as a man. As a then fresh-faced, provincial youth, my knowledge of lesbians was as sketchy as that of the recently sacked FA chief, Greg Clarke.
However, I had, by coincidence, recently watched The Killing of Sister George, sitting alongside my mother in our villa near Keele Service Station.
I remembered my mother’s impressing on me that lesbians were ‘always prone to violent fits of jealousy and rage’. Thus brainwashed, I was naturally at first wary of this tutor.
What was not in doubt was Maggi’s dedication as a teacher of life drawing. She has the eye and beak of a raptor – as she stalked my easel, I felt like a blue tit on a bird-feeder on the very brink of being snatched by a sparrowhawk. But her gruff exterior masks a rare sensitivity. It is merely a defence mechanism evolved against the jibes of scaffolders of that era.
She was never impatient and had a particular gift with the more difficult or ‘tortured’ art students. That’s why I was so incensed by Bel Mooney’s banal comments regarding Maggi’s recently unveiled sculptural tribute to Mary Wollstonecraft – a nude woman with what I confess is a rather bird’s-nest-like pudendum, emerging from an ectoplasmic spurt of Bacofoil.
‘Hambling is yet another ill-informed modernist who can only view the past through 21st-century sensibility,’ wrote Mooney.
What arrant nonsense. Maggi is steeped in artistic tradition. When artist-in-residence at the National Gallery, she faithfully copied the Old Masters in charcoal on paper.
She was the only tutor who, in a sea of mindless 1970s abstraction, imparted practical, artistic skills, which have stood me in good stead to this day.
My loyal mother, still interested in any aspect of her son’s life, had been viewing the documentary from her bungalow in Anglesey.
I reminded her of her 1970s warnings about lesbians and suggested she might have been guilty of the fashionable psychological crime of ‘othering’.
These days, of course, it would be the other way round. As Maggi herself commented, ‘I suppose, in the past, one did feel more of an outsider being queer. Now practically everybody’s queer. It’s become so fashionable that frankly I’m thinking of going straight.’