My favourite film aged 12: Mrs Doubtfire
Robin Williams was a constant presence in my life growing up – he was Genie in Aladdin and Alan in Jumanji, when I got older he was Armand in The Birdcage and Adrian in Good Morning Vietnam. He was cool and funny, and he somehow managed to be a kid and an adult at the same time (it wasn’t an accident he played a 40-year-old Peter Pan in Hook and an 10-year-old adult in Jack). I watched every single thing he made, and every new film I saw reinforced my belief that a) we would be friends, b) he was the funniest person alive and c) he had a big heart. In Chris Columbus’s Mrs Doubtfire he managed to embody all the things that I loved about him, plus … he plays a crossdressing divorcee dad in a tartan skirt.
When I was younger my dad used to drive me down the road to Upfront video every Saturday so I could rent a VHS. I watched Mrs Doubtfire one Saturday in 1994 on a battered paisley sofa in our living room. I watched it again the next morning before we had to return it. Then I saved up and bought my own VHS with my pocket money, and watched it again. I started secondary school. I watched it again. My parents got divorced. I watched it again.
Daniel Hillard is a struggling actor using his considerable talent for impressions to do voice work, while being a husband and father to three kids. The film opens with Daniel being fired from his job voicing a cartoon parrot called Pudgy after a crisis of conscience during recording, when he refuses to voice Pudgy enjoying chuffing on a cigar. “Millions of kids are watching this, Hal!” he protests to his producer. Hal’s response (fag in mouth) is “If you wanna play Gandhi, do it on somebody else’s time!”, so after a quick Ben Kingsley impression, Daniel walks out. William’s character is set out within two minutes of the opening credits – this guy cares about kids.
It happens to be his son’s birthday that day, so Daniel’s (questionable) response to losing his job is to make the snap decision to hire an entire petting zoo to come to his house. Sally Field plays Daniel’s frustrated wife, Miranda. Miranda has already organised a nice dinner and a birthday cake for her son’s birthday, so when she gets home after being at work all day to discover her house covered in streamers, her jobless husband dancing on a table to House of Pain, a horse in her garden, and a goat eating her sofa cushions, it is unsurprisingly the straw that breaks the camel’s back, and she files for divorce. At the court hearing, the judge gives Daniel 90 days to sort his life out – get a job and a house, be a stable father figure or you won’t see your children again.
Daniel moves into a flat by himself, and while looking for a job learns that Miranda is looking for a housekeeper.
In yet another questionable decision (he makes a lot of these), he asks his drag queen brother to fashion him a prosthetic face mask and give him tips on dressing as a woman, before bulkbuying a load of cardigans and deciding to impersonate an elderly Scottish nanny to get the housekeeper job. My 12-year-old self was fine with this – “Sure Daniel, disguising yourself as an old lady to trick your ex-wife into letting you inside her house sounds like a great plan! Can you do another impression please?”
Thus is born Mrs Doubtfire – the perfect nanny, airlifted into the Hillards’
lives to help the kids with their homework, clean the house while Miranda is at work and cook dinner when she gets home. There is a joyous hoovering montage set to Aerosmith’s Dude (Looks Like a Lady), and at one point Mrs Doubtfire plays football with the kids – and as an adult, the idea of Robin Williams running around a park in a dress shouting “Goal!” in a Scottish falsetto sounds like the product of a particularly intense fever dream. Marriage Story this ain’t.
Having a bit of help with the kids also means Sally Field has the time to pursue a fledgling romance with everyone’s favourite hairy-chested Irish Bond, Pierce Brosnan. Tanned, whitetoothed, and possessing a bottomless collection of light-coloured linen suits, Brosnan tries his best to charm Miranda while being negged by a 60-year-old nanny.
Robin Williams obviously had a gift for physical comedy, and the slapstick comes thick and fast – a social worker visits Mrs Doubtfire at home after Daniel’s prosthetic mask has been run over by a lorry, forcing him to dunk himself in a cake to conceal his face. Hilarity ensues. There are fake boob jokes when he leans too close to the stove while cooking breakfast (“This hollandaise smells like burnt rubber”). Hilarity ensues. Daniel juggles two simultaneous dinner dates in a restaurant while dressed as both himself and Mrs Doubtfire, running between two tables and necking cocktails. Hilarity ENSUES.
When I was 12, I loved this film with every fibre of my being. This was in part because it made me laugh, but also because it has a big heart. Daniel Hillard is a cross-dressing Mary Poppins, and he becomes a much better father and human being than he ever was before he started wearing a tartan skirt and fake breasts. Eventually Mrs Doubtfire gets her own kids’ TV show, on which she responds to letters from viewers. A 12-year-old girl writes in asking about her parents getting separated, and if she’s going to “lose her family”. Robin Williams in full drag looks straight at the camera and starts a two-minute monologue. “Some parents, when they’re angry, they get along much better when they don’t live together. But if there’s love, dear, those are the ties that bind, and you’ll have a family in your heart, for ever. You’re going to be alright, poppet.”
I was 12 when Mrs Doubtfire taught me that if you’re a kid and you’re worried times are going to be tough, that’s true – sometimes they are. But don’t worry … everything’s going to be alright.
of something. But who knows? Maybe that sort of thing will shift and change. It needs to be a societal shift.”
When societal shifts happen in Black Mirror – which migrated from Channel 4 to Netflix and was praised by the novelist Stephen King as “terrifying, funny, intelligent” – they usually come with a dark twist. The season-four episode Metalhead features a post-apocalyptic future where humans are hunted by robot dogs (“almost like a tone poem of bleakness,” he says). Brooker has little appetite to write in that vein right now, but points out that Black Mirror can be uplifting too – San Junipero was a love story with a happy ending – so we should not necessarily give up on a sixth season.
“I’m not writing stories about societies falling apart at the moment, so read into that what you will. If you look at classic dystopian stories, it becomes every man for himself immediately. Actually, in this crisis, what’s happened is you’re more likely to be sitting indoors watching Tiger King and worrying that your neighbour’s OK and asking to see if they need you to bring in a bag of potatoes or whatever. What’s actually happening at the moment is much more cohesive and heartening.
“At the moment, if you were trying to write a story about a pandemic sweeping the world and everyone immediately turning on each other, plenty of people would look at that and go: ‘Well, that isn’t what’s happened.’ So there’s plenty of room for bleak stories and horror movies – it’s just I think you’ve got to approach it slightly differently.”
Brooker was summed up on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs as: “Sardonic, deadpan, scabrous and snarky ... and he’s really got it in for politicians.” But now a dad in his mellow fifth decade, it turns out he even has a place in his heart for Boris Johnson – up to a point.
“If you look at Boris Johnson getting ill, when he was in intensive care, I’m not a fan of Boris Johnson but I was worried about him on some level. He’s a human being with a kid on the way. Worrying about that doesn’t mean you’re not worried about everything else. It doesn’t mean you’re not critical of things he’s done or decisions he’s taken. And also it doesn’t give him a get-out-of-jail-free card. Now he’s back in the saddle, it doesn’t mean you can’t criticise the decisions that he’s made.”
Brooker’s assessment of Johnson as prime minister is unflattering. “I’m not a fan of the new, sort of slightly bolshie shrugging off of the truth that happens, the way they slightly adopted the fake news. Dominic Cummings swanning out of his house and telling journalists that they’re all rich remainers. It’s a sort of gaslighting that goes on.
“That feels to me like a new thing, or a new sort of shamelessness, which I hope goes into a great big burning bin. And I hope everybody involved in that eventually finds themselves nowhere near any position of power or employment. If I think about that for more than 20 seconds, I can get very cross indeed.”
Brooker’s imagination prepared him well for the world-changing pandemic. How does he feel about an event that can be predicted with absolute certainty next year: his 50th birthday? “I’m resigned to it now, I guess,” he says. “I remember turning 30 that was: ‘Oh my God, I’m going to be 30,’ and then that was OK, that was almost: ‘Oh, actually, hang on, I’m still young.’ Turning 40 was a bit more like: ‘Oh no, this isn’t great.’
“In my head I’ve been 50 for a while so I think I’m going to deal with it. But that’s probably why I’m going out running and trying to use pull-up bars, because I’m desperately trying to not die. But then, we all are.”
Charlie Brooker’s Antiviral Wipe will be on BBC Two on Thursday at 9pm