Show + tell: Paul Flynn’s top telly
Catch up with the vintage Widows – the gritty ’80s drama, with its brassy female criminals, is perfection
EAGLE- EYED VIEWERS of Steve Mcqueen’s hit film Widows will have noticed a pertinent early cameo. Widows debuted as an episodic TV drama in 1983, the story of four London broads left partner-less after their gangster spouses mess up a heist in a Waterloo underpass. As they conjoin to take on the next job themselves, their ringleader is the redoubtable Dolly Rawlins (Ann Mitchell), a formidable cross between Lady Macbeth, a Queen Vic landlady and several cans of flammable hairspray. Mitchell’s appearance in the film is as brief as it is significant.
The TV Widows, now streaming in honour of the film, has accrued the value of a time capsule. Mitchell is flawless in it, giving widowhood itself a fuming new flavour. It was the first British crime caper where women were the criminals. It was written and produced by Lynda La Plante, whose attention to detail turned her into the ’80s Agatha Christie of ITV, with added fishnets and swearing. The seeds of the ground-breaking work she later put in with Prime Suspect are planted in Widows. Hers are women you don’t mess with. They are hard as nails and twice as glamorous, manning the change stall at a Soho arcade, dusting the crystal in a mock- Georgian Totteridge pile or swigging back a whisky to give them the Dutch courage to laugh in the face of gender expectations.
The original Widows was drawn in an age where bent coppers wore tight flannels, gangsters cavorted malevolently with rent boys and everybody smoked. The widows’ wardrobe looked like a mood board for Hedi Slimane’s career. Underneath is a reminder of the power of story-telling when women are handed complete control. The most compelling character in Mcqueen’s Chicago retelling is Daniel Kaluuya’s terrifying gangster. His Dolly, renamed Veronica Rawlins, is more passive, grieving and hounded. Dolly was just quietly, stoically livid.
Mcqueen’s tenderness for La Plante’s story is recalled by direct reference – the widows meeting in a sauna, objectification of the protagonist’s dog. But like A Star Is Born, there is simply no touching the original Widows, a crime drama woven from pre-gentrification London and the fabulous brassy chicks who ran it. The film is good. The TV series, perfection. Streaming now on Amazon Prime