Mr Darcy SHOULD have swum naked. There’s no greater joy than skinny dipping!
As screenwriter says he wanted Colin Firth to emerge nude from that lake ...
WHAT a moment it was for the ladies: dashing Mr Darcy, the Byronic hero of Pride And Prejudice, surveyed a shimmering lake on a hot summer’s day. Perspiration beaded his brow. He cast a languid eye at the sun and — gulp — he loosed his neckerchief, shirt straps and manly trouserings. Hold on tight, girls: smalls comin’ down. Fix binoculars.
But then came the real letdown. In the BBC TV adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel about romantic repression and inner growlings, Mr Darcy dived into the lake while still wearing his extensive underclothes. What a wuss.
We were not merely talking Y-fronts. He was wearing a capacious white shirt and a pair of long cotton pantaloons that would not have disgraced Wee Willie Winkie.
Scriptwriter Andrew Davies, speaking at the Cheltenham Literary Festival this week, let slip that the original plan was for Mr Darcy — played by good-looking Colin Firth — to discard all his clothes and swim in the nude. Quite right, too.
As an enthusiastic skinny-dipper, I have never been in any doubt that Darcy would have flung far his smalls — possibly flicking the last layer off towards the laurel bushes with a gymnastic big toe — and would then have done a joyously starkers honeypot into that lake. Geronimo!
Darcy was hot. He was at home. The water at Pemberley, his country estate in Derbyshire, was i nviting. What sensible chap, thinking himself unwatched, would want to go in wearing all those underclothes?
A few frames later, as he strides through the long grass in his damp shirt and that pair of pantaloons, now presumably as soggy as a wet nappy, the eligible Fitzwilliam Darcy bumps into Elizabeth Bennet, so pretty, so in love with him (and he with she).
SHE WAS played in the BBC version by Jennifer Ehle and Miss Ehle, at the sight of our Colin in his chemise, gulps like a blocked council drain. But as Mr Davies now tells us, it could have been so much more interesting.
‘The wet-shirt scene was intended to be a total full-frontal nudity scene because that is how guys went bathing in those days,’ we learn from the scriptwriter.
‘Darcy was a natural man, but he spent all his time being constrained by polite society. He could have a few hours when he would be blissfully alone. I thought he would strip off completely and become an animal just for once.’
Sadly, there was a feeling that the BBC’s taste wallahs — the ‘ suits’ — would not permit i t. Woundingly, Mr Davies added: ‘It may have been something about Colin’s anxiety about his l ove handles or something.’
Or something? Egad. What exactly are you trying to tell us, sir?
The BBC missed a trick and not just on grounds of viewer excitement and historical accuracy. It lost a chance to celebrate one of the great pleasures of life — namely, bathing i n the altogether. For there is nothing so liberating, so ticklishly, quiveringly, goosepimplingly pleasureable as an open-air dip in your birthday suit.
You stand at the water’s edge, a frail mortal under God’s heaven. I f wearing a pair of Speedos, you are likely to delay, to dilly- dally and quite possibly to decide not to jump in after all. Brrrr. But if you are naked, there is no time to lose.
In you go, whoosh, and at once the water swirls and tingles and refreshes the parts, as Carlsberg adverts used to say, that other leisure activities cannot reach.
I say this not as one of those proselytising naturists who is keen to rip off his clothes at the first opportunity and hold barbecue parties wearing nothing but a kitchen pinny (to safeguard against hotspitting sausages).
Nudist camps are not my idea of a fun time. They always make me t hink of bungling I nspector Clouseau when he has to visit a naturist resort in the course of his duties and deploys a guitar to strategic effect.
Nor am I particularly fond of nudie beaches, though my late Uncle Christopher, a sometime British Army officer who lived on Ibiza and opened a restaurant there, used to take me to them when I was a young man. I seem to recall that we usually bumped into his accountant and ended up discussing my uncle’s risibly small profit margins. And that is not a euphemism.
The only time I have visited an English nudist beach was by accident in Dorset, when I was f ully clothed and walking my terrier, Flip.
A naked j ogger ( male) came jiggling past and Flip chased him, jumping up at his flapping whatnot and yapping with her sharp teeth. She thought it was a game, you see. The poor bloke legged it for the horizon at the speed of Usain Bolt.
But back to nude swimming. That moment you jump into a swimming pool, buff naked, i s the most marvellous of experiences. Andrew Davies, imagining how Darcy would have felt, uses the word ‘animal’.
He is right. There is something animalistic about the sensation of the water and the bubbles. Without any encumbrance of trunks or briefs or, in the case of Colin Firth, wretched pantaloons, you can kick your legs and swim like a wriggling tadpole. Just writing about it makes me feel all skittish and free.
Nude bathing is a counterblast to modern life. We spend so many hours feeling stressed about work, fretting about bills, loading our days with appointments and duties and commitments and chores.
But in that act of launching ourselves off the diving board, wearing not a thread of clothing, covered in nothing but a few simian hairs, just like Tarzan in his jungle pool, we throw off more than our clothes. We escape the shackles of responsibility and public expectation, if only for a few, shrivellingly chilly minutes. In part it is the physical prickling of cold water on bare flesh, but in part it is something psychological, something semi-forbidden.
The 21st century is more prudish about naked bathing than was the early 19th century.
At the time Jane Austen was writing (Pride And Prejudice was published in 1813), men often bathed naked in the sea. There was a poorly enforced rule that ladies should keep a distance of 60ft, but the real-life Miss Bennets regarded that distance as being open to negotiation.
The Pall Mall Gazette, in an early-Victorian era despatch from Margate, spoke of ladies ‘viewing from the pier and the beach, through opera glasses, the antics of nude gentlemen’. When my parents ran a prep school in the 1960s, the pupils (then all boys) never wore trunks.
THERE was nothing peculiar or improper about this. People were generally less fazed by nudity. If you tried that today the educational inspectors, who seem convinced there is a pederast lurking in every stationery cupboard, would no doubt have a terrible fit of the vapours.
Perhaps we have all become a little ninnyish and feebly fretful about it today (even though, what a paradox, there has never been more pornography so nastily available).
Not that I push my luck. When taking my dips au naturel in the outdoor pool at home in rural Herefordshire, I make sure the coast is clear. We have a public right of way through our garden, and one does not want to give a group of ramblers too much of an eyeful.
So far, I have managed not to be caught mid-frolic by unsuspecting members of the public. But if that happens, I know what to do.
There is the old story about two senior clergymen at Parson’s Pleasure, the naked bathing spot on the riverbank at Oxford. A puntload of genteel ladies comes floating past.
One of the men clutches his crown jewels but the other covers his head. As he says: ‘I don’t know about you, Archdeacon, but I’m generally known by my face.’