QUAINT MIS

It’s nearly a thing of beauty, but the true story of how Women’s Libbers hijacked Miss World in 1970 can’t work out if it’s comedy or social history

Misbehaviour (12A) Verdict: Knock-kneed sexism drama ★★★✩✩

The Hunt (15) Verdict: Faintly deplorable ★★✩✩✩

Afew years ago I wrote a book about growing up in front of the telly in the Seventies, and devoted a chapter to my unmissable annual date with Miss world.

even relatively enlightened families, which I like to think ours was, loved to sit down and extol Miss Denmark’s legs, while rubbishing Miss Paraguay’s nose. Or whatever.

My mother was just as hooked as my dad and I were. She worked full-time and was strongly in favour of equal rights for women, but if it ever occurred to her that beauty contests were degrading, she certainly never said so.

In fact, she had a much keener eye for the slightest physical flaws than we did. for some reason, a condition known medically as genu valgum was her speciality.

‘Just wait until you see Miss Argentina in the swimwear round,’ she used to say. ‘She’s terribly knock-kneed.’

But that was then. As we all know, the past is a foreign country, all the better to poke fun at.

Misbehaviour examines the 1970 Miss world contest largely through the eyes of the fledgling women’s Liberation Movement, and by extension, if we see #MeToo as part of the same lineage, through the prism of 21st-century sensibilities.

Nonetheless, it’s a true story. A bunch of early ‘women’s Libbers’, as they were none too affectionately known, infiltrated the audience at the Royal Albert Hall and, to the consternation of BBC producers who were beaming the pictures live to a global audience of 100 million — more than the number who watched that year’s world Cup final — chucked flour bombs at the bemused host, Bob Hope, played by Greg Kinnear as an unreconstructed sleazebag. Of course he considers the feelings of women, he quips. He considers feeling women all the time. The story contains an impressive set of -isms. Sexism, feminism, paternalism and racism, just for starters. But that also poses problems for director Philippa Lowthorpe and writers Rebecca frayn and Gaby Chiappe, which they don’t entirely resolve. Keira Knightley and Jessie Buckley play the principal agitators, Sally Alexander and Jo Robinson. Sally is a Home Counties academic (who in real life, by the time of the events lightly fictionalised here, had been briefly married to the actor John Thaw).

Jo is a flat-vowelled Northern firebrand, which brings class, too, into the unwieldy mix — at first she regards Sally with the utmost suspicion.

while they are plotting to disrupt the Miss world contest they loathe so much, the same event provides an exciting springboard for 22-year-old Jennifer Hosten (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who is competing as Miss Grenada.

for her, Miss world has yielded opportunities that, as a black