Not even Carey could save this soggy drivel
THE impossibly grand Sir David Hare – too grand, for example, to answer polite letters from yours truly – has made a prize fool of himself with his BBC flop Collateral, a non-thriller.
Nobody at the BBC dared to tell him that he had written a clunker, partly because he is so majestic, partly because they too were so blinded by dogma and Leftist bigotry that they couldn’t see what was wrong with it. They presumably hoped that high-quality stars such as Carey Mulligan would save it. But they didn’t.
It wasn’t just the soggy, exhausted cliches of Sir David’s clapped-out Hampstead imagination – saintly lesbian vicar persecuted for her love affair with an illegal immigrant, nice Left-wing police versus vicious Thatcherite MI5, cruelly persecuted refugees, evil Right-wing Army, evil Right-wing press – though these were bad enough. It was that almost all of them (the Left-wing police being the only accurate bit) are totally wrong.
Sir David’s views of the world are as outdated and deluded as those of a blimpish, ancient High Court judge of 50 years ago. The revolutionary generation of 1968 are now themselves the fossils and dinosaurs. Isn’t it time they were swept away? Where’s the revolution when you need one? Alas, it’s probably going to look like Donald Trump.
Does anyone know of a good monastery, preferably well-hidden among high mountains?