It’s hate, Nina (but I loathe your employer even more)
IHATE Nina. I know I’m supposed to Love Nina, as that’s the title of the new ‘gentle’ (meaning: not funny) BBC sitcom about a nanny, set in Camden, North London. Oh, hang on, there’s a comma. It’s Love, Nina. I still hate her. I wager she doesn’t teach her two precocious charges about grammar, so the comma doesn’t count.
It’s based on the book by Nina Stibbe, a collection of letters she wrote to her sister in the 1980s about working for MaryKay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books.
Nina is from Leicester, so there are lots of scenes of her being chippy, and force-fed Thomas Hardy. She is stocky, too, whereas her employer is as fragile as porcelain. But, of course, she’s resentful. All domestics are. I used to get texts sent to me by mistake: ‘I’m in her column again, ggggrrrrrrr! D’ya know how much ’er bath oil costs!’
And do we really need a comedy about a single mum, played by Helena Bonham Carter, who lives in a huge white stucco house (if she were a workingclass pop star, most newspapers would call it a ‘mansion’) worth several million? No matter her two sons run riot and are rude – they won’t ever have to toil away for 85 hours a week to afford a deposit on a former garage in Bromley. I actually hate the mum character a bit more than I hate Nina: she seems to be home all the time, so why does she even need a nanny?
The sitcom might be dated, but the scenarios are true today. An immaculate house from the outside, worn as carelessly as a Per Una cardi bought in the sale. Inside lurks the detritus of the well-heeled: bottles of wine with an inch at the bottom that was just left to go rancid. Unread glossies. Ditto hardbacks. Sticky bottles of scent in the bathroom. Lit Diptyque candles (I never, ever light mine) that mask smells from the River Café Cookbook.
I remember the wedding list posted by one of these needed-acrammer-to-even-pass-oneA-level nightmares in the mid 1980s: on it was Egyptian bed linen, thread count specified. I resented borrowing the money to buy it, knowing it would never be ironed.
There is always a cleaner in these once-lovely houses, but she struggles to make headway given the huge amount of Chanel make-up in the bathroom with the tops left off, inherited furniture, and the stiff invitations crowding the mantelpiece. And she lives in fear of being accused of nicking the Berry Bros & Rudd red. Only those of us who have had to work hard for our money look after things, and perch gingerly in our homes as though we are guests.
Hate Nina has (sort of) the same cast of characters as Alan Bennett’s memoir, The Lady In The Van. The real Bennett used his floor-to-ceiling windows to look out at the world, not hide from it.
In the film, you spy Bennett scrubbing his own lavatory after a visit from the woman living in his drive, played so brilliantly by Dame Maggie Smith. In the TV show, Bonham Carter’s character is never seen performing any kind of ablutions. She just sits lazily, occasionally shouting at her children, and planning her next foray to luxury boutique The Cross in Notting Hill.
MY RAGE stems from my time as a live-in babysitter, circa 1981-83. I was working on a magazine, couldn’t afford rent, so, in exchange for a £10-a-week bedsit at the top of a gorgeous house in Barnes, South-West London, I would babysit three nights a week.
I used to resent the fact that the (posh, floppy-haired) father and (Filipino) mother didn’t rouse themselves to go out three times; instead, they just lay in bed, or hovered (they never Hoovered). ‘We enjoy the possibility,’ they would say.
I was soon sacked and evicted for being messy in the kitchen. ‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘The constant pans of boiling tea towels.’
Apparently, they’d never heard of such a thing! They would just throw the Conran linen away whenever it developed a stain.