Are you finding that you’re getting a terrible sense of deja vu these days? Seen it all before? In the words of that great local combo, The Average White Band, let’s go round again?
Maybe it’s just me but it seems like we can’t move for a kind of cultural Groundhog Day bringing the past back to life in a never-ending loop. We’re bogged down with nostalgia.
Rewind, the 80s pop reboot, is more popular than ever. What’s left of The Who is on the road and the Rolling Stones cannot be far behind. Queen are on tour with Freddie Mercury sing-alike Adam Lambert and Angus bagpiper Craig Weir. We Will Pibroch You, indeed.
We’re quite understandably awash with First World War memorabilia and celebrations of Magna Carta. We’re fixated (again) on a young female addition to the royal family who wears a good frock and produces cute baby boys. And aside from the sad saga of the less than grand old Duke of York, the biggest royal figure of the day is a 530-year-old found under a car park.
The big films of the moment hark back to the Second World War (The Imitation Game), the Europe of the 1930s (The Grand Budapest Hotel) or cover a 12-year period of the actors’ lives in real time (Boyhood).
The most popular shows on telly feature ballroom dancing and baking, always making sure never to confuse our sequins with our soggy bottoms. Period dramas are all over the shop, from the dreaded Downton via Mr Selfridge to the wonders of Wolf Hall. And people who have nothing better to do are already complaining about how the actors’ mock-Tudor teeth are too good and how these productions are more like 50 Shades of Lady Jane Grey than the grim and grimy reality.
Of course, we rely on historical research and the imagination of writers like Hilary Mantel to transport us back that far but living memory is there, too, if you’re as old as me. Twiggy has just been named the face of L’Oreal and this week actress Sheridan Smith took the top drama performance prize at the National Television Awards for impersonating Cilla Black. Me, I would have given the gong to Aneurin Barnard who made her husband/manager Bobby the star of the show in spite of a platinum blond dye job (authentic, if you look at the original!) that ranked him alongside Javier Bardem in rising manfully to the task of upstaging his own hair.
Sheridan-as-Cilla sang much better than Cilla ever did, if my memory of the 1960s is clear enough for the cynical to assume that I wasn’t actually there. As someone who became a teenager in 1970, I will concede that I might have been a bit too young to claim any great affinity with the Swinging 60s other than crushing on that cute George Harrison and witnessing the last, desperate fling of the liberty bodice.
Ms Smith and Mr Barnard are also the perfect rebuttal to those who claim you have to be posh to a successful actor these days, she being the untrained daughter of a northern country and western duo and he the Welsh-born offspring of a coal miner and a factory worker. Take that, Redmayne and Cumberbatch.
Of course, the other obsession of show business is with appearances and the way our thespians look before we ever get to the complicated side issue of whether they can actually act or not. In an industry (and a social context) completely dominated by the need to look youthful, it seems rather unfair to penalise someone like intrepid 26-year-old Katie Redford.
The baby-faced and well-named Ms Redford has just been booted out of the cast of Coronation Street before she put a stiletto on the iconic cobbles because she claimed to be 19 when she went up for the part of a 14-year-old. for which she was subsequently cast. Now, since when have the acting profession and those who dish out the roles been much concerned with the way things really are rather than the way they look? And if she was a good enough actress to convince people who are actually supposed to know about these things, what exactly was going to be the problem putting her in front of a TV audience?
It’s make believe, darlings. Get over it. The more high-falutin’ members of the fraternity may be intent on finding the truth of a character and situation but as we all know from many Oscar-winning turns, it’s really all about convincing people you’re something you’re not.
As the luvviest of them all, Sir Laurence Olivier, advised the angst-ridden exponent of The Method, Dustin Hoffman: “Try acting, dear boy. It’s much easier.”