AS MY columnar colleague Lorraine Wilson points out so succinctly elsewhere on this page today, it hasn’t been a great week for women in the public eye, what with Green around the gills Natalie Bennett tying herself in mental knots and Madonna falling over herself to upstage da yoof at the annual and increasingly excruciating Brit Awards. I’m too old for this lark and so, on the evidence of Wednesday night, is she. The fact that it was my 58th birthday merely compounded the agonising certainty that after a certain age, clothing that requires anything more than slipping over the head to get it on and off and to cover all major food groups is a bridge (probably constructed like a ravine-spanning Indiana Jones rope version) too far. And in spite of 50-something Julianne Moore carrying off the Best Actress Oscar and that slip of a 46-year-old Patricia Arquette using her Best Supporting Actress victory speech (ironically, for a movie called Boyhood) to lobby for equal pay for Hollywood women, it hasn’t been that wonderful a period for the more mature female of the species, either. At 50, Monica Bellucci has been cast opposite the still sprightly Daniel Craig (46) as the traditional femme fatale of the 007 stable. She optimistically refers to herself as a “Bond lady” or “Bond woman” in a vain attempt to stave off the knowledge that many less than chivalrous commentators (and not all of them men) are referring to her as Bond’s old girl. Only in the world of the superspy could the spectre of an age-appropriate relationship for a fictional macho hero be regarded as ground-breaking enough to make headlines. The day they actually cast a woman as a proper Bond villain (with apologies to the shade of Rosa Klebb and her sharpened toe caps) will be the day I hang out the flags and consider paying for a cinema ticket. For quite apart from all the sparkly malarkey of the Oscars et al, what always amazes me about the awards season is how few people have actually seen some of these prize-winning films. The manufacturers of pop corn and Kia-Ora must be seriously worried but then, I haven’t been to the pictures much since the heady days of Pearl & Dean. And no, you younger whippersnappers out there, that is not the mis-naming of a famous ice skating duo.
Elsewhere in the esoteric world of current screen entertainment, however, there is apparently a tide in the affairs of women that appears to be leading to a flood of cross-over casting.
One of my guilty TV pleasures during the 1980s, when I had little better to do (I had neither a husband nor a cat at the time and the job bore less of a resemblance to having to go down a mine every day) was a show called MacGyver. This involved a wise-cracking secret agent type who tended to foil those aiming for world domination by using his brains rather than his fists and nothing higher-tech than some strategically-placed duct tape and a handy set of Allan keys.
Now, it seems, this formative televisual figure is to be recast as a woman. In the hope, mark you, not of amusing or diverting an otherwise jaded contemporary audience with a nicely judged piece of comedic post-modern irony, but of “encouraging young women to take up science and engineering careers”. That’ll have them flocking to the auditions.
I should think the prospect of having to sport a mullet in the style of original hero Richard Dean Anderson would put off any self-respecting thespette otherwise keen to show off her ability to make footstools out of syrup tins or an entire spring collection wardrobe out of a pair of father’s old trousers and the key from a corned beef can.
But there you go, that’s just me. I may be rather too long in the tooth to be scrutinising light entertainment shows for role models striding towards a shining future but I can’t say that watching NCIS’s Ziva David has ever made me want to send off for the application forms for Mossad or that witnessing the intricate cut-and-thrust of pathologist Megan Hunt in Body of Evidence has inspired me to turn my hand to a bit of forensic fossicking.
All is not lost, however, at my age and stage. Yesterday, apparently, there was a senior citizens’ morning showing of 50 Shades of Grey in Dundee. I have a sudden vision of a horde of my near contemporaries expecting a short about home hair colouring or labouring under the misapprehension that the red room of pain is where you wake up after your hip replacement.
And it could be a lot of fun getting the wrong end of the stick where the government’s high interest pensioners’ bondage is concerned…