And she's hooked to the silver screen

It's taken me a while, but I've finally realised what the problem is. This is a Technicolor (TM) world. My soul is monochrome. Inside this scruffy exterior, buried beneath layers of ill-fitting denim, beats the heart of a wannabe silver screen siren. No wonder modern life leaves me so dissatisfied. In the first place, no-one wears hats properly any more. I certainly don't as I any hat tends to make me look like Noddy Holder crossed with Wally from the Where's Wally books (or Waldo if you're in the USA). Yet fifty, sixty years ago everyone wore hats by instinct alone and looked fabulous. The same goes for tailoring. The women were hoisted into place with discreet scaffolding of one kind or another. The men wore made-to-measure as a matter of course. Now I know I'm generalising wildly and yes, I know not everyone could afford to look like that. But that era had class. No-one flashed their drawers at the paparazzi. They'd be ashamed at the mere idea. Yet these days tartiness is de rigeur and I can't remember the time I saw a well-dressed man in the street. By now you're rolling your eyes and wondering what's set the mad tweedy women off on her soap box again. It's quite simple. Blame whoever did yesterday's daytime telly schedule and decided to put on a 1947 thriller, Odd Man Out, directed by Carol Reed and starring (deep breath to ward off swooning) James Mason. He was playing a wounded killer on the run rather than leaning suavely against a mantelpiece but it still set me thinking. My train of thought, a short one, admittedly, ran something like this: I'd forgotten how lovely James Mason's voice was. Oh, I haven't seen The Prisoner of Zenda for ages. Oh! Stewart Granger! Stewart Granger and James Mason in the same film! At this point I had to go and lie down, fanning myself with the Radio Times. You just don't get men like that these days. You don't get stars like that, all velvet-voiced and masterful. I mean, compare the brooding presence of Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights with Tom Thingy in the recent TV serial. It's a bad example for me because I didn't watch the latter on the wholly-justifiable grounds that I can't bear the book and just want to bash Cathy and Heathcliffe's heads together for being so irritating, but you can't fault Olivier. I'm on safer ground with Hitchcock's Rebecca; I've seen that several times and he was an excellent Maxim be Winter. Going back to James Mason, I've seen several old films in which he's never less than compellingly watchable even if the rest of the film's complete tosh. I know these men were actors, and gifted ones, and I know that sixty years ago there were probably women carping that screen heroes just weren't the same since the talkies came in, but I do think that modern men just don't compare. So while my inner self cries out to wear a fabulous frock with a nipped-in waist and my hair longs to do that twisted under thing beloved of the Foyle's War stylist, perhaps with a little pillbox hat perched aloft at a sassy angle, I have to say no and put my plimsolled foot down firmly. There is no point going to all that effort when men wear South Park t-shirts and talk like refugees from soap operas. As a species, we have no longer have any class. How frightfully, frightfully grim.

Drawing the line under celebrity

I was going to say I was watching The Lady From Shanghai the other night, but that's misleading. It makes me sound like a film buff, which I'm not. I love good storytelling and I love the atmosphere of film noir, but I rarely have time to sit through a whole movie unless I'm sick. So what I actually did was watch the first twenty minutes of The Lady From Shanghai, remember that I have have an aversion to Orson Welles, regret that someone else wasn't playing the lead, vaguely wonder where I put my Maltese Falcon video, and start watching an archaeology documentary instead. What did strike me about the film, however, even more strongly than the awfulness of Welles's Oirish accent, was how jaw-droppingly lovely Rita Hayworth was. Her frocks were rather nice, too. And then I saw it. She was lying on a yacht (I think), singing, and it was there, clear as you like, magnified on the silver screens of yesteryear and the less magical screens of today. A line. Across her forehead. Right across it. And do you know what? It didn't detract from her beauty at all. If anything, it added to it. Beauty and character. If a woman looked like that now, she'd be vilified. Youth is all, beauty is all, but only if it conforms. All traces of character and individuality must be expunged. Open any glossy magazine. Unless you've nothing else to do with your time, I'd bet you'd be hard pressed to tell any of the women apart. Go back fifty years or more. The stars cultivated their individuality, celebrated it. Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Veronica Lake, Jean Harlow, Ingrid Bergman, Hepburns Audrey and Katherine, all of them completely distinct. All we have now is bland homogenity and high streets full of poker-straight-haired clones who aspire to be 'celebrities' without the hard graft. There's little real style, let alone any substance. I'm bored with identikit 'stars'. It's time for a change. The revolution starts here. Chuck out your straightening irons. Banish the botox. Reclaim your character, or, if you haven't got one, do something about it. What are you afraid of?