Tuesday 1 January 2008

A tough choice

Last night, as usual on New Year’s Eve, I faced a difficult choice. Should I attend an all-night party where there would be delicious food, fine wines and Class A drugs, under the influence of which previously scantily clad young women would dance naked after the midnight fireworks? Or should I stay at home with my Border terrier and watch a little television?

The choice was yet again made easier this year by the fact that no-one had actually invited me to a party. Not even the sort where you end up drinking supermarket own brand lager straight from the can, and passing around a packet of cheesy Wotsits.

Apart from Coronation Street, obviously, I watched a film called Girl with a Pearl Earring. Admittedly this was mainly because I had confused the title with that of the 1985 American underground classic, Girl with a Pearl Necklace. This one featured much less exposed flesh and substantially smaller hair. Colin Firth played silent, brooding Colin Firth as usual, though you could tell from his costume and a few other clues that he was meant to be the painter Vermeer rather than Mr Darcy.

I became fascinated by Scarlett Johansson’s unusually full lips, and spent much time trying to remember what they reminded me of. Finally I got it. It was those suckers which people in the olden days used to attach models of Garfield the cat to the inside of their car windows. If she were ever so Narcissistic as to kiss her own image in a mirror, she’d almost certainly be trapped there for life.

Nothing much happened for 90 minutes, but at least it didn’t happen against a very beautiful period backdrop.

After that, I flicked through the channels for ages looking for Andy Stewart’s White Heather Club, with special star guest Chic Murray, but I couldn’t find it anywhere so I gave up and went to bed to read a book. Someone in the vicinity let off a load of fireworks at midnight, but I couldn’t be bothered to get up and go “Ooh! Aah!” I get quite enough of that walking barefoot on the bathroom tiles when I succumb to the middle-of-the-night incontinence of the late middle aged.

I can hardly wait for tonight’s TV viewing highlight, Andrew Davies’s new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. The BBC are trying to make out that it’s ever so racy. Fingers crossed that it’s up to the high standards of his previous free adaptation of Persuasion - Louisa Does Lyme Regis.

No comments: