Enough already!
Simon Hoggart
Iknew that Tipping The Velvet (BBC 1) was camp, but just how camp it is I didn't realise till I looked the word up in Collins dictionary. 'Effeminate, affected, consciously artificial, exaggerated, vulgar or mannered, self-parodying, especially when in dubious taste'. Well, that's my review written for me. Even the title is slang for cunnilineus, and we reach a sort of camp nirvana when we learn at the end of each episode that the executive producer is called Sally Head.
That isn't to say I didn't enjoy it. We can all relish the pleasures of being hosed down with molten nougat. Nan, the heroine, is an oyster girl. 'Open the oyster and it's like a secret world in there, and that's how it was with me,' she says in one of her first voiceovers. Just in case we'd missed that message, she says later about her favourite comestible, 'You mustn't lose any of the liquor, that's the best hit, some say,' and for those of us who are really, seriously obtuse there's a shot of waves lapping over empty oyster shells, lapping, lapping — oh, for heavens sake, you want to shout, enough already!
But Andrew Davies has never been afraid to parody himself. Take his trademark anachronisms: 'You don't want to know that,' someone says. 'Promise to be happy for me' and 'that's just my style — I don't think!' But this doesn't matter; it's just camp, like Colin Firth's wet cambric shirt in
Davies's adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and the way that the streets of London in Velvet are so clean you could eat your oysters off them, instead of being filled with mud and stinking horse manure as they actually were. Oh, and the heroine, even when pretending to be a rent boy, has a skin like a freshly plucked apricot and bright-red lipstick. I'm sure lots of people will accuse the BBC of broadcasting filth; my objection is that the whole thing is impeccably clean. Even the sex, even the hand stealing south under the blankets, even the dildo peeking shyly behind the door, even the shot of pubic hair. I think a first for television drama, which clearly is meant to be pubic hair, and equally clearly isn't.
It's full of camp jokes. "Enry Irving 'isself once fell down these stairs!' says a landlady. Nan says 'oh, yes!' so often I was reminded of John Major's first prime minister's question time, when he used the phrase repeatedly, or possibly one of his more private sessions with Edwina. And is the music hall act in the first episode meant to be as tedious as it seems? Nan and her lover captivate London with a cross-dressing act which, with its air of noisy desperation, would have been perfect on The Fast Show. At first the audiences jeer and boo, quite rightly, for as music-hall performers Nan and Kitty, performing over and over a dreary song called 'Following In Father's Footsteps' have as much pizzazz and vavoom as a pair of stuffed owls in bell-jars. The point about the old music hall is that standards were very high indeed. Suggesting it was as had as this is patronising to the Victorians. Later the customers applaud wildly, yet nothing at all has changed. I suppose it is the producer's little joke.
Oh, and Nan is so dull, so buttockclenchingly boring, so vacuous, so utterly passive. Rachael Stirling does her best to play a character who lacks any character, and she's very pretty, so we can understand why a woman-eater like Kitty would want to have sex with her, but we cannot begin to comprehend the grand passion. It would be like falling in love with a doormat. And yet, and yet, it is captivating. Like the Funny Girls transvestite nightclub in Blackpool, where middle-aged northern trippers mutter to each other, can't work out where they put their bits', you watch half-amused, half-aghast, marvelling at the artifice, wondering why anyone bothered, grateful that they did, puzzled even when you can see perfectly well where they put their bits.
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