Awkward Situations For Girls Blog

Awkward Situations For Girls: Being Cut From The Telly

Thu, 17 May 2012 20:26:00 +0100

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The Rise of the Superdoll I have a checkered history with dolls....

Tue, 15 May 2012 19:10:00 +0100

The Rise of the Superdoll

I have a checkered history with dolls. Growing up in the era of uglier-than-sin Cabbage Patch Kids, gravity-defying Barbie Big Boobs, and the freaky doll who cried when she needed feeding (what was that about?), I bonded more with cutesey Care Bears and Keepers than I did with plastic dollies. In 1989, bored of giving my sister’s sasha dolls a trim and haircut behind the sofa - there’s only so much you can do in terms of styling when you’ve given a doll a buzzcut - my mum stood me on the kitchen table, trying not to laugh or cry as she took in my missing bunch of hair. Little girls who wear two pigtails, with two bunches of hair? I had only one. I’d chopped one whole bunch off.

I think everyone in my family blames my subsequent wonkyheadness on those sasha dolls. Likewise, the sleep terrors I experienced through 1990-1993 can be precisely attributed to the moment I realised my Cabbage Patch Kids could ACTUALLY BE Chucky, the devil-like monster from Stephen King’s horror Child’s Play.

So how would I feel about a doll - for adults?

A few months back I was invited to an exclusive haute couture event, created and curated by two fashion designers with an illustrious fashion past, including leading couture houses and major fashion outlets that they are too coy to name. Held at a secret Shoreditch location, the exhibition featured models draped in the epitome of high fashion. The point is, of course, that the models were all dolls. Superdolls.

The Chalk Whites are a collectors item so coveted and exclusive, they’re rumoured to sell for anything up to £25,000. This is no Polly Pocket bought from Toys’R’Us on the fly: these are one-of-a-kind superdolls; a one-of-a-kind piece of art. The dolls are art.

Dressed in furs and perched on sabre-tooth heels, the dolls were displayed on a raised plinth, accompanied by hushed classical music: guests at the exhibition peered up at them as if we were worshipping them. Their purchasers? The super-rich Euro crowd who cherry-pick from the catwalks at Paris Fashion Week and collect fine art.

No self-respecting fashion brand would be complete without a cheaper ‘diffusion line’ - well, if it’s good enough for Marc by Marc Jacobs and Miu Miu by Prada - and a more affordable line of Superdolls is available for around £200. Very nicely and rather unexpectedly, creators Charles and Des sent one to my home, so I now have my very own Venus D’Royce sitting on my shelf in her haute lingerie, pouting fiercely over me while I sleep.

Which is fabulous. Although… when younger I was terrorised by my dolls’ resemblance to characters in popular culture. Now I’m 30, and struggling with being unfashionable and uncool, I’ve got a doll on my bedroom shelf who’s better dressed than me! It seems insecurity will always be only a hand-painted glass eyeball away.

More: the Sybarite Superdoll exhibition in Harpers Bazaar

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Birdsong comes to the BBC Fourteen years ago, Working Title...

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:14:00 +0000

Birdsong

Birdsong

Birdsong

Birdsong comes to the BBC

Fourteen years ago, Working Title acquired the rights to Sebastian Faulks’ novel Birdsong. Since then Tim Bevan and crew have reportedly spent in the region of £3 million on different treatments in development, but failed to bring the book to the big screen. Sebastian Faulks’ own website lists the directors at any time attached to the project:

Justin Chadwick
Joe Wright
Paul Greengrass
Iain Softley
Sam Mendes
Peter Weir

For years Ralph Fiennes was touted as the frontrunner to play Stephen Wraysford - but let’s actually consider that for a moment. Voldemort? Surely one reconstructive nose job away from his pensioner bus pass: He Who Shall Not Be Fienned is no fit with the young Wraysford, who in his early twenties undertakes an illicit affair with Isabelle Azaire.

Production of a Birdsong film has, for some reason or other, floundered for over a decade. But just as my hopes had finally faded into a forgotten indifference, still vaguely aware that Birdsong is one of my top ten favourite books, into the fray steps the BBC.

Written by screenwriter Abi Morgan (Shame, The Iron Lady), and starring Eddie Redmayne (My Week With Marilyn) and Cleménce Poesy (Fleur in Harry Potter), with a supporting cast including Thomas Turgoose (This Is England), Birdsong will air as 2 x 90 minute episodes on the BBC.

In 1997 I sat on a coach tour of the Northern France and Belgium battlefields, reading Birdsong. I have never been so profoundly moved as I was by reading fiction in the very place it was set, surrounded by the memories and echoes of a very real war. The battlefields are a place that will never shake the horrors they held. It’s ghostly. Live shells litter the roads; the names of fallen soldiers line the graveyards and war memorials that stand in salute across the country. Faulks’ story may have been a fiction but it captured an era so vividly that I had a hard time separating truth from nostalgia.

This small screen adaptation by the BBC, in association with Working Title, has all the early signs of being spot on. Eddie Redmayne exudes exactly the right combination of male stoicism and vulnerability we’d expect from Wraysford, while Cleménce Poesy, in all her beauty, is perfectly cold, aloof - exactly how I imagine Isabelle. The only potential problem could be the made-for-TV budget in the staging of the trenches; however, bearing in mind the BBC spent a reported £1 million per hour on the Christmas adaptation of Dickens’ Great Expectations, we might just be alright.

Birdsong will air on the BBC in January 2012

Find out more on IMDB.com

Buy Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong on Amazon

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What song would you choose to survive music torture? I would...

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 23:31:00 +0000

What song would you choose to survive music torture?

I would like to tell you a short story about how I ended up sitting comatose on a train, listening to Kate Bush, contemplating what song I would choose to withstand torture in Guantanamo.

According to Mahalo, the songs most used in music torture are Britney Spears ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’, AC/DC ‘Hell’s Bells’, and
(?*&!?) David Gray’s ‘Babylon’.

Yeah. I made that face too. Babylon?

Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’ (unsurprisingly) also features rather highly, though reports of prisoners declaring Luda’s middle 8 “his best since ‘I’ve Got Hoes In Different Area Codes’” are unconfirmed.

After the tumbleweed has passed, let me uncomfortably segue back to me.

My iPhone 3GS had recently kicked the bucket, joining Frodo on his final voyage to the undying lands. As such, a replacement white iPhone 4S winked at me, on the train, like a voluptuous siren in the dark.
‘Look at me,’ it giggled directly into my brain. ‘I’m pale and shiny and sexy. Let me sit in your hands! Play with me!’
After nullifying a fully rational panic that Siri was, in fact, a honeytrappin’ white supremacist, I started to feel a tickling of affection for this new thing. I soon began to worship her, cleansing her smeary screen like a loving mother bathing her baby. She was so clever! And… speedy. And… shiny.

Like many attractive women before her, she soon began to suffer from her own self-satisfied smugness.

This smugness was broken like a digital hymen when I realised, twenty minutes into a three-hour train journey, that my iTunes library had not properly synced with this new white bastard of a shiny bastard iPhone 4S. WOE! WOE WAS ME!

I had four songs. Four. 4S. Four songs and three hours. Three hours on a train, with the people in front of me eating KFC and yakking about Waterloo Road. Three hours of a northern bint behind me screaming into a diamante HTC Desire at her boyfriend who’d found himself in a brawl. Three hours of Manchester City fans hogging the table, egging on Danish tourists and rewarding themselves with beer every time they managed a poorly-constructed bacon joke. Three hours, and four songs.

No person should have to experience a train journey with the following “tunes”:

Rihanna ‘Te Amo’, a far-fetched tale of unrequited lesbian love underneath a candelabra;
John Murphy’s theme from ‘28 Days Later’, wholly unsuitable music for public transport between Manchester and London on a Sunday night (too scary);
Some free bollocks I downloaded as iTunes song of the week, subsequently deleted, and
Kate Bush ‘Running Up That Hill’.

Sleep eluded me; there was nothing for it. I began running up that hill.

I ran up Kate’s hill for nigh on two hours. And as I did, I began to recall that looped pop songs are a fairly common method of torture at prison institutions including Guantanamo. Could I survive Kate Bush on repeat?

Hell yes I could. Twenty minutes in, the pounding repetition of the 80s drumbeat began to penetrate my pysche. Those synths! The depth of layered vocals! Her unpredictable rhythms! The stonking great lyrical content! - What the hell is she even talking about, anyway?

I was trying to say that, really, a man and a woman can’t understand each other because we are a man and a woman. And if we could actually swap each other’s roles, if we could actually be in each other’s place for a while, I think we’d both be very surprised! [Laughs] And really the only way I could think it could be done was either… you know, I thought a deal with the devil. And I thought, ‘well, no, why not a deal with God!’ Because in a way it’s so much more powerful the whole idea of asking God to make a deal with you.

Thanks for that Kate.

After an hour, it began to occur to me that I could sing this song on X Factor. I could line up for Boot Camp, eschewing a paraphrased sob story in favour of genuine musical passion, before chowing down on stage to some Kate Bush melodies.

  You don’t want to hurt me,
  But see how deep the bullet lies.
  Unaware, I’m tearing you asunder.
  Ooh, There is thunder in our hearts.

I ruddy love Kate Bush. By Milton Keynes, I had the entire opening down pat: lyrics, ad libs, et al. As my pendolino swished in to Watford Central, I had fully decided to practise my carefully plotted-out stage routine at karaoke, before applying for the X Factor 2012. Screw you, Usain Bolt! In 2012 I’ll be running up that hill on primetime television.

There aren’t many things that bear repetition and scrutiny beyond a few hours in this life, but for me, on that night, Kate Bush was it. If I had to withstand music torture - and obviously I’m rather flippantly and middle-classily pondering such a horror, but then I was on a train in the middle of the night having a mental breakdown to music and I’m definitely not trying to offend - I reckon you could find enough melodic, lyrical and textural variety to survive a good few days. And, if all else fails, you could pass some time plotting a pretty amazing talent show finale.

What song would you choose to survive torture with?

Join zero dB, the campaign to end music torture: www.zerodb.org

Breaking: blog turns penguin bonkers My love for penguins knows...

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:56:00 +0000

Breaking: blog turns penguin bonkers

My love for penguins knows no bounds. Having previously featured - somewhat extensively - the Penguincam at Edinburgh Zoo, to the point where their marketing manager personally thanked me on Twitter, I am delighted to bring you this story from our kiwi penguin pals down under.

After 2,500 barrels of oil were tragically spilled just off the coast of New Zealand, international yarners came together to knit’n’pearl these natty jumpers - saving penguins from poisoning and freezing to death. After a call for help from Skeinz.com, international packages containing woolly penguin suits started arriving from the US and UK.

Knitters who knit in knitting clubs, I may once have thought of you as curious creatures enjoying nothing better than a stitch’n’bitch, but this act is above and beyond. There’s even a crochet penguin pattern! I salute you. For no other reason than because it’s Friday and I love penguins, here is a video of my friends at Edinburgh Zoo being entertained by a bubble machine.

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Awkward Situations For Girls Blog

Awkward Situations For Girls: Being Cut From The Telly

The Rise of the Superdoll I have a checkered history with dolls....

The Rise of the Superdoll

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