******* NO SPOILERS *******

Rivals is terrible. The kind of terrible that leaves your temples throbbing and your quality filters furred-up like the bit on your hairdryer you never ever clean the fluff out of.

But, let me be clear, that does not matter.

Because, somehow, it has become the chosen vehicle to bear away the collective misery and for that, we must thank all involved for making it. Genuinely, thank you. Just because it doesn’t obey any of the basic rules of plot and character, doesn’t mean I won’t wolf it down like Henry VIII going at a capon.

The new series begins exactly where we left it: David Tennant’s Tony Baddingham (for fuck’s sake, the villain is called Baddingham) lies on his office floor, head leaking crimson juice onto the carpet tiles like a trodden plumb.

Cameron (Nafessa Williams), his former paramour and business partner, has bolted like a kicked horse after dealing the potentially fatal blow and heads straight for her only ally while she works out her next move.

Meanwhile, Taggie (Bella Maclean) returns to her yearning spiral having briefly hoped for a love affair with Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell), despite the fact he’s the same age as her dad, looks a lot like her dad and is probably riddled with half of Rutshire’s bonking contagion thanks to literally never stopping fucking, not even when he’s going up the stairs.

Freddie (Danny Dyer) and Lizzie (Katherine Parkinson) renew their own awkward dance of longing, that hazy meadow-based picnic of the senses from series one now just a distant memory replaced by marital guilt. Their hunger for one another is palpable every time they find themselves adjacent. “Is that a potato waffle?” Freddie smoulders at Lizzie’s back door. She hands it to him, the Birdseye frozen potato treat instantly attaining erotic symbolism.

The Irish one who looks a bit like Campbell-Black , Declan (Aidan Turner), a kind of sexy Wogan (although Wogan also exists in this universe), is still stiff as a broom handle for his actress wife, Maud (Victoria Smurfitt) and the two continue to have the kind of shower-based sex one only assumes other people are having in their 20-year marriages with grown-up children. But he is stressed about his new company, Venturer, which is or isn’t making a documentary about Yeats for the BBC, so he keeps missing her theatre performances leaving her forlorn.

Meanwhile, Gerald (Hubert Burton) and Charles (Gary Lamont) continue their covert affair as Gerald announces his ambitions for parliament and sets his sights on a human shield called Muffy (Eliot Salt) with a view to marrying her lavender-style.

The rest of the plot is a vague-arm-wave towards corporate take-overs, franchise battles, politics and extra-marital affairs, not forgetting illegitimate babies and the use of Mrs Thatcher AND Neil Kinnock to quash the erections of the male cast’s otherwise healthy and constant boners.

The acting in Rivals is exactly what it should be: enormous, unrestrained and visible from neighbouring galaxies. If anything, series 2 leans even further into this because I felt there was a tonal oddness about some of the more sincere scenes in series one.

When everyone is a cartoon (albeit beautifully fleshed out by some terrific actors) it’s almost impossible to make an audience care about them. It’s like trying to find genuine human empathy for the predicament of Renee Artois, a simple cafe owner from Nouvion who can’t stop fucking the help and taking delivery of exploding sausages.

There’s no point. Far better to unleash what’s left of your restraint and give these ponies the full freedom of the paddock with all the sugar lumps they can eat.

Season two is open season on willies, bums and, at one point, The Chicken Song from Spitting Image.

Yes, the fuzzy heart of the piece is still in Dyer and Parkinson’s wholesome eye-fucking. But when Danny Dyer is the note of authenticity in your show, you know you’re not really aiming for anything more than feelings-flavoured tenderness. He’s fine at that.

It’s Parkinson that performs the real magic in these scenes, absorbing as she does all of the audience empathy they’ve had nowhere to put for the rest of the time. Dyer gets all of the praise, much like a dad looking after his own child when the child’s mum is just considered to be doing the bare minimum. Katherine Parkinson could yearn opposite a lump of stone and make you believe the chemistry was mutual.

But the relationships in Rivals are for the plot only. Cameron sleeps with the nearest penis just as Rupert sleeps with the nearest vagina. Proximity = Pumpsville. USA.

Rather than making emotional sense of the central romance between Taggie and Rupert, we focus on short scenes that state and restate the non-existent plot before whirling helicopter blades hurry us onto the next bit and I’m all for it.

Basically, last series I drew the conclusion that it was trying to be a real drama and a giant whoops-there-go-my-bloomers panto at the same time, two directly opposed things. This series, it goes full Ray Cooney farce, literally at one point when Sarah Stratton (Emily Atack) holds a dinner party for which Taggie secretly does all the cooking.

Cue a set-up with two walk-in kitchen pantries and a revolving cast of “people who aren’t supposed to be there”, forever getting shut in cupboards til the danger passes. It’s kind of artlessly done and, like the rest of this show, makes no real sense for the characters, but it signals an end to this uneasy desperation to appear proper or heartfelt. Relax, showrunner Dominic Treadwell-Collins seems to say. It’s Noel’s House Party from here on in. Mr Blobby is an almost nailed-on certainty before series’ end.

We get cameos from amazing 1980s faces - I won’t spoil those for you - and the kind of soundtrack that is best heard hissing through the foam earphones of a Bush walkman in the back seat of a hot Renault 5.

After careful distillation of all that worked from series one, Rivals is now 100% pure daft, enormous, distracting fun, judging by the first three episodes I’ve seen.

I hesitate to link to it out of sheer envy, but this review by Sarah Dempster in the Guardian is absolutely perfect. A five-star banger from one of the funniest writers in the country. God, she’s good.

Suffice to say, if you liked or even loved series one of Rivals, series two may physically lift you off the ground so dedicated is it to raising the nation’s spirits and tap-dancing for our immense pleasure.

It may have taken me a season to get fully on board, but now I’m absolutely pro and looking forward to the rest of the 12-part series dropping later this year.

The first 6 episodes of season two arrive on Disney+ on Friday 15th May and the second 6, later this year.

I tried to talk about The Devil Wears Prada 2 on the radio yesterday and I just ended up ranting, concluding with an exasperated, “All that money and it still sucks.” This is why they pay me the big bucks.

It’s fair to say I was monstrously disappointed by the sequel to the 2006 original film which spawned a franchise, a musical, endless merch, brand tie-ins etc etc etc. It’s not that the first film meant something to me. I enjoyed it enough for the well-crafted fun it was but fun was definitely the aim. A fairytale with a subverted ending. Cute.

I liked the fish-out-of-water story of Andie (Anne Hathaway) trying to become a journalist in New York but finding herself interning at famous fashion magazine, Runway, with its terrifying editor, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep). (It’s obviously supposed to be Vogue. She’s obviously supposed to be Anna Wintour.)

Thrust into the chilly world of fashion where everyone looks down their noses at her, Andie must prove herself in some way which I’ve forgotten now and then turns her back on them all anyway because she prefers “real” journalism to writing about clothes.

This time around, I hoped there would be dresses and there were dresses. I thought it would be a chance to unplug from The Daily Awful to gawp at said dresses while enjoying how unimportant fashion is while, simultaneously, fashion is treated as life or death.

I did not get the second thing because the writer (Aline Brosh McKenna, same as film 1) was too busy telling me at a very surface level about the decline of traditional publishing.

In a recent interview, Meryl Streep made it very clear the condition she’d laid down before she agreed to sign on for a sequel. That it “spoke to the moment.” And now we start to see where it went wrong.

PROBLEM ONE

The decline of traditional publishing would have been hard to ignore, of course. No one could argue the landscape hasn’t drastically changed. But the landscape should have formed, as landscapes tend to, a backdrop for the story, not constituted the whole sodding plot.

And this collective decision to foreground the decline in trad publishing and to make the stakes of this whole enterprise: WHICH BILLIONAIRE WILL BUY THE MAGAZINE? means you’re practically watching a corporate merger in real time with the occasional frock montage thrown in.

At almost two hours, the plot spreads the corporate back-and-forth so incredibly thin it leaves no time at all for the characters and their relationships.

Andie in particular is gifted a gem of a love interest in Patrick Brammal, the co-star and creator of Colin From Accounts, and he gets three scenes - one in which they meet-cute (he lights up the screen), one in which they sort-of fall out (but not really) and another in which they reunite. No kissing, no shagging. No friction at all. Just a side salad and not a very tasty one at that.

He is horribly underused, as is Rachel Bloom from Crazy Ex Girlfriend (she co created it with this film’s writer) who pops up as a friend who also works for a publisher and offers her a book deal. The deal is never signed but it is offered for“$50k” when they have never met Andie, and then upped to “$350k” when it hasn’t even been offered to other publishers and isn’t the subject of a bidding war. They just offered her more money out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s just one example of a plot thing driven by nothing, coming from nowhere, floating in space.

PROBLEM TWO

Miranda (Streep), once a terrifying tyrant who put the “fash” in fashion, now sits meekly in her small office, hoping for a promotion. Like an ego of those proportions would ever just sit and accept her fate on the deck of a demonstrably sinking ship.

She’d have been out of there years ago. Instead, the writer instantly de-claws her, leaving her neither high status nor low, but somewhere in the middle. She’s also married to Kenneth Brannagh in another frictionless non-relationship. This film is really good at those.

Andie has just lost her job (low status) but has won an award (high status) and is head-hunted to get Runway out of trouble as the already failing mag hits a PR crisis but even the reason for her being hired changes later in the film leaving her, you guessed it, somewhere in the middle. As soon as she arrives back at Runway, she reverts to subservience around Miranda EVEN THOUGH HER STATUS IS NOW CONFUSING AT BEST.

Miranda’s former assistant Emily (Emily Blunt) no longer bows down to Miranda because Emily is, I think, the head of Dior now? So Miranda does whatever Emily tells her to - “no advertisers, no us” - even though Emily still seems to want to please Miranda but then (spoilers) perhaps it’s not Miranda’s future she’s interested in after all. Oh and she dates an idiot billionaire played by Justin Theroux who was once fat but now, due to all the money, has remodelled himself and is now someone Emily considers a suitable companion even though he’s a cartoon buffoon.

So, the head of Dior still needs to date a shitty guy for his money. This also puts Emily….somewhere in the middle, status-wise.

Stanley Tucci is still Stanley Tucci and nothing’s going to change that. His character, such as it is, was horribly betrayed by Miranda in film one but just stuck around for 20 years because no one in film 2 really wants anything for themselves. They just want what the plot wants.

With all of these now mid-table characters, there is no natural push and pull of motivations so the plot just happens around them and they are buffeted by fate while Andie half-heartedly tries to solve problems that arise.

Financially, they have thrown everything at this two-hour product placement window: celebrities, helicopters, Milan, Lady Gaga. But it’s an empty vessel, a shiny bucket with nothing in.

OTHER PROBLEMS

1. In the original, Andie was coded as a clueless numpty despite being played by the least relatable woman in Hollywood owing to her flawless beauty and cheekbones you could open envelopes with. Twenty years later, she looks basically the same meaning you read her as a sort of impossible woman, trapped in amber in 2006 with no boyfriend and an unexplained need to please Miranda even though Miranda’s a cunt.

2. Andie’s personal peril is that no one is clicking on her worthy articles about real world issues because she works for a fashion magazine where people just want to read interviews with celebrities.

   Resolution: she phone-stalks a celebrity (played by Lucy Liu) with “18 voice messages” and, instead of getting her arrested and cautioned for harassment, said celebrity welcomes her with open arms and gives Runway an exclusive interview. You don’t have to work in journalism to know that’s dumb.

3. Where the first film was an escapist romp, the second is a miserable mess of fun-free woe that actively draws your attention to the state of the world, rather than dangling a shiny thing to distract you from it. But it doesn’t do it very well so nobody wins.

4. In serving the earnest intentions of its star, The Devil Wears Prada 2 succeeds in serving literally no one else.

TLDR: BLAME STREEP.

You could read my novel instead

I’ll start by saying that I had a complex reaction to Baby Reindeer which ultimately ended in me not liking it at all and also morally objecting to it which surprised some people, because I’m usually strongly in favour of victims of abuse being given a voice.

By the time the legal furore around Baby Reindeer had kicked off, I was already feeling unpleasantly manipulated by the rapid pace of Gadd’s storytelling which had pulled me along at such a lick, there was no time to question some of the wild things he was saying in his “true story”.

Should we all have listened to the woman from the Hawley Arms with a very different memory of Gadd’s associations with the woman he went on to inadvertently out as his “stalker”. Why did he give the stalker in his show a conviction for stalking him when the real Martha was never convicted of stalking him? Which bits of his “true story” are we supposed to believe?

I’ll just say this: imagine a little-known woman going to Netflix with a drama they’ve written about the guy who stalked them. They’ve hardly bothered to disguise him and they’ve even directly quoted some of his social media posts in the show while depicting him as a convicted criminal, but they’re sure it won’t be a problem because everyone hates the guy anyway and he’s mad.

Ethically, it shouldn’t ever happen.

There are thousands of women unable to speak out about the man that attacked/abused/terrorised them because they would be legally in the wrong to do so. You aren’t allowed to just point at someone and declare they’re a criminal. You have to go through the legal route or band together with multiple other victims and share your story via journalists with their own legal protections.

How does Gadd just stroll into the biggest streamer on the planet and do exactly what I’ve described above?

The ethical debate aside, his shows don’t stand up to emotional scrutiny for me, dazzling and raw though they initially seem.

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HALF MAN

I went into Half Man not expecting to like it.

I try to review things as stand-alone. See Emerald Fennell and my unadulterated love of Promising Young Woman compared to my visceral loathing of her next two films. I want to be as objective as I can but, of course, all reviews are subjective.

And after six gruelling episodes of Gadd prowling shirtless with that strange bowl-cut he refuses to change no matter what part he’s playing, my mind had not been changed.

Half Man centres step-brothers Ruben (Gadd) and Niall (Jamie Bell). The former is an angry psycho in and out of young offenders institutes and Niall is a sensitive lad, bullied and/or ignored by the world and the subject of Ruben’s intense loyalty but also sinister control. I read Ruben and Niall as - Fight Club style - both aspects of Gadd’s own relationship with masculinity.

His performance history so far has been a series of one-man shows about being dumped, being mugged, being raped and being stalked. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I am looking, I suppose, for a curiosity about the world in the artists I admire. His apparent lack of curiosity about people who aren’t Richard Gadd is starting to grate on me.

“Put your top back on,” says Niall to Ruben during their wedding barn confrontation at the start of episode one. In an otherwise mirthless six hours, this did actually make me laugh. Bell is fully dressed, Gadd is stripped to the waist and wrapping bandages around his hands like a prize fighter prepping for a ruck. As a character immediately coded as violent and unpredictable, Ruben is one-dimensionally obviously intending to commit violence but Niall stays right there, dumbly asking him why he’s taking his clothes off and wrapping his knuckles while snorting like a wild animal.

Gadd says he wasn’t intending to play the part of Ruben but there was a ‘clamour’ from everyone involved that he must. As explained above, I’m not sure I believe him when he says anything humble sounding now. But I try to focus on the work.

After our initial meeting with the adult versions of Ruben and Niall, we flash back to childhood where young Ruben is moved into his step brother’s bedroom when he’s just out of prison for biting someone’s nose off. Niall’s mother seems nonplussed that this would upset her sensitive son and just tells him to get on with it. Let’s try to join the emotional dots here. Niall’s mum must not care what her son feels?

The characters in Half Man are pointlessly cruel to Niall again and again. He is beset on all sides by teachers who look the other way when he’s bullied and a mother who couldn’t give less of a fuck about him while also claiming to love him.

In the press pack interview, Bell says: “You’ll see that there's a lot of love within that relationship between mother and son, and also none whatsoever at the same time.”

To me this sounds like terrible writing. A bad writer telling an actor something that literally doesn’t make sense and everyone at the table read nodding like he must be a genius. I do not think this is born out by his work which seems to take place in a kind of emotional void.

What Gadd writes here has no emotional depth and is a collection of viscerally shocking scenes that lead to no knowledge or resolution for those of us watching.

Here are my innards, he seems to say with his oeuvre. Feast on my entrails for I am a vulnerable artist and that takes true courage. But what is he actually giving away about himself or what he thinks? I would argue - nothing.

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I said I wasn’t going to, but I binged The Other Bennet Sister just hours after it dropped on the iPlayer until it was practically coming out of my nose and now I am having some serious thoughts about myself.

If you haven’t seen it, the BBC has adapted (quite beautifully) Janice Hadlow’s novel imagining a life for Mary Bennet from Pride & Prejudice after her pretty sisters all get married and leave home.

She’s the plain one who wears glasses and what she lacks in radiance, she makes up for in pedantry. Told all her life that her complexion’s too ruddy, her countenance too severe and that no man will want her, she buries her nose in her studies and quietly observes the chaos around her from behind the spine of a book.

She’s the ultimate underdog and an avatar for anyone feeling like the whole world has been let in on a joke that they don’t quite get.

And I’ll tell you now, I haven’t cried so hard in front of something since a re-watch of Drop Dead Fred after Rik Mayall died that left me in absolute tatters and not just because Rik Mayall had died. This is about neurodiversity.

I’m not making it about that, I promise. It very clearly is. The Other Bennet Sister (available in ten exquisite 30-minute chapters) revolves around Mary’s adventures once she leaves the confines of Longbourn and goes to work as a governess in London, to escape the influence of her controlling mother.

At home she is mostly ignored, pushed around by said carelessly cruel mother and often left looking out at the rest of the family through the window while they go about their lives with apparent ease. She can’t understand them nor they her.

When she gets to London to lodge with the liberal Gardiners, she meets Tom Hayward, an affable lawyer with a love of poetry who also wears glasses. What begins as simple ‘outlier’ coding - they both peer at the world through magnified glass - goes on to signify that the two delightful nerds are more than a bit different to the rest of their social group.

Mary stims when she’s anxious or preoccupied, picking at her fingers and the wonderful direction by Jennifer Sheridan occasionally lingers on it to convey Mary’s sense of overwhelm. At one point, Tom does it too. They see a likeness in each other that binds them together and makes them feel safe with one another. It’s so beautiful, I start crying.

While it would be foolish to diagnose them with autism on the strength of this (and also pointless since they aren’t real), the intention behind these decisions felt clear as day to me.

Mary wants to understand the people around her, and to show and be shown affection, she is bubbling over with feelings and ideas. But her upbringing has taught her that she’s a bother to other people, that what she wants is unreasonable, that what she needs is weird and that she should stop wanting and needing those things.

I can’t begin to explain how much I cried watching her story, particularly the last episode which features a meeting in the park between Mary and Mr Sparrow the optician, the first man who ever showed an interest in her.

(This is when I begin to think that my TV reviews are going to tell you a lot more about me than the programme.)

Back to Mr Sparrow. He was always sweet and attentive and took things at face value and Mary found him easy company once she got over her shyness. He could have been the right guy for her, but she was young and swayed by a desire to please her mother, so she brushed him off.

Mary always regretted disappointing him just because he didn’t meet her mother’s high standards for social advantage in a potential match.

So they meet a few years later: he’s newly graduated as an eye doctor and married, she’s returned to London after a rough time back at Pemberley and the two of them sit, side by side on a park bench, marvelling at where they find themselves now.

And something he says to her uncorked in me the kind of emotional deluge that only happens once a year at most.

She talks about her difficulty in finding her place in the world and the friction with her family. And with the lucidity you could only expect from a man who deals in clear vision, he says: “If you have always struggled to please your mother, why do you keep trying?”

And suddenly it’s Drop Dead Fred all over again. The tears would not stop so I just let them flow, like that bit in labour where your waters go and it’s just sort of funny that you can’t stop massively wetting yourself.

Mary’s mother is played by the brilliant Ruth Jones and, because we’re seeing her through Mary’s eyes, she’s not the delightfully flappy, overly dramatic Mrs Bennet of former Pride & Prejudice adaptations. She’s a proper cow.

She puts her middle daughter down and expresses repeatedly her disappointment that Mary can’t do the one job - being attractive to men - that a woman in Regency England is required to do. She is given a redemption scene near the end where she talks about the loneliness of trying to shepherd four female children through the marriage market unaided, knowing it’s their only chance of financial security.

But mostly she’s a cow and cannot see the harm she is doing to a girl who is already struggling.

Looking at that park bench and those two nice, misunderstood people, I realised as the moisture drained from me, that I’d been on the edge of tears often whenever Mary was on screen. The actor playing her, Ella Bruccoleri, is the most astonishing talent. He face is so expressive, so open, that it’s disarming. In her portrayal of Mary she has somehow brought everything to the surface.

In a single sentence she can express the minutiae of Mary’s thought process in such detail it’s like actually watching someone’s brain work. Cogs and pullies cranking away.

She made me cry because I think I have reached a particular and unexpected stage in my life where my inner thoughts, my way of being in the world, is starting to get odder and odder. And it felt as though she were reflecting some of it back at me.

I’m surrounded by female friends receiving late diagnoses for ADHD and autism and ADD - and it is nearly all of them - and thinking how comfortable I feel around them.

My own oddness has become far more pronounced in the years since my oestrogen levels started to tumble. I am not the person some people have always thought I am. I’m weird.

The things that others seem to find OK, I find almost unbearable. A sense of injustice I used to mostly ignore now burns within me like molten lava. I repeatedly draw a little tadpole shape, or half of a yin and yang sign, on the tip of my thumb with the tip of my forefinger. Sometimes all day.

None of this makes me autistic or puts me on a special spectrum, but it does help me to think of myself as having some stuff that I just need to let those close to me know. I don’t like staying in other people’s houses unless I know them really well and think I can assimilate into their way of doing things.

So I stay in hotels now and just let folks know that it’s not them, it’s me. It’s definitely me.

When my husband was diagnosed with ADHD (a comedy writer, who knew?), it was an enormous help to understand that overwhelm was real and that it was crippling him sometimes. Before we had a name for it, it was so hard to understand why he was being an arsehole.

“Why can’t I have a special badge for whatever’s wrong with me?” I complained to a friend I was talking to about my newfound weirdness acceptance. “Well, wanting a special badge isn’t NOT autistic,” she smiled.

“You’re not autistic,” scoffed another friend who has no idea at all what goes on inside my head. I’m probably not autistic in any sense that would earn me that longed-for badge, but I’m weird and I have limits and I’m just letting my nearest and dearest know that now, because I can feel my shoulders go down as I tell them.

Phew. So yeah, first TV review of Womansplaining is in the bag!

Watch The Other Bennet Sister on BBC iPlayer if you have ever been the one at the edge of the dance floor, wondering how on earth everyone else knows what to do. It’s really, really good.

Please my buy novel

It didn’t make sense. Any of it.

I have no skin in the novel game. I haven’t read it since I was a teen and I didn’t have a lot of love for it then. I had already been sorted into the Jane Eyre sub-category and you can’t be both.

So, I went to watch the film because simply everyone is talking about it, the marketing machine having pushed me up against a wall and stuck its tongue in my ear.

Let’s start right at the top.

My history with Emerald Fennell films:

1. When I saw Promising Young Woman it hit me right between the eyes and I thought Fennell was an angry genius. I wanted whatever she was selling from then on. Boy did she have something to say and a demonstrably cool way of saying it that seemed to speak directly to me.

2. When I saw Saltburn, I was confused. I must have missed her point this time among the insane Brideshead pop promo that was jizzed onto my eyeballs. It’s about class, but what she thinks about class is unclear and informed, obviously, by the strange class bubble she herself comes from. In fact, what she seems to think about class is that despite everyone, top to bottom, being just awful, the upper classes really have to watch out for the middle classes who are definitely after their foie gras.

3. In the years since Saltburn, watching interviews with her, keenly inspecting them for that fury present in PYW, I now think she made that brilliant film by accident. Like, the point that the only way women can win in a patriarchy is to become weaponised victims because we cannot defeat the status quo, was just the accidental result of some cool visuals she wanted to try. I don’t know. I’ve given up analysing anything she does now because it would be like measuring the depth of a water droplet with a metre rule.

So, to the most recent film. The one that drips money and white privilege but god, you guys, stop going on about it and taking it so seriously. It’s just a horny treat for Valentine’s. Heart emoji heart emoji dagger.

Fennell’s films have become the sensory equivalent of flooding the zone. She bombards you with so much stuff - anachronistic costume, music, fog, MONTAGE, flourescent sunsets - that assessing the finished thing is like trying to remember your phone number while trapped in a spin cycle.

But let’s start with the casting. Hollywood casting - your exec producer wants to play Cathy and you have a great relationship with the hot Hollywood man of the hour - is no mystery. Those two names above the title mean this film’s audience is buying a ticket. We can’t change that.

But the film (let's take it as red/read that the “film” is not the book) describes an intense childhood friendship/siblinghood that turns horny AT SOME POINT. I use capitals here to emphasise that the leads are depicted as children, then 35-year-olds, with nothing in between.

Logic (and the novel) says their hormones kicked in as teenagers and their gennies began to twitch for each other around then. They did not live together far into (in this film’s chronology) at least their twenties, before the squelchy stirrings made themselves evident. So, that’s annoying and breaks the timeline, my concentration or any emotional through-line for me.

Now to the direction. In interviews I’ve seen, there is much talk of the director trusting her actors. Oh Jacob just automatically shielded Margot’s eyes when the rain machines started up, so they kept it in because it made star and director go weak at the knees.

If they want an antidote to this, they need only watch the irksome clip of Elordi spitting gum into his mom’s hand during a red carpet event. It worked for me.

But the point: a director who trusts their actors still needs an iron hand on the tiller so the film doesn’t just become a mish-mash of different people’s in-the-moment instincts. I’m glad Fennell is a dream to work with. So few in showbiz truly are. But the films she makes are confused and confusing, I suspect because there is no singular vision beyond, “it looks cool”.

Isabella writes a desperate plea to Nelly, begging for rescue from her brutish husband. But we have already seen her, before and after the letter, winking and smirking and loving her time as a dog chained in the fireplace. We do need to know who these people are and what they want. You can’t have every single character be a capricious willow the wisp. It’s annoying and monotonous and not grounded in truth.

Is Linton a quite nice cuckold or a bossy bastard? He keeps changing his mind? Is Heathcliff a chivalrous, brooding hunk or an abuser who uses brutality as escapism, because he changes his mind a lot during this film. Like I say, you could be trying to work it out forever. No one on that set has the answers.

The plastic curtains.

They get a whole section of their own. When the Lintons show Cathy her new dressing room, closets filled with silks and brocades from Paris etc, the pillars around the room are all draped in clear plastic curtains.

The aesthetic has already been buggered about by latex crinolines, skin wallpaper and massive tittage during a funeral scene. It’s not like I’m expecting period authenticity. But a prize for anyone who can convince me that there was any point at all to the plastic curtains. Go on, I’ll wait. I’ll even open the comments up.

Would I say this about a film made by a man?

Yes, I very much would. Fennell is a man at this point: someone who is allowed to make whatever she wants as long as it’s visually wild and simply crammed with hot famouses. Someone so happy in her own skin, she cheerfully wonders why you’re insisting on scaffolding and foundations when the building is just… so lovely?

I feel like I’ve watched a film made by Boris Johnson, but not evil. Friends who have met Emerald Fennel (I’ve only just found out it’s pronounced F’n-NELL) tell me how absolutely lovely she is and I believe them. I bet I’d like her and ever so slightly want her to like me.

But she’d see it in my eyes now. The liquid rage.

And the fury, as I discussed with my husband on the drive home from the cinema, isn’t necessarily just coming from the film or even Fennell. My next therapy session is going to be, if not particularly full of actual content, beautifully lit and flooded with artificial rain.

Thank you for listening. One star.

Please buy my novel