One of the most uplifting TV series is back on the box for an autumn season: Timothy West and Prunella Scales’s Great Canal Journeys (Channel 4). This sprightly pair of married thespians in their 80s – Tim is 83, Pru 86 – have had a late career development, gliding through the canals of Britain, Ireland and continental Europe, opening up the beauty of the waterways with the wit and charm of their commentary (aided by fabulous camerawork).
Prunella suffers from the onset of dementia, but you would never guess it: she can draw on the mental discipline and long-term memory of a lifetime’s work in the theatre and on screen (she was the unforgettable Sybil in Fawlty Towers).
So, when sailing down the Nile in a splendid traditional Egyptian sailboat, a Dahabiya, Pru quoted faultlessly from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, and from Lewis Carroll’s sardonic “How Doth the Little Crocodile” (when encountering crocs preserved by the Egyptians).
The series focuses on beauty, on peacefulness, on landscape, all with gentle drolleries. Appropriately, the commentary is not controversial: ancient Egyptian religion is referenced, but contemporary conflicts, or the plight of the Copts, are not part of the remit. But inevitably, we get a sense of awe at the antiquity of Egypt’s civilisation.
Next Sunday night, they arrive by canal in Milan, and that, too, looks breathtaking.
Tim West is my late husband’s cousin, and in life, Tim is exactly as he seems on his canal journeys – wry, observant, self-deprecatingly intelligent. His parents were struggling actors, and I think if you have grown up knowing the price of bread, it leaves you with a legacy of thankfulness and good cheer.
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A company that provides digital pregnancy tests, “Clear and Simple”, recalled 58,000 of its products last week, on the grounds that the tests could be faulty and were providing “false positives”. That is to say, they were registering “pregnant”, when in fact, there was no pregnancy.
Thomas Carlyle said that a thousand people who witnessed the execution of Louis XV would tell the story a thousand different ways. Thousands of women must have had a thousand different reactions to the results of those test kits. There will have been those who were elated to find they were expecting a baby, perhaps after a long time hoping, perhaps after no time at all.
There will have been those who were dismayed to see the line register “positive”, plunged into anxiety or worry about the prospect of a baby, or an unexpected addition to the family. And there will be those who reacted with ambivalence, because that, too, can happen with pregnancy. Parents can be half-pleased, and half-worried. Then, when it was disclosed that there was an error, another set of emotions must have followed: disappointment, or relief, and again, ambivalence.
In one case, the faulty outcome showed an interesting range of contemporary attitudes: anger that an error could take place, and yet, conscientiousness about the start of a pregnancy.
Claire Bushby, a 33-year-old Durham mother of a six-year-old, was furious that her “dream holiday” in Florida was “ruined” by the information that she was pregnant. She and her partner had spent £7,000 on this trip, and the positive test cast a cloud over her holiday. Thinking herself pregnant, she wouldn’t participate in the bumpier rides at Disneyland, and worse still, she felt she had to restrain from drinking any alcohol. Ruined the fun!
She and her partner “weren’t in a position” to be considering another child, so the prospect of a pregnancy was dismaying. And yet “the thought of having a termination was horrific,” she said.
That’s another noteworthy reaction.
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Ray Galton, the comedy writer – he co-wrote such classics as Steptoe and Son and Hancock’s Half Hour – died last weekend at the age of 88. He had tuberculosis when he was 17, and was given six months to live. My elder brother had almost exactly the same experience in the 1940s. But they were the first generation to benefit from penicillin and streptomycin, which combatted the scourge of TB.
“Consumption”, as it was sometimes known, previously cut short the lives of so many – all the Brontë writers are said to have died from it. For long life, we should count our blessings indeed.
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