Not falling for the villain (or similar)

Villain crushes are like the pot that won’t boil if you watch it. When you’re actively seeking a new flame, you will mostly find nothing. The worrying thing is that so many of my crushes start with a “surely not?” phase, where I am in denial about having fallen at all, and I’m sligthly anxious about what taboo I’m going to break next.  There seems to be little rhyme or reason to when villain infatuations strike –they just happen, or don’t as the case may be.

How, for instance, can I explain my lack of enthusiasm for Doctor Simeon, later morphing into the Great Intelligence, in the latest episodes of Doctor Who? He’s Victorian, he’s chilly, he’s ruthless, he’s – well – intelligent: in sum, just my type. True, he’s played by Richard E. Grant, whom I have found vaguely unsettling in previous roles. However, I’ve always thought that this was because he was playing dashing blades (Sir Percy Blakeney, James Harthouse) or good eggs (Bob Cratchit) instead of villain roles, which he was obviously better suited for. Gosford Park seemed to bear me out: I approved of him as George the cynical footman (admittedly, it would have been hard to go wrong with a part like that).

In Doctor Who, though, the Grant-unsettling effect was still very much in evidence. Consequently, I had the weird experience of viewing a villain in the same way a majority of viewers do: with fear and even a little loathing. Instead of thinking “Yummy, what an adversary” I went “Yikes, I’d hate the likes of him messing with my past”. In a way, a triumph for Richard E. Grant then, as this was of course exactly how I was supposed to react. 

And why don’t I even like Thomas Watkins in Upstairs Downstairs? He’s not precisely a villain, but you could say that he’s a villain surrogate. He often behaves in a way no dyed-in-the-wool hero would get away with, and he’s got the cunning and ambition which you normally expect from the baddie. But I just can’t warm to the man. I’ve debated the point with myself roughly as follows.

“Why I don’t like Watkins? Well, he’s so shifty, isn’t he?”

“I thought you liked that in a manservant. And why don’t you call him Thomas?”
“Well, obviously I can’t. Anyway, Watkins only ever thinks of himself. He’d walk over corpses just to get on. Just look at how he lets the admittedly idiotic Mr Kirbridge down.”
“As I was saying…”
“And then he’s so cold in his personal life. He disappoints Rose, and I’m never quite convinced that he really loves Sarah. They both deserve better than him in my opinion.”
“I see, cold in his personal life. You mean like Mr Tulkinghorn? Or Bitzer? Or Balzac’s bankers?”
“Oh, just shut up, will you?”

As you can see, I can’t explain it, but there it is. In part, I can blame a latent bullish aggressiveness in Watkins’s character – even towards Rose, at one point – which I really don’t think is that common among my own diddle-diddle-darlings. Also, he came off rather badly in the spin-off series beguilingly titled Thomas and Sarah, where we learn that he didn’t make a success of his garage and he steadfastly refuses to marry his live-in-girlfriend Sarah. The spin-off ended – on a cliff-hanger too  – after only one series: I blame Watkins, plus the couple’s continuing bad luck (surely, also his fault).     

So, when it comes to villain crushes, maybe it’s just as well to stick with what I’ve got for the present. Away with embarrassment: sometime in the near future, I will buy that T-shirt with Downton’s Thomas on it and the caption “Trust me”. But the question remains when I’m going to wear it?    

Summer grumble

It starts with the bus stop tantrum. I seem to have one every year, in full view of a nervous audience of fellow travellers. The ongoing problem is, from the beginning of June to the middle of August, the bus timetables are changed and buses run much less frequently. This means you will either be far too early or a little late to wherever you're going - or, as is so often the case, much too late because the bus that is running is delayed (and packed, of course). Sometimes scheduled buses don't arrive at all. I certainly don't begrudge bus chauffeurs their holidays, but this drives me up the wall every single year. No effort seems to be made to keep time, and the impression you get is that the bus companies think that, hey, what does it matter, everyone's on holiday anyway. But I'm not on holiday. No-one's on holiday from June to August, worse luck. I'm still working, and the worst part of it is, I don't want to be. Having to run to catch a bus which then does not turn up or turns up ten minutes late only adds insult to injury.

The yearly bus stop tantrum is only a symptom of end-of-summer-term malaise. School is out, but work is still very much in. As the city shuts down around you and the TV channels start sending reruns, as the sun beats down and last-year pupils whoop and holler, enjoying one of the happiest days in their life, you are only too aware that your freedom is still far away - well, far-ish. It's not even as if things are slowing down, either at work or privately. There are so many things you need to fix "before the summer hols" that there is not much time for lazying in the sun - or out of it, comes to that.

But they will come, the holidays - and when they do, I'd quite like one of those famous good summer reads. In fact, I could do with one now. Why is it so hard to find an honest page turner? I tried another one of my family sagas and gave up after approximately a hundred pages - luscious descriptions of idyllic summer days full of honeysuckle, butterflies and what have you before Disaster Strikes (World War One) are not the best way to catch my interest. Not even Wilkie Collins can be relied on. The man in the black skull-cap in Hide and Seek turned out to be a sad disappointment - a Rough Diamond, if you please. I never much cared for men of the wild: I like my diamonds to be polished, thank you very much. Hide and Seek's plot reminded me of The Dead Secret in a way: in both novels, the characters who try to find out a secret and the ones trying to hide it are good-natured people, and so there is not much suspense. You know they will all get along swimmingly by the end. There was one plot twist I didn't see coming, but Hide and Seek still remains the weakest of the Wilkie Collins novel bunch. And even a pro-Victorian like myself must marvel at how little you need to do to be branded a vile seducer. No matter if you meant to marry the girl; no matter if you left the country not knowing she was pregnant; no matter if all your letters were intercepted through no fault of your own; no matter if you tried to make contact the moment you came back, only to learn that the girl was dead and the child you didn't know about had vanished without a trace; you are still a terrible person. Because you shouldn't have slept with her, should you? Not before you'd put a ring on her finger. I must say, supposedly moralistic Dickens cut Captain Hawdon in Bleak House much more slack than this.          

Anyway, I've now started reading a slim Swedish volume which seems to be evolving into an elegant chiller, set in a manor-house in an unspecified country during an unspecified war. I'm not greatly in favour of mysterious dystopias generally, but this story seems promising, and the author conjures up atmosphere without being boring. Perhaps I've struck gold at last - or at least first-rate electricity-conducting copper.