What IS Sooty doing in The King's Speech?
You don’t have to be so very old to remember when George VI was King. During my toddlerhood in the late Forties, his was the profile on British stamps, and taxes were collected ‘On His Majesty’s Service’.
Child though I was, I sensed something tragic and haunted, as well as ineffably kind, in that lean, unsmiling Windsor face. When I heard of some criminal being ‘detained at His Majesty’s pleasure’, I felt that such a nice man was bound to show mercy sooner rather than later.
The new film The King’s Speech (whose star, Colin Firth, was honoured in Sunday’s Golden Globe awards) gives long-overdue credit to George VI, the most quietly courageous of our modern monarchs and source of almost everything dutiful and steadfast in his daughter, our Queen.
Mistakes: Like almost all 'period' film these days The King's Speech is riddled with historical distortions, over-simplifications and out-of-period anachronisms
The movie traces the young King-to-be’s struggle to overcome his stammer with the help of a pioneering Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue. As a result, he is able to rally the nation with a faultless, inspiring address over the BBC just as the war-clouds are gathering.
Yet I watched it in a state of agonised suspense unconnected with whether he would succeed in spitting out the next syllable. For like almost every ‘period’ film nowadays, and certainly every British one, it is riddled with preposterous historical distortions, over-simplifications and out-of-period anachronisms.
Admittedly, no film can be an exact and comprehensive recreation of real events, otherwise there would be no dramatic tension and the thing would have to go on for hours.
So one can overlook the fact that the real crisis over the Prince’s stammer — mainly the result of his father’s blustering cruelties — started in the early Twenties rather than the middle Thirties. One can accept the film’s monkeying around with historical fact in relation to the main political players: Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and Winston Churchill (a miscast Timothy Spall).
Worst crime of all: One scene in The King's Speech mentions Sooty - despite the film being set in the 1930s and the puppet not getting busy until 1948
One can even accept Helena Bonham Carter, usually such a sensitive actress, playing Queen Elizabeth as a sharp-tongued snob, crushing ordinary people as the future, lovely Queen Mum would never have dreamed of doing.
But the first rule of film-writing, laid down by the famous screenwriter Robert McKee, is: ‘Thou shalt know thy world and everything in it as well as thou knowest thyself.’
Sadly, the scenes in The King’s Speech don’t take place in the world of Thirties Britain — or any other that ever existed.
No dinner-jacketed BBC executive, surrounded by heavy stand-microphones, would have talked about a royal broadcast ‘going out live tonight’.
Also, rather than George VI’s Coronation in 1937 being organised, as such events had been for generations, by the Earl-Marshal of England and hundreds of officials, the film suggested it was orchestrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury (Derek Jacobi), fussing over the seating for Westminster Abbey as if for some provincial whist-drive.
Until now, my mental Oscar for Most Ridiculous Moment in any film went to the scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill when a character travels by plane with a huge, naked samurai sword on the next seat.
That is now supplanted by the climactic sequence in The King’s Speech when the Prince and Logue hold a pre-Coronation rehearsal in a deserted Westminster Abbey using King Edward’s Chair, which has been moved from its centuries-old resting place with the Stone of Scone.
Monarch-to-be and his disrespectful Australian therapist have a furious row, which still attracts no attention until the Archbishop of Canterbury himself — who evidently lives over the shop — comes bumbling in.
Even worse, the film neglects a piece of real drama involving the King and the unpleasant Archbishop. A couple of days after George VI became King, the Archbishop made a singularly insensitive broadcast, calling attention to the ‘occasional and momentary hesitation’ in the new monarch’s speech, which devastated the King and almost undid all Logue’s good work.
Ridiculous moment: A scene in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill saw a character travel by plane with a huge samurai sword on the next seat
The other great recent offender in such matters was ITV’s hugely-successful Edwardian drama Downton Abbey, written by Julian Fellowes. I intended to avoid this series, having previously managed to sit through only about five minutes of Fellowes’ Oscar-winning Twenties country house movie, Gosford Park.
In that, a character was shown flagging down a liveried chauffeur in a vintage Rolls-Royce and, like some American hippy hitch-hiker, asking: ‘Where are you headed?’
Another character was being sympathised with for their hard lot and lapsed into similar 21st-century Yank-speak: ‘It comes with the territory.’
However, the praise for Downton Abbey was so extravagant I felt obliged to take a look. And, lo and behold, here was an Edwardian kitchenmaid announcing, like some modern agony aunt, her philosophy was: ‘Live every day to the full.’
Next came a footman being criticised by a colleague, and snapping: ‘Cut me some slack, will you!’
There’s less excuse for Fellowes, who is old enough to know that Britons who lived eight and nine decades ago never used expressions like that.
The sad truth is that most younger writers assume that people in other ages spoke and behaved just as we do today, shrieking four-letter words, hugging each other when they met, saying ‘I’ll get it’ if a doorbell or phone rang, or at moments of triumph punching the air and shouting: ‘Yessss!’
Inaccuracies: ITV drama Downton Abbey used phrases that would never have been uttered 80 or 90 years ago
The National Theatre production of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Her Naked Skin, a play with a ‘new take’ on suffragettes in 1913, focused on sex, specifically lesbianism, as much as politics.
But worst of all was its awful American soap-style lapses. During a scene in a Pall Mall gentlemen’s club, a member called to the barman: ‘Give Lord Curzon a drink and put it on my tab.’ A husband, remonstrating with his suffragette wife, said: ‘I just want you to be happy is all.’
Call me a pedant if you will, but I’m hardly preaching revolution. Until quite recently, in both film and television, getting the period right, or at least not too glaringly wrong, was an automatic part of the production process.
Big-screen epics such as Lawrence Of Arabia, The Charge Of The Light Brigade or even Spartacus, while predominantly action-based, still managed to avoid lines whose incongruity set your teeth on edge.
On television, producers like John Hawkesworth studied and meticulously recreated the real world of their stories, like The Duchess Of Duke Street.
Oh, I forgot to mention The King’s Speech’s worst crime of all. One scene has Helena Bonham Carter’s bitchy Queen Elizabeth trying to strike up a rapport with Lionel Logue’s children by asking: ‘Do you like Sooty?’
Sooty . . . in the Thirties? Actually that most malevolent of glove puppets didn’t come along until 1948 with his hammer and ink squirt and magic words: ‘Izzy-wizzy, let’s get busy.’
Izzy-wizzy . . . once again a scriptwriter didn’t get busy enough.
