Heels before swine in Ben Charles Edwards’s The Town That Boars Me
Who has the greater shoe obsession — the young director of a strange new musical or our correspondent?
Now, shall I wear my electric-blue brogues? The high-heeled lilac boots? The traffic-light-red Patrick Coxes? The black python-skin? Hmm, no: let’s have the new patent-leather Joneses with pink edging and laces.
A journalist does not usually choose his shoes with such care, particularly when interviewing a 25-year-old neophyte director. But then Ben Charles Edwards is also a fashion and nightlife photographer, and his debut film is a 15-minute musical about a hybrid pig-boy with a shoe fetish who roams town by night stealing the high heels of local women — played, with fabulous casting, by Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Kelly Osbourne, Zandra Rhodes and the drag queen Jodie Harsh.
“I always look at a person’s shoes first,” Edwards confirms when we meet. He approves of my shoe…