All big eyes and no breeches

Actually, short of sticking my fingers in my ears and going “La, la, la, I’m not listening” for the next however-long-it-takes-to-make-a-movie, there is no way I am going to be able to avoid the great Pride and Prejudice buzz, so I suppose I’ll just have to go with it. Keira Knightley, as you doubtless already know, is to play Elizabeth Bennet, with Rosamund Pike as her elder sister, Jane.

Anyway, the thing that is really interesting (Oh, all right, I admit, I am fascinated by the whole grisly process of adapting a classic for the screen. I just don’t want to see the end result) about P & P, The Movie, is the trouble they have had casting a chap in the role of Mr Darcy. Well, I mean, you would, wouldn’t you? In 1960, the last time they tried it, they cast Laurence Olivier, which seems fair enough, what with smouldering dominance of a gentlemanly kind being his speciality.

But these days, it seems, chaps don’t really do smouldering dominance. Not until they are of advanced years, which Darcy is not. No doubt Jane Austen aficionados, of whom I am not one (my mother, who is, made the elementary mistake of calling me Jane, after her, and Elizabeth, after Lizzie Bennet — thus ensuring that I would spend my entire life modelling myself in the image of Thackeray’s Becky Sharp) will write in scores to tell me exactly how old he is, but even my imprecise memories of the novel are sufficient to tell me that he is a man in the prime of life, which, with the life expectations of 1796, when the novel was written, means that he can be no older than his late twenties or very early thirties at most.

Modern men in their late twenties or early thirties are, you will have noticed, low on dominance. Apart from the occasional, very weird, one who has become a Member of Parliament and thus goes about in suits, nervous haircuts and a manner of damp-palmed authority, men of these years largely resemble labrador puppies.

They are adorable, in an enthusiastic, lolloping sort of way. They have large, melting eyes and floppy ears, their limbs are all over the place and they trail behind them the metaphorical equivalent of an immense yardage of unrolled loo paper. A sharp-witted young person might well want to curl up with one on a sofa for an hour or two. But as for being dominated by one of them, or regarding him as a likely marriage prospect — well, phooey.

So you can see that back on the casting couch at Working Title, the British company making the new adaptation, things were getting tense. The obvious candidates (Colin Firth. And, er, that’s it. Unless you could get Sean Bean to go all posh, I suppose. Or Hugh Grant to get dominant) were regarded as too ancient. Jude Law and Orlando Bloom were “unavailable” (thank goodness. I mean, smouldering domination by an ex-elf. Get away).

So, to cut a long story short, they auditioned more than 100 people and settled eventually on a 29-year-old called Matthew Macfadyen, who is, besides being the star of the TV spy drama Spooks, “a big guy, lovely, macho and very sensitive”. So Keira will be having a lovely time, then.

Still, it makes you think, the whole adolescent-until-35 male thing. Our mothers’ generation, weary of male dominance in all its various forms, wished for something different — and now we’ve inherited the results. Which are adorable, as outlined above, but curiously high-maintenance.

In a way, having reached the age at which I am fancied only by 70-year-olds on the lookout for a housekeeper of regular habits with most of her own teeth, I suppose I am in luck, since the older generation at least retain some vestiges of dominant behaviour, even if their smouldering is a bit on the damp side.

Younger men, I conclude (from covert observation of various adjacent husbands), while big on charm, seem as little concerned with the maintenance of a household as their adolescent sons. When it comes to earning a living or taking out the bin bags, they are happy to let their wives get on with it in their own, matchlessly competent, way. Now Lizzie Bennet, I am sure, would have been a real Superwoman, given the opportunity: champion both at earning her living and whipping through the household chores.

Whether she would have been happier without the firm hand of Darcy on her reins is a very interesting question.

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

WHILE I’m getting into a temper, I’d just like to deal with the jocular treatment in some of this week’s papers of the Oxbridge interview process. Ooh-er, missus, you wouldn’t believe the stuff they ask. “Name Santa’s Reindeers.”

“What is the point of me teaching you?” (To which I suppose one answer might be, that in the process you might learn something about the correct use of the gerund.) “If I painted a picture on the side of your house, who would own it?” (To which another answer might be, it depends whether you mean the picture or the house.) Anyway, having got into Oxford from a grammar school which was not in the habit of sending its girls there, I claim the right to an opinion about these allegedly “eccentric” questions. And it is this; that the bizarre questions are precisely those that do not alarm the clever but uneducated child who deserves an Oxbridge education. I know, because I answered them.

Ask a dim but well coached Etonian, “Q. 13: Is question 13 a fair question?” and his poor little intellectual gaskets will blow. Ask a brilliant sink-school child the same question, and he or she will blossom like a flower on the subject, from the sheer pleasure of being asked an interesting question. These batty questions should not be mocked. They are the signs of equality of opportunity in action.