Behind every internationally successful TV show there exists a deep prejudice. Fans of Baywatch will generally agree that blondes in high-cut swimwear are the acme of female loveliness. The ongoing popularity of Knightrider in the former Eastern Bloc, Africa and much of the Middle East tells us something about the universal weakness for low-slung cars that talk. But for a show to be a hit among a largely female audience, writers must tap into two very different belief systems: first, that expensive high heels (global symbol of affluent, sexually irresistible female) can make you happy; second, that regardless of age, religion, marital status or socioeconomic background, women worldwide agree that all men are bastards.
The shoes and bastards motifs made Sex and the City a hit in the US. And some countries have come up with their own hit versions, adjusting the shoes-to-bastards ratio accordingly. Heavy on the footwear is China’s Foreign Babes in Beijing, about the exploits of a group of friends in a country whose new maxim is “to get rich is glorious”. In Russia bastards feature more heavily. Balzac Age follows four thirtysomething Muscovites in search of husbands. In post-communist Russia their mantra is: “Without Dolce & Gabbana, a woman has no chance.”
The uncertainty of life in a country lurching towards a market economy is one issue that might have sailed over even Sarah Jessica Parker’s pretty head. Still, Balzac Age (a reference to the French author’s A Woman of Thirty) borrows heavily from its US forerunner. Instead of Carrie and Co we have Sonia, a widowed gold-digger and occasional call girl; Vera, a psychologist who lives with her mother and teenage daughter; Yulia, an unemployed nymphomaniac; and Alla, a top lawyer and commitmentphobe. Like Miranda, Yulia wears her hair cropped and dyes it red. Vera, like Carrie, provides the introspective voiceover. Alla has a soft spot for male strippers. Each week a massive 7 per cent of the population tunes in to find out if the girls have fulfilled their quest: finding a mate.
But if the cross-sectional single American female occasionally frets over her failure to have found a husband, her Russian equivalent is apoplectic about it. In Russia an unmarried woman in her thirties is still deemed an old maid, and the show’s title is the polite Russian way of saying so. In last week’s episode Sonia, who has been hiring herself out as a call girl to a married oligarch who can make love only in the dark, is so depressed about this that she gets drunk and falls down the stairs: “I’m 35 and have neither children nor a husband, nor a job. It’s all over. All that’s left is a lonely old age.” (It is worth mentioning that the Russian word for single, odinoky, also means lonely).
Vera and Yulia live with their mothers, as does Vera’s boyfriend, Zhan, reflecting the legacy of communist-era housing and Moscow’s soaring house prices. Zhan, we learn in series two, is married to a woman whom he says he wed fraudulently to provide her with the residence permit needed for even Russian citizens to live in Moscow. Because Russian men have long enjoyed a privileged place in relationships, their bastard status is unusually high among Russian women. The Soviet Union’s legacy of war, repression and alcoholism left Russia, where the life expectancy for men is 58, with an acute shortage of males, many of whom are raised and spoilt by single mothers. Maksim Stishov, Balzac Age’s scriptwriter and producer, says: “We have many fewer men than women. This affects relations between (the sexes).”
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Dmitry Fiks, the director, says that traditionally it was deemed “very bad” in Russia for women over 30 to remain unmarried. But society is changing: “Russian-speaking women want to get married more than American women, but a new generation is growing up that’s more similar to Americans, shoes and neuroses and all.”
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Magic darts that pierced my heart
The dress code said smart casual, “collared shirts only”. As we entered the empty hotel foyer a gentleman in black tie greeted us soberly. He opened the door to the ballroom. Before us stretched a flotilla of black pointed hats atop a sea of glittering golden crowns under a horizon of orange Afro wigs. What kind of fancy dress party had we mistakenly walked into? No mistake.
“Ladies and Gentlemen: ARE YOU READY?” The chandeliers trembled in anticipation. “LET’S PLAY DARTS!” Magic.
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Last week I fulfilled an ambition. I spent an evening at the Lakeside Leisure Complex in Surrey, “the UK’s premier entertainment centre” and, each January, the venue of the World Professional Darts Championships. This year, true to form, it has been the biggest televised piss-up since Freddie Flintoff boarded the Ashes victory bus.
I absolutely love watching darts on the telly. I don’t play and I disapprove of my husband playing it in the garage. But come the new year, the thrilling combination of tungsten-tossing and astonishing feats of mental arithmetic has me spellbound on the sofa.
So how did the real thing compare? “I thought the board would be bigger,” whispered my friend as we wobbled, pints in hands, towards our ominously numbered table 101 (treble 20, 1, double top finish). “Brilliant that we got to see the World No 1 go through,” enthused her husband during the first break. Except that Mervyn “The King” King (fans wearing crowns) had actually just been knocked out by a young Dutch rookie (orange wigs) and we’d somehow missed that key detail.
Evidently watching the game — correction, sport — is not what the Lakeside tourney’s about. It’s about leaping to your feet to yell “One Hundred And Eighhhty!”; it’s about making friends with blokes with scary tattoos and bolshy barmaids pulling pints of snakebite and black. It’s about fumbling for your lippy when the cameraman comes round, and cheering for Simon “The Wizard of Oz ” Whitlock (pointy hats) simply because he looks like Brett Lee crossed with Rapunzel.
And the best thing is that you can be home in time to watch it all over again on BBC Two and find out what really happened on the oche. Magic, darts is.
POLLY DUVAL
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Rupert the Ursa Major: a star reborn
Eighty-five years ago the big weapons in the circulation war were anthropomorphised animals. The Daily Mail had Teddy Tail, the Daily Mirror Pip, Squeak and Wilfred, but the Daily Express scooped the lot with a white bear wearing trousers more usually associated with golfers. In the rough publishing world of November 1920, Rupert Bear was the equivalent of The Times Su Doku.
He developed from a classic instance of newspaper nepotism. Lord Beaverbrook wanted a new cartoon and asked his Editor, R. D. Blumenfeld, to find one. Blumenfeld, who had more important things to do, such as report the founding of the League of Nations, canvassed the office. The night editor, Herbert Tourtel, said his wife Mary was rather good at drawing and the extra cash would come in handy for educating the Tourtel offspring . Thus a legend was born.
Rupert Bear is the epitome of Middle-English niceness. He got into all sorts of scrapes but problems were never more than a jolly good tea away from resolution. Rupert was the only cartoon to be published throughout the Second World War; it was felt that his disappearance might damage morale. How appropriate, then, that Rupert is to be reborn later this year as an animated TV series from the people who make Postman Pat. In the war on terrorism, we can never be defeated as long as we wear checked scarves and speak in rhyming couplets.
But will everything be reassuringly normal in the new Nutwood? There are fears that it will be updated. Edward Trunk, Bill Badger and Algy Pug are probably suitable for the PC age, but they’ll have to be sensitive about the way they handle Pong Ping, the Pekinese, and the Old Professor’s dwarf sidekick will have to go.
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Rupert’s supporters have given the project a cautious welcome. “We hope that any changes do not stray too far from the traditions that have made Rupert so popular,” says a statement on “the official” fans’ website. They hope for the same “happy co-existence” that E. H. Shepherd’s Winnie the Pooh has with the Disneyfied version. Any attempts to replace the red jumper with a hoodie or to swap the scarf for gigantic bling will be met with very stiffly worded letters.
But Rupert is used to adapting. An earlier cartoon series made in the US gave him a transatlantic twang. Then there was the Frog Chorus video for Paul McCartney’s excruciating song We All Stand Together. He was even cited in an obscenity trial: in 1971 Oz ran a cartoon that grafted Rupert’s head and scarf on to a strip by the American underground artist Robert Crumb. This Rupert was seen violating the virginity of a comatose woman (an act described in rhyming couplets beneath). If he gets up to such larks in the new series, it may have to go out after the watershed.
PATRICK KIDD