Category: Films

Beautiful People

Laugh Out Loud Stuff

I took a much-needed break from promoting Perking the Pansies. I switched on the TV, put my feet up and settled down to  watch Beautiful People on BBC Entertainment. The series is from the magical pen of Jonathan Harvey, the creative comic genius behind Beautiful Thing (one of my favourite films) and Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, the deliciously wicked, surreal TV comedy starring James Dreyfus and the inimitable Kathy Burke. There’s a reason I’m wittering on about this: something interesting cropped up in one of the episodes, How I Got My Water Feature, inspired by the British national obsession in the late Nineties with Ground Force (a gardening makeover programme featuring the bouncing, bra-less breasts of Charlie Dimmock). One of the characters came out with the immortal line ‘We’re just planting perky pansies.’ I recoiled in horror. I’d never seen this episode before I started the blog. Honest, Your Honour. Will Jonathan sue me for breach of copyright? I hope not. Maybe a case of great minds think alike? Even if Mr Harvey’s mind is a significantly greater than mine.

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Under the Tuscan Sun

Under the Tuscan Sun

With Liam back in Blighty, I’m making do. Our Turkish neighbour, Bubbly Beril, knocked on the door and shoved a DVD in my hands.

Under the Tuscan Sun

Based loosely on a true story, Under the Tuscan Sun is the tale of an American woman whose marriage collapses around her. She emerges from deep despair and paralysing sense of failure by making a new life in Tuscany, all by chance. It’s a sentimental, sugar coated yarn of love lost and a life regained. Boo to the nasty man who dumped her and hurrah for the cast of colourful characters who pick her up, dust her down and help her start all over again. I cried like a child.

Of course, life isn’t really like a movie. Not everyone’s that nice. The female flotsam washing up on our shores seeking comfort in the arms of a Turk are mostly onto a hiding to nothing. It can work but the odds are stacked against it. For me, the most significant part of the film was that the Yankee expat first arrived in Italy on a Tuscan gay tour.  Beril had picked up the subplot. She was saying, ‘I know and I don’t mind.’

Alice’s Bucket List

It takes a lot to make this cynical old queen cry. Okay, I confess. It doesn’t. I cry at sentimental films cleverly contrived to elicit an instant emotional response. I cry when Karen (Emma Thompson) realises that her husband Harry (Alan Rickman) is having an affair in Love Actually. I weep when Mary (Joan Plowright) and Arabella (Judi Dench) wave farewell to Luca (Baird Wallace) in Tea with Mussolini. I am inconsolable when Ste (Scott Neal) and Jamie (Glen Berry) run through the forest to the soundtrack of Make Your Own Kind of Music by the Mamas and Papas in Beautiful Thing. It’s an acting thing and it gets me every time.

Alice Pyne is not acting. Alice has cancer and she has a blog. She writes:

‘Hi, I’m 15 years old and live with my parents and sister in Ulverston. I’ve been fighting cancer for almost 4 years and now I know that the cancer is gaining on me and it doesn’t look like I’m going to win this one 😦 I’m hoping to write in here as much as I can and I’m also going to show my bucket list which I’m trying to get done before I have to go. Hopefully, I’ll update as I tick each one off the list :)’ Alice’s Bucket List

I began to read Alice’s wish list out loud to Liam. I had to stop half way through. It was all too much. Her courage astounds and humbles me. It should humble us all. Alice has restored my faith in humanity. Thank you Alice.

Clunk, Click Every Trip

The Turkish Government is blitzing the airwaves with a road safety campaign. A combination of light-hearted and deadly serious adverts are being broadcast to warn of the dangers and consequences of jumping lights without a seatbelt while yelling down a mobile phone. It will take divine intervention to break the Turkish love affair with suicidal driving but ten out of ten to the Government for trying.

Liam does all the driving in our family but will only drive in Turkey when absolutely necessary. He’d rather negotiate the North Circular during the morning rush hour than the Torba Road at any time. Our near-fatal crash earlier in the year killed his confidence. He’s had his fill of lunatic Turks and inebriated emigreys. I never learned to drive. I never saw much point in London where jumping on the Tube is by far the most efficient way of crossing the city. Liam’s lot in life is to chauffeur me around. He calls it driving Miss Daisy.

Wacky Baccy

We thought bonfire night had come very early. For three days the electricity pylon located a few metres from the house entertained us with a nightly impersonation of a Roman candle. We feared we would be fried alive in our bed as sparks bounced off the roof. The power clicked on and off like Morse code until the fuses finally tripped. Thank the Lord for surge protectors otherwise our fancy electricals might have exploded in sympathy. On the night of the final performance I spotted arcs of lightening dance along a cable to a neighbouring house. We speculated that some dodgy local was cultivating hashish hydroponically like Brenda Blethyn in Saving Grace. Every cloud has a silver lining. The light and sound show roasted our meter. Once reset, our recent consumption has been lost for all time.

Bubba’s Gobbler

Perking the Pansies has exceeded 50,000 hits in just five short months. How did this happen? I know the winter months are long and bleak but we all really do need to get out more. As the orbit of the Earth slowly warms the northern hemisphere with longer days, pansy fans will emerge bleary eyed from centrally heated hibernation. We can free ourselves from our enforced virtual lives and enjoy the bountiful summer. Alas, I guess my hit rate will plummet accordingly. Oh well, maybe my bacon will be saved by renewed interest from a wintering south plunged into darkness. So far, South America, southern Africa and Australasia have been immune to my pansy pulling power.

To lift my spirits I thought I’d celebrate my minor success with two pansy parables from America. In Blighty I was casually thumbing through the gaypers (the free gay publications distributed to pansy establishments). In between the relentless diet of pop, porn, prossies and pec pics I came across a more serious journalistic piece. Called ‘Distant Voices and Gay Lives’ the writer David McGilliveray profiled long forgotten pansy pioneers. The subject that most caught my eye was dashing William Haines who was a major box office star in the twenties and early thirties. One of his first talkies, ‘Way Out West’ (1930) included the immortal line “I’m the wildest pansy you’ll ever pick.” Obviously Billy never visited Bodrum.

Haines’ stubborn refusal to stay in the closet and play it straight eventually killed off his Hollywood career. He didn’t seem to mind and became an interior designer of some note. He met his partner Jimmie Shields in 1926 and they stayed together until William’s death in 1973. Three months later Jimmie killed himself because he found it “…impossible to go on alone and I’m much too lonely.” This is a tragic though strangely tender tale that belies the notion that gay men can’t sustain a relationship beyond a nanosecond. Joan Crawford called William and Jimmie the happiest married couple in Hollywood. I asked Liam if he would consider suicide if anything terrible happened to me. He said he was considering suicide because nothing terrible has happened to me.

From the delicious to the ridiculous, the second entertaining tale concerns my namesake and distant cousin Jack Scott, turkey trapper. Jack Scott’s affair with wild turkeys spans more than 30 years. Read all about Jack’s ever popular box and the legend of Bubba’s gobbler here.

And finally, spare a thought for the spring-loaded wannabe VOMIT who googled “im a woman wanting casual sex with a man in turkey where would i go” and returned Perking the Pansies. The lusty lass must have been devastated to find friends of Dorothy. Of course, the obvious answer is jump on the next plane for the ride of your life (or so the local boys think).

Wild About the Oscars

I lost Liam to a night at the Oscars on the CNBCe channel. He watched the entire back-slapping marathon from the glitzy red carpet entrée of fixed Hollywood smiles, borrowed frocks and asinine chatter right through to the tacky banquet of tearful and gushing OTT acceptance speeches. I awoke to find Liam asleep on the sofa wrapped like a babe in swaddling clothes. I went about my morning household chores silently. The washing machine on final spin finally roused him from his slumber.

‘The King’s Speech’ won Best Picture and Colin Firth who made his name wearing magnificent britches and a stiff upper lip was awarded the gong for Best Actor. We’ll take in the film when it’s released in Turkey. The multiplex at the Oasis Shopping Centre just outside Bodrum is cheap, comfortable and civilised, providing armchairs and a mid-screening fag break for the punters. Unfortunately, the entertainment can be rudely disrupted by a Turk shouting down a mobile.

Yalikavak Sex

Video Nasty

I completely lost Liam to an afternoon musical matinee, the delightful feel good little number called Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street – a video nasty with nice tunes. Not my cup of çay at all. While he was gripped by the melodious gore, I spent my barren time studying my blog stats. Perking the Pansies has finally penetrated the Dark Continent and I seem to have acquired an avid fan in Costa Rica. Twinkle, twinkle little red star, how I wonder who you are.

I was mystified by someone out there searching for Yalikavak Sex which inexplicably returned my saintly, strictly sexless site. Copulation in vacant Yalıkavak in a chilly, wet February? That would be a triumph of hope over experience. Like the deserted village, I won’t be putting my stall out again until April.

Irresistable Bubble Gum

We spent the evening watching the first series of Glee. As a strange hybrid of Fame and High School Musical with a wafer thin bubble gum plot and hammy acting, I was determined to loathe it. I sat through the lot. Liam was utterly bewitched by a magnificent rendition of Funny Girl by Idina Menzel. ‘So much better than batty Barbra’s original,’ he gushed. We really need to get out more.

Oh Woe is Me

Laugh and Cry
Screen Dames
A Real Weepy

A chill night wind conspired to trap us inside most evenings so we amused ourselves with a delicious mix of gossip and the silver screen, liberally lubricated with increasingly less cheap plonk as wine prices seem to rise by the week. We amused Clive with our sorry emigrey tales of the mad, the sad, the bad and the glad. We watched Beautiful Thing and Tea with Mussolini; two of my favourite films. Seriously sentimental Clive just loves a weepy so I kept a box of autumnal shades to hand.

We ventured out  to a village morgue bar just the once and really wished we hadn’t. We’d hardly taken our first sip when a despondent, drunken emigrey called Fergus from Falkirk was working his pitch at the bar and looking for a stooge. He collared us to impart his hard luck story. Fergie is a big man with a greasy ginger toupée and a disproportionately hefty lower torso, giving him the look of a bewigged weeble. He had married an attractive tender-aged Thai girl who he had picked out of a catalogue. She was delivered by post and married for security. After a couple of barren years, the Thai bride divorced fat Falkirk Fergie, kept the security and moved south to warmer climes. He now drowns his sorrows in the bottom of a beer glass frittering away the meagre income left to him. A dismal tale of woe too far, we headed for the door, taxied home and chucked on Steel Magnolias to lighten the mood. It was not the best selection. Clive was inconsolable and emptied the autumnal box.

Sex and the Sitesi

Vivacious vetpat Charlotte and naughty but nice Nancy are compulsive Sex and the City groupies. So when they heard that my butch scaffolder nephew gave me a DVD of  ‘Sex and the City 2’ for Christmas they started foaming at the mouth. I have a perceptive family who know what I like though I suspect the strapping lad asked his girlfriend to buy it for him to avoid being ridiculed at the till in HMV.

Charlotte and Nancy descended on us for a camp night at the movies dragging Charlotte’s dapper hubby, Alan, behind them. ‘Sex and the City’ really is a gay and girlie thing. Straight men just don’t get it. As with SATC1, the sequel is less edgy and sexually incisive than the broads with balls TV shows but is diverting enough with a thin storyline cleverly disguised by a grand pageant of fab frocks, fuck me heels and glam handbags. The rapid fire costume changes left our girlie guests gasping doubling the dimensions of their bounteous baps. Meanwhile, bored Alan dropped off in the corner.

The soaring triumph of the film is a remarkably nimble performance by premier league gay icon, Liza with a ‘Zee’ Minnelli, who I thought had long since checked into a waxwork museum. Draped in a little black mini dress displaying an amazing set of pins many decades her junior and a fixed nip and tuck expression, Ms Minnelli delivered a delightfully feisty rendition of Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies (Put a Ring on it)’. The agile, aging diva bopped boldly about the boards like the game old bird that she is. I feared she might fall and break a hip. And, while I have no wish to impugn Ms Minnelli’s undoubted talents or profound ability to hold back the years, I suspected CGI.

Much-troubled Ms Garland’s much-troubled progeny appeared as the surprise star turn at a gay ‘wedding’ at the top of the film. Alas, it  put our tastefully understated French bistro-themed civil partnership reception at a gastro-pub in Waterloo firmly in the shade. That’s Hollywood for you.

Thanks to Paul Hard for the post title. Sorry Paul, there’s no money in it!