Ah, the comfort of the stereotype. Like a pair of warm slippers, with a little device set into the toe so that you only have to stir slightly to hear the reassuring sound of communal laughter.
I won't labour the point. But an added annoyance was the difficult-to-swallow characterisation of the mother who, supposedly at seventy (which fits the ages of her children) acts at least five years older than my middle class mother (83) or - more tellingly - than my widowed working class mother-in-law (78). No, Mike, those crunch years for children come in your late fifties and sixties, not in your thirties.
I think I might have found this film comforting in the eighties - when I remember feeling vaguely discontented and at odds with the world, and not being sure why; as I didn't live in London, I had only the vaguest idea of what a yuppie was. It would have set up a myth, an enemy: in fact, isn't that what we used to call a paper tiger? Comforting, but ultimately too easy to be useful?
I won't labour the point. But an added annoyance was the difficult-to-swallow characterisation of the mother who, supposedly at seventy (which fits the ages of her children) acts at least five years older than my middle class mother (83) or - more tellingly - than my widowed working class mother-in-law (78). No, Mike, those crunch years for children come in your late fifties and sixties, not in your thirties.
I think I might have found this film comforting in the eighties - when I remember feeling vaguely discontented and at odds with the world, and not being sure why; as I didn't live in London, I had only the vaguest idea of what a yuppie was. It would have set up a myth, an enemy: in fact, isn't that what we used to call a paper tiger? Comforting, but ultimately too easy to be useful?