War
can be such a social inconvenience. Well, at least if you're
Dorothea Grant, the sly and selfish grown-up spoiled brat
currently stealing the show in BBC1's Second World War drama No
Bananas. Dorothea, played by the glorious Stephanie Beacham,
is the latest in a dishonourable line of television bitches,
though she's very much a rich bitch of her time, a woman for whom
the privations of a country in conflict mean little more than a
chronic shortage of nylons. And no one throws parties any more.
Her
selfless and much nicer older sister Evelyn (Alison Steadman)
takes in a pair of forlorn evacuees, much to Dorothea's
disapproval. Sharing one's home with a pair of frightened
children hundreds of miles from home is a small sacrifice to
Evelyn.
But
not to Dorothea. To her it is unthinkable. These are urban
children, consequently part of the great unwashed and unseen
masses who, to her almost psychotic snobbery, inhabit an
underclass of Dickensian picturesqueness. So it comes as little
surprise that a woman who never takes account of the feelings of
others should unforgivably wrongly accuse the little girl of
theft, precipitating an almost catastrophic chain of events for
which she alone is responsible.
But
never mind. While her fellow countrymen and women are making the
most terrible sacrifices, Dorothea gives up nothing. She even
continues to wear the most remarkable hats, teetering
confections of rioting colours that give her the appearance of a
rather put-out great crested grebe.
In
last week's episode, she wore a hat that could have been used in
the war effort to distract incoming enemy aircraft. All the War
Office needed to do was remove it from Dorothea's head and use
it to cover historic buildings.
No
self-serving, self-regarding bitch should be without at least
one large hat in her core wardrobe. She also needs a pair of
fluffy 'mules', a small dog (though the latter is optional) and,
of course, shoulder pads. Joan Collins had them as the
formidable Alexis Carrington Colby, who glided through Dynasty
like a fur-trimmed armoured car to become an eighties
cultural icon. Her shoulder pads were so huge they could
accommodate entire families.
Glossy
television dramas in the 1980s were fecund ground for bitches.
This was the so-called 'me decade' when women broke out of the
kitchen to ransack the boardroom and lay waste to the bedroom.
Often at the same time.
Stephanie
Beacham established her credentials in the title role of the
1985 drama Connie as a one-time fashion-store high
priestess who returns from the wilderness to reclaim her
business by fair means or foul. Mostly foul.
The
cat-eyed Kate O'Mara became synonymous with vampdom after the
fondly remembered The Brothers, a soap set in the road
haulage industry, in which O'Mara played the temptress owner of
an air-freight business. Later, in the wonderfully awful Dynasty,
she played Caress, who wrote a lurid, tell-all biography of
her sister Alexis.
O'Mara
also slinked her way through the quoits and cabins saga Triangle,
lovingly referred to as the worst television programme of
all time, in which she played the purser of a North Sea ferry
(she gets all the glamorous jobs). Triangle was filmed
at sea, but thanks to ever-present fog, it might just as well
have been shot from the dockside at Grimsby.
That
was the eighties. What of the supposedly 'caring nineties'?
Where are today's bitches? The glossy dramas have all but gone,
to be replaced by grit and endeavour. Our television heroines
are selfless, committed but caring career women - Dr. Susan
Lewis in ER, Dana Scully in The X-Files, Dr. Sam
Ryan in Silent Witness. Unless you look at the soaps,
little hot-beds of bad women with bad attitudes. Bitches can
turn up in the unlikeliest of places. Once upon a time the
greatest drama in the rural saga Emmerdale was someone
leaving the farm gate open. But, along with air crashes and
murder, sex came to Beckindale in the form of Kim (Claire King),
a sneering siren who cuckolded her husband (a man remarkable
only for his bouffant) with a dim toyboy. This was after she had
worked her way through half the male population of Yorkshire.
In
Coronation Street, treacherous barmaid Tanya Pooley
enmeshed herself into a Byzantine relationship that wasn't so
much a triangle as a dodecahedron. After tinkering with Des
Barnes and all but destroying the splendid Raquel, the result
was her running away with Bet Lynch's monolithic boyfriend
Charlie.
In
the Liverpool soap Brookside, the manipulative Susannah
Farnham, the doltish Max's ex-wife, is wheedling her way back
into her former husband's affections at the expense of the
long-suffering Patricia. One can only hope Susannah succeeds
because Max is an idiot and Patricia deserves much better.
Perhaps
the biggest nineties bitches of them all are those reactions to
all the political correctness of this often po-faced decade,
Patsy and Edina of Absolutely Fabulous, a pair of
drunken drug-ridden amoral hags who rejoice in their own
superficiality.
Who
could forget the episode when the old and perfectly formed
friend of Eddie's threatens to visit, sending our heroine into a
doomed frenzy of weight loss. But when the friend arrived a
delighted Patsy announced the good news. No, the friend was not
dead as Eddie had hoped. "Even better," yelped Patsy. "She's
blind." It was a defining moment in bitchery.
Of
course, some actresses who try to play bitches just end up
sounding petulant. Take Heather Locklear, Sammy Jo in Dynasty,
and the manipulative Amanda Woodward, a woman with big hair
and short skirts in Sky One's American soap Melrose Place.
Heather, a young lady who in real life has a penchant for
relationships with tattooed rock stars, is a small person with a
small voice. This gives her an annoying tendency to yap, making
her sound like a Jack Russell on helium.
No,
to be a bitch you need real presence. Just look at the cinema.
Bette Davis relished the roles that lesser actresses would shy
away from. In the splendidly awful Gothic melodrama Whatever
Happened To Baby Jane? she kept her disabled sister (Joan
Crawford) a miserable prisoner in a wheelchair, in one memorable
scene taking the opportunity to serve her rat kebab for dinner.
Cooking
fluffy creatures is a noted entrée into bitchdom. Glenn
Close as the psychotically vengeful Alex in Fatal Attraction
boiled a rabbit belonging to her former lover's small
daughter. This was before she attempted to wipe out his entire
family. She ended up apparently dead in a bath, only to rise
like a damp Lazarus. It was one of bitchdom's great moments.
Beat
that, Dorothea.
