Day 1975: Line Dance

Wednesday

My Daddies and me watched the last episode of BBC2's "The Line of Beauty" tonight. I am not sure that they were quite OLD ENOUGH to watch this sort of programme but I am a Liberal elephant and so I let them anyway.

It is apparently based on a BOOK and lots of people who watched it probably knew more about what was going on from reading the book first. But we hadn't done that and so came to it without any PRECONCEPTIONS.

The series was set in the nineteen-eighties which was when Mr Balloon's gang the Conservatories were in power. And one of the Conservatory gang was quite central to the plot, played by Lord Percy Percy from Blackadder and married to the Borg Queen. Who wasn't Lady Thatcher after all, as it turns out.

The central character is called NICK GUEST and from what we have heard from other people he was actually much LESS NICE in the book, and essentially a person who "loves things more than people" like the character in the film that he has written.

However, without knowing that, he on the telly seemed like a quite nice, if a bit naïve, sort of a person from an ordinary middle class background in a Conservatory constituency.

A bit like my Daddy Richard.

Except that Mr Nick had a bad habit of sniffing sugar up his nose (I THINK it was sugar) while staying in Lord Percy's posh Conservatory house.

I wonder what Mr Balloon thinks of THAT!

You should not sniff sugar up your nose: it is bad for you. I know because I once got a sticky bun stuck up my nose that way!

Anyway, Lord Percy was MP for the place where Mr Nick came from, but he did not really like the place and only pretended to. He was much more fond of staying with rich friends and living it up or of making shady deals with nasty millionaires.

In the first two parts, in exchange for being kind of an unpaid butler, Mr Nick managed to get to live a very nice life and live in a very nice house and meet lots of very nice people and also lots of Conservatories.

In the third part there were some very SAD bits when Mr Nick's boyfriends all died of AIDS because nobody knew how to take care properly in those days. Although this was SAD it was also important to remind people that this is a very deadly disease that cannot be cured even today and so people must be VERY CAREFUL!

But then it turned out that Lord Percy Percy was not very nice AT ALL when his, er, rather strange daughter Catherine went to the papers and told them all about the dreadful things that her daddy had been doing when he had been pretending to be NICE.

Then Lord Percy and the Borg Queen took it all out on Mr Nick and he had to go away.

Lord Percy said some VERY HORRID things about it all being Mr Nick's fault because Mr Nick liked BOYS instead of GIRLS. This was obviously NONSENSE because it was because Lord Percy liked GIRLS rather too much that was one of the things that got him into lots of trouble.

Although liking MONEY more than either was really what got him in trouble in the first place!


I suppose that you are supposed to be left feeling that they were all rather HORRID and be glad that the Conservatories were all washed up nowadays.

But it did seem a bit that although Lord Percy got his comeuppance by being sacked for being AWFUL, you were left wanting him to get his comeuppance AGAIN because he did not learn the lesson from being sacked but instead just carried on being MEAN.

Perhaps there is a lesson there: greedy horrid rich mean people do not stop being greedy horrid rich mean people just because they get found out. They just find someone else to be mean to.

I wonder what Mr Balloon thinks of THAT too!