2023 Door Nineteen: Half-Watching Love Actually

Half-Watching Love Actually

I’ve only seen this once,
so I can’t quite remember,
but I think he’s the brother of her,
who’s married to him
who works with the two of them
and they have their do at his work
and he’s the best friend of him,
who’s old friends with her, and him,
and they were at his wedding,
and he’s in love with her but she’s
sleeping with him, and he’s directing them
but is also the best friend of him, who also
works for, or with, the other one,
who by coincidence lives next door to the one
who fancies the Prime Minister.
And who is also her brother.

It’s a small world, this loved-up London
of double-decker buses and East End galleries
riverside function rooms, festoon lights,
studio flats on West End mews, the Gherkin half-built,
where the dodgy end of Wandsworth is a million-pound terrace
and Heathrow seem remarkably relaxed about terrorists
so soon after 9/11.

It’s a small world, where there’s only one channel
and at most, four songs,
and where everyone’s miraculously connected to each other.
Looking back now, like through backwards binoculars,
it somehow seems to get smaller every year.

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What’s this about then? Well, for the most part it’s self-explanatory, as I spent a portion of this evening eponymously half-watching the beloved/so-so/execrable (deleted as appropriate) Richard Curtis behemoth, Love Actually.

If you’ve not seen it, it’s mostly cheesy, repeatedly infuriating, regularly dodgy, occasionally heartbreaking, and thoroughly implausible. And of all these charges, perhaps that last one is most forgiveable – it’s a rom-com, after all, and a Christmas one at that. Surely you’re allowed a flight of fancy at this time of year, and to stretch the boundaries of narrative credibility to their absolute breaking point.

Love Actually is one of those films – i.e. any Richard Curtis film – which presents such an idealised version of life, and in particular London, that it’s actually a bit annoying. I know it’s twenty-odd years old now but there’s no way, even in them days, that Martine McCutcheon’s self-denigrated patch of South London wasn’t extremely lucrative real estate. It’s a bit like Notting Hill, in that respect – all these people seemingly in dead-end but very attractive jobs, struggling to earn fulfillment or actual money, but living in some of the most desirable postcodes in the capital, and apparently without a second thought as to how any of them are going to pay their (presumably extortionate) mortgages.

That’s a really minor thing to get wound up about, I know; and it doesn’t detract from the opening monologue about the Arrivals gate at Heathrow, which is actually quite nice. But there’s something sad about how much these attempts to celebrate the everyday, ordinary, extraordinary loves and lives are just so far removed from reality. It’s almost like a sense of the uncanny: This is Downing Street, this is London, this is England… but it’s not. Not quite. And not quite can be a hell of a long way sometime.

Anyway, I’m surely reading too much into it. Love Actually, Christmas classic or dewy, doe-eyed, misogynist trash, is a film about love. And this is a poem about watching Love Actually.

OK, half-watching. There was a lot going on.

I feel it in my fingers. Six days to go…

Owen x

2021 Door Three: Scheduled

Scheduled

There must be somewhere that sells Christmas trees in August,

Specifically for soaps and shows set in December

But filmed in the summer,

Some forecourt on the outskirts of Shepperton,

The first to go the days the reservoirs burst their banks;

And there must be people whose job it is

To dress sets specifically for Christmas specials taped long in advance,

Paid by the hour to close down sidestreets

And spray paint frost on window panes,

Pile drifts of shavingfoam fakesnow onto sills and kerbs

And the tops of postboxes;

Just as there must be passers-by bemused to hear

Carols drifting over high parking lot fences,

And actors, wishing families, lovers and villains

“Merry Christmas”, dry-kissing under mistletoe

Before becoming themselves again,

With all the frailties that entails,

Stepping out of a studio door,

Momentarily awestruck in the glory

Of an impossible late summer’s evening.

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I wrote a poem a few years ago called ‘One the death of Jools Holland, one day in late December’ – it’s about how they pre-recorded the New Year’s Eve Hootenanny, and so it’s theoretically possible that Jools Holland could die between recording and broadcast. It’s quite good, I think, and you can watch it here. Today’s poem feels like a festive cousin of that piece, but broadcast a week earlier. Part of me is slightly fascinated by what it must be like to have to record a Christmas special months in advance, putting up trees and decorations and having to get in to the seasonal swing of things when the sun is still blazing, the heatwave still sweltering and possibly still the school holidays. There’s at once a sort of insincerity and an impressive kind of faith to it.

I would have liked to have been an actor, not only to experience that but for more obvious reasons too. I did a bit of am-dram in my teens, including a scene-stealing slot as Francis Fryer in Class Act’s production of Calamity Jane, which they still talk about down the side of the Corn Exchange even now (they don’t). I wish I’d done more of it at uni, but I think I was always too self-conscious. Far easier to hide behind the words and let someone else do all the hard work, take the spotlight and the acclaim with it. A lot of my friends went on to be actors, though. Maybe one day I’ll visit them on the set of a Christmas special and we’ll share a turkey leg and some Advocaat in the height of the football pre-season.

It was with one such friend that I actually visited Shepperton Studios, once, which sort of gets a mention in this poem. I’d written a play about Margaret Thatcher dying and we needed some sugar glass, and as Egham wasn’t too far from Shepperton we drove into deepest, dingiest Middlesex to pick some up from a guy who supplied props for the movies. I seem to remember Verity, who played one of the protagonists of the play, almost crashing the car on the way there. I think someone ran a red light. It might even have been us. It was the sort of journey that seemed exclusively made up of trading parks and industrial estates, all of which seemed to be on the slopes of a reservoir, of which it seems like there are hundreds in that corner of Outer Outer London, and all of which seem to be named after midcentury British royals. Because if you’re literally married to, mother of, and grandmother of, the literal King of England, why wouldn’t you want a large body of water named after you on the way between Staines and West Molesey? What to get the person who has everything.

The actual sugar glasses cost me £40 I barely had. I submitted the receipt to our producer, Tim, and he lost it. I’m still not over it. If you’re reading this, Timothy, you owe me a bullseye. That said, it was worth it for the effect in the play. I won’t tell you what happens in the incredibly unlikely event it ever gets revived. It was brilliant though – one of the few things I’m genuinely proud to have written.

This blog is becoming more of a departure from talking about the poem each day, although they’re both sort of about Christmas trees. I’m fine with the off-road rambles, although weirdly both today’s and yesterday’s Doors have ended in me talking about playwriting. A sign from the universe to knock the poetry on the head? In fairness it’s much more challenging to write twenty-four one-act plays over the course of three and a half weeks, so I’ll stick to this course for now.

A reminder that if you’re enjoying the poems, the non-sequitur blogs, or both, or neither, you can show your appreciation by chucking a few quid in this year’s Poetry Advent Calendar fundraiser, for the amazing folk at Ronald McDonald House Charities UK. You can find out more about them and their work, and give them a bit of dosh, over on the JustGiving page. I’d be more grateful than you’ll know. And Tim, if you want to chuck the forty quid in that you owe me, we’ll call it quits…

Thanks to everyone who’s made it this far, and the usual, annual apology to my Mum for “not enough funny ones.” Let’s see what the weekend brings.

Lights, camera… Twenty-two days to go.

Owen x