Calamity Jane and Yes Minister - by Elizabeth Kay

 

The real Calamity Jane

I have been watching films and TV episodes from the past to see if they stand up to current day scrutiny. Some do, surprisingly well, and some don’t. And some that you thought were candyfloss really surprise you. When my elder daughter was ten, in 1981, she contracted chicken pox from her younger sister. Being older, she had it really badly. She was so miserable that we put the television in her bedroom to try and distract her. As luck would have it (this predates any way we had of recording programmes) the afternoon film was Calamity Jane, which was made in 1953. She absolutely loved it, as she was quite a tomboy herself. So when it came on recently I thought I’d revisit it, and see why she found it so engaging. To begin with it seemed dated, exaggerated, stereotyped, prejudiced, and a bit disappointing. But before long I was as captivated as my daughter had been, and full of admiration for something with no CGI or dubbed singing, and that rarely used stunt actors. No fussy agents or insurance issues. You needed to be able to ride a horse – really ride.

Calamity Jane was a real person. She was born in 1852, and died in 1903 of pneumonia, possibly brought on by an alcohol binge. She was known as a heavy drinker. She was an orphan by the time she was fourteen, and needed to provide for her two brothers and three sisters. So she loaded their waggon, and headed off to Wyoming. She worked as a dishwasher, cook, waitress, dance hall girl, nurse, and ox team driver. Finally, in 1874, she claimed she found work as a scout at Fort Russell. Eventually she moved to a rougher, mostly outdoor and adventurous life on the Great Plains. She is reputed to have had a relationship with Wild Bill Hickok, although he said he had no time for her, and, following Hickok's death, she went after his murderer Jack McCall with a meat cleaver because she had left her guns at home. Following McCall's execution for the crime, Jane continued living in the Deadwood area for some time, and at one point, she helped save numerous passengers in an overland stagecoach by diverting several Plains Indians who were in pursuit of the vehicle. Stagecoach driver John Slaughter was killed during the pursuit, and Jane took over the reins and drove the stage on to its destination at Deadwood. Jane also had a reputation for being a kind and thoughtful person. She nursed the victims of a smallpox epidemic in 1876 was eventually buried next to Hickok.

The film plays a bit fast and loose with the real story, but it is an entertaining romp. Although it portrays women as only being attractive if they dress in a feminine way, and behave decorously, this fits in with post-war1950s more than the 1870s. It see-saws between real emancipation, and overt sexism, but what really impressed me was Doris Day, an American actress and singer with an entertainment career that eventually spanned nearly 50 years. Day was one of the most popular and acclaimed female singers of the 1940s and 1950s, with a parallel career as a leading actress in Hollywood films, where she became one of the biggest box-office stars of the 1960s. She was known for her on-screen girl-next-door image and her distinctive singing voice – but her athleticism was exceptional. She was thirty-one at the time, and leapt about all over the place, hanging from a rope at one point as she sang. She could clearly ride well, but I think they did actually use a double for the more dangerous scenes, such as galloping flat out downhill on uneven ground. I really enjoyed re-watching this, despite it being made over seventy years ago. The skill in this case is the sheer versatility of the actors, but also the endurance of the songs, whatever their stance. The hypocrisy of attitudes to native Americans in the 1950s is best illustrated in the lyrics "take me back to the black hills, the black hills of Dakota; to that wonderful Indian country that I love." And then you hear Calamity boasting about killing "them varmints".

There are some TV series I’ve realised I can watch over and over again, the most notable being Yes Minister, and Yes Prime Minister. In this case it’s the script. It was written between 1980 and 1988, and it’s still very funny as it doesn’t date. Although there are no computers or mobile phones the storylines could have been written the day before as they’re about what drives people, and that doesn’t change. But it’s the circumlocutive speeches by the head of the civil service, Sir Humphrey Appelby, played with such skill by Nigel Hawthorne, that remain in the mind. The one where Jim Hacker, the prime minister, is attempting to stop Appleby from using a door between the cabinet office and no. 10 by confiscating his key to the communicating door is a classic:

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Prime Minister, I must protest in the strongest possible terms my profound opposition to a newly instituted practice which imposes severe and intolerable restrictions upon the ingress and egress of senior members of the hierarchy and which will, in all probability, should the current deplorable innovation be perpetuated, precipitate a constriction of the channels of communication, and culminate in a condition of organisational atrophy and administrative paralysis which will render effectively impossible the coherent and co-ordinated discharge of the function of government within Her Majesty's United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Jim Hacker: You mean you've lost your key?

It’s not just the dialogue but the situations which seem eternal. The episode “Power to the People” is a classic example of the Politician’s Syllogism - a logical fallacy of the form:

We must do something.

This is something.

Therefore, we must do this.

Yes Prime Minister was slicker than its predecessor, but then the premise offered a lot more opportunities for satire. Both series are master classes in scriptwriting, and the characters change and develop. When Hacker is a novice politician he is manipulated with ease by Appleby. As he starts to learn things become more evenly balanced until in the end he manages to outwit Humphrey every so often. Highly recommended, even for those writing prose.

As I don't have any more copyright-free images,
I thought I'd stick one in of me on a horse instead. 
In Brazil, which is slightly closer to the USA
than Surrey.