Something Miss-ing

Years ago, an acquaintance of mine, who was an expert in botany and worked for the forestry commission, went to see the 1966 Oscar-winning film A Man For All Seasons starring Paul Scofield. The story, for the historignorami among you, is about Sir Thomas More, who, on a matter of principle, defied King Henry VIII and was executed for his pains.

Early in the film my friend muttered to his wife that a certain tree in the background of one of the outdoor scenes had not been introduced to England in the sixteenth century. From that moment on, he lost interest in the film; because the setting was so obviously fake to his eyes, there was no point to the story.

I was vaguely amused to hear of his reaction. Surely such minor points faded into insignificance when set against the majesty - I use the word with care - of the film? Couldn't he see the much greater tragedy of a noble character brought low by principle?

Decades later, that anecdote came back to me in the first few minutes of the television screening of The Woman in Black, starring Daniel don't-mention-Harry-Potter Radcliffe as young lawyer Arthur Kipps at the turn of the 20th century. Firstly, it seemed to me that the drawings of Radcliffe's four-year-old son were too contemporary in both depiction (what they showed) and medium (the crayons used). Shortly afterwards, I cringed as Radcliffe's boss (the usually reliable Roger Allam) uttered the words "this firm doesn't carry passengers" - a phrase which has only entered the language in the last twenty years or so. The death blow for my enjoyment was dealt by the death certificate in Kipps' hand, which referred to a Ms. Jennet Humfye.

Ms? Ms?! Ms???!!! The appellation is a 1970s invention. Until that point unmarried women were always designated Miss (and a few of the older generation still insist on that term). If you are going to spend all that money on recreating a sense of the past, I silently shouted at the screen (the Other Half was sitting next to me and I didn't want to disturb his concentration, plus I doubted that my words, even at full volume, would somehow penetrate the tv and make their way through space and time to the set designers who put this film together)... If you are going to spend all that money on recreating a sense of the past, do it properly. Take pride in your work. Get someone who has a little more education than you have to check what you are doing. Has no-one taught you that Ms is relatively new? What did they teach you at school? Didn't your natural curiosity lead you discover that basic fact of etiquette by the time you reached puberty? Or have you not reached puberty yet?

That was the point at which I gave up on the film. From then on I was distracted by almost everything I saw. Why, I wondered, was the village set high in the Yorkshire Dales and yet somehow only a short distance from the flat sea? Why, when Sam Daily (Ciaran Hinds) was driving the Rolls did his hands move unrealistically up and down on the steering-wheel as in old films when the car was so obviously set in the studio? Why was there a modern "First Aid Emergency" sign at the railway station? Why, when Kipps, his wife and child were walking along the railway tracks, had they suddenly shrunk to dwarf-size? Why was Radcliffe's acting so wooden? Whoever heard of finding a large cemetery attached to a country house? Why . . . ?

Oh never mind what else was wrong. The only conclusion I drew from The Woman in Black was that Something was Miss-ing, and it wasn't just fear and suspense.