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First girl: ‘Dunno. We went by air.’
Michael Nicholson
Grayswood, Surrey
Lost plot
Sir: While Marianne Macdonald’s article (‘Sex and the City is a myth’, 24 May) was an entertaining read, its central thesis — that the airbrushed on-screen portrayal of the four female leads in Sex and the City is fundamentally detached from real life — was hardly revelatory. Even I, as a straight, male, sometime fan of the series, managed to spot within a matter of an episode or two that the four characters were intended to represent four overlapping aspects of the female psyche, rather than being a gritty reflection of everyday distaff New York life.
Nevertheless, it might have helped her case if Ms Macdonald had at least given the impression of having seen more than one or two episodes herself, since every example she cited of real women’s concerns that the series had supposedly failed to address had, in fact, been covered at length in the plotlines. For example, the absence of any ‘lamentation on the lack of men’ (subject of numerous episodes, including one where Carrie takes an evening class on how to meet men, and Miranda notes that ‘now they’re dying on us’); that ‘the biological clock was a barely perceptible tick’ (try the infertility/adoption storyline underpinning much of the final series, or indeed Carrie’s dilemma in the climactic final episodes); or that ‘the women never, ever, bought a self-help book’ (wrong: self-help gets the treatment in at least two episodes).
Television doesn’t always have to serve up grim realism in order to make its point, but Sex and the City managed to cover an impressive array of issues affecting the modern woman, and do so with verve and wit. But why let the facts get in the way of a good article?
Neil O’Connor
Sheffield, Yorkshire
Hazy memories
Sir: Certainly many of the anachronisms in Foyle’s War were non-verbal (Letters, 24 May), perhaps the most glaring being the virtual absence from the screen of smouldering Woodbines or any other brand of cigarette (non-filtered, of course) which were universally popular at the time.
A more realistic depiction of mid-20th-century mores can be found in Mad Men, set in the New York advertising world at the beginning of the 1960s. Here, 90 per cent of the characters smoke 90 per cent of the time, and a permanent tobacco haze permeates every office building, restaurant, bar and bedroom.
Lord Monson
London W8
The test of society
Sir: As I read your last editorial (‘Here’s what we call progress’, 24 May) and Rod Liddle’s piece (‘One day, abortions will appal us all’, 24 May) upon how future generations may look back on the current abortion law with incredulity, I remembered a quotation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: ‘The test of society is what it does for its children.’
For nearly 40 years children’s interests have taken a back seat to the ‘woman’s right to choose’, the economics necessary to support ‘Life Plans’, the denigration of the nuclear family, the institutional care of the under-fives and a determination to see education as little more than a platform for economic advancement.
No Labour candidate will be selected unless they are ‘on message’ about such things, and that is both weakening of their party and the general polity, as the recent vote indicated, with the outcome being less than representative of the mood of the country.
If we are truly seeing the opportunity emerging to confront the sterility of New Labour’s theoretical underpinnings, it seems to me essential that we take the wisdom of one victim of an immoral slaughter and apply it to averting the current one. Nothing would begin our liberation from the dead hand of political correctness faster than a determined and direct challenge to the article of faith that the current abortion settlement is untouchable.
Martin Sewell
Gravesend, Kent
What’s funny?
Sir: I suppose it’s just about possible to conceive of a name for a child more pretentious than Aeneas, the name Matthew Dennison gave his child (‘What’s in a name?’, 17 May), but I’m not sure what it might be. Good luck Aeneas Dennison, I say; maybe he’ll learn to quote from Virgil as the blows come raining down in the playground.
My oldest son, meanwhile, is called Tyler — after Wat Tyler. I suppose, in Dennison’s view, he was probably the original chav. But Tyler’s proud of the association and the worst he has to put up with is his brother saying ‘What, Tyler?’ and then laughing a lot.
Rod Liddle
Marlborough, Wiltshire
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