Ooh, Your Grace
The missus and I have slightly random TV habits and don’t generally just sit down to watch whatever the show-of-the-moment is. But I will say that I often go to bed earlier than Her Mightiness and she occasionally watches a bit of extra TV in that time. And during that first year of the pandemic, there was a week or two when I seemed to be going to bed early every night, the TV was always running late, and Shonda Rhimes’s Bridgerton seemed to colonise the ‘Continue Watching’ spot on our TV dashboard.
There was, of course, quite a lot of critical conversation about the series, reinvigorated by the release of Season 2. I was interested enough in all this that my wife and I ended up watching, or rewatching, the whole of Season 1.
I think the series did well in part because it involved a (gently managed) collision of two genres. Yes, the series looked roughly like your standard issue Jane Austen drama. Same dresses, same carriages, same houses, same reliable mixture of unmarried women and dashing dukes.
But where a BBC Jane Austen drama will aim for precision on language, clothes, settings, and the rest, Bridgerton simply didn’t care. Its string quartets played themes by Nirvana. The Regency landscape was suddenly full of people of every race and colour. The wisteria which was in full flower at the start of the season bloomed and bloomed and went on blooming week after week after month. The cinematography was often given a hyper-real tint, a child’s Cinderella remade for adults.
All this was done with the lightest of touches. The multicultural invasion of the Regency period was barely alluded to. It just was. The ever-blooming wisteria was never mentioned. An improbable monarch reigned happily over a world that never was.
This broad strategy works like a dream for any kind of storytelling. If a reader or viewer loves a genre, they’ll read plenty of it and it won’t be long before they find themselves wanting the same thing (because they love it) but done differently (because they’re human and humans, bless them, get bored more easily than any creature except the show-poodle and the Barbary macaque.) Mixing up your genre conventions is a delicious, subversive-feeling way of delivering that same-but-different sensation.
I’ve done it myself in my crime writing. The Deepest Grave took a standard-issue police procedural (the genre beloved of my core readers) and rammed it with a storyline revolving around King Arthur. The whole thing was just about a plausible procedural – I adhered to the basics, just as Bridgerton did – but the whole thing was plausible only if you closed your eyes to the shimmer of absurdity that flitted across every page.
However, it’s actually illegal to talk about Bridgerton without touching upon the sex scenes and making specific reference to (a) Regé-Jean Page’s torso and (b) the way those scenes were shot for the ‘female gaze’, not the male one.
Now, I’ll admit I don’t quite understand the fuss made about RJP’s torso – it looks much the same as my own. But the female gaze idea is really quite interesting, especially for the writer.
Through the whole series, which contained plenty of bedroom scenes, one almost never saw a naked breast. Not one of the main female characters were ever shown bare-breasted. During the sex scenes, they were either clothed or covered by sheets. The same was absolutely not true for RJP’s character, the Duke of Hastings. It’s not just that he was asked to reveal his pecs during bedroom scenes. The Duke had a merrily improbable friendship with a boxer that called for a whole lot of gratuitously bare-chested scenes as the two of them sparred.
So in part the female gaze idea is just a boring one. Men like boobs. Women like hunky torsos. So if you’re doing a show aimed mostly at women, offer fewer breasts and more torsos. Obvious, right?
But one of the things that struck me was that the radical female gaze of these sex scenes seemed mostly to feature … Daphne Bridgerton’s face. The single sexiest thing in the whole series wasn’t RJP’s pecs, it was the face of the central female character.
Where a series directed by a man might have concentrated on the act of sex, the physical activity, the female-led Bridgerton concentrated relentlessly on relationship. So when Daphne Bridgerton has sex for the first time, we see her shocked delight dawning in her face. That’s what’s sexy. That’s what’s emotionally charged. The act of sex was (nearly) always subservient to its emotional context, because the emotions were what mattered most. Again and again, the camera returned to Daphne Bridgerton, so we could read her emotional transitions.
That’s a good lesson for writers. We don’t have RJP’s torso to conjure with. Yes, we can describe such things, but in the end our written descriptions will fall short of what a TV-screen can show.
But emotions? Yep, we can do those, and we can do those better than Bridgerton, or anything else, because can climb inside the human brain and tell readers what we find. Sex, for the novelist, is a continuation of relationship, by other means. That’s it. Don’t think of sex as sex. For novelists, it’s a relationship that unfolds in the bedroom. Any physical activity is really just a way of nudging that relationship forward into new places. It’s a different type of exploration. That’s all.
Same with fights. I saw the lovely phrase recently that a fight scene should be thought of as a ‘conversation with fists’. Exactly so.
Fight scenes can become incredibly convoluted very fast. ‘He placed his right hand on my left shoulder and, as he did so, the blade in his free hand flashed up towards my thigh. I saw the move and countered by twisting my leg round to the tree behind me. At the same time, I …’ You can sort of imagine what’s going on there, but only by working hard at it. In a way, you decipher that kind of writing the way you decipher IKEA instructions – bit by bit, frowning, manipulating shapes inside your head.
As soon as you consider the fight as a conversation, everything becomes easier. You can drop the judo-manual type language, and simply focus on what’s happening in the relationship. There’ll be more room for dialogue. Less need of complicated explanation. The scene will breathe more. It’ll read with greater clarity. Your story won’t be interrupted by the fight; it’ll be moved nicely forwards.
A conversation with fists. A conversation with bedsheets. That’s how to write your sex and violence – and keep your reader glued to every word.
Harry, it sounds like you might be overthinking this. Sometimes, the basics just work (like in a Jack Reacher novel). Bridgerton is all about RJP’s pecs (and other bits)! Everything else is just fluff (according to my missus, anyway).
Alas, I found said show boring. That was based on the first twenty minutes. Now there‘s something the novel has in common with the screen, especially in the world of episodic drama, where each instalment is like a chapter. Fail to gain the interest in those opening lines, and it doesn’t matter how marvellous the rest of the conception was. Fickle, impatient types like me will just move on.
Spot on, Harry. As always.
Just late in catching the wave on this topic before Friday’s new one. It just so happened that I was finishing my first draft of a scene in Chapter 15 of my novel about the streets of 1970’s London. There’s a bit of a scrap in it.
My protagonist Jack and his friend Rick take on the job of disrupting ‘winklers’ who were employed by developers to bully old and vulnerable people out of secure tenancies so they could renovate and sell at profit.
I then read Harry’s piece about fights written as Ikea instruction sets, or a ‘conversation with fists,’ so at risk of embarrassment – how does this first draft fare?
The Winklers (draft scene)
‘They said they’d be here at seven on the dot,’ said Olive, answering the door in her basement flat just off Richards Road. The tarmac on the road was thin in places and I saw some cobblestones poking through. They reminded me of Eric on the corner, staring out of his window for sixty years.
‘Where do you want us?’ said Rick, looking around. ‘Nice place you’ve got here.’
‘I’ve lived here for fifty years,’ she said, ‘and I don’t plan to go anywhere else just yet.’
We stood in her front room with windows having light from above and her front-door opening directly into the room.
‘This is my parlour,’ said Olive, ‘and those buggers will be coming in that door so I’d like you in the kitchen out the back and when I shout “Roger,” you can come in.’
‘Roger?’ I said.
‘That’s the signal,’ said Olive, ‘are you new at this love?’
‘He is,’ said Rick, ‘but he’s handy and you got to start somewhere.’
‘I’ll leave the door open so’s you boys can hear what’s said.’
Rick nodded and took out a silver-coloured dicta-phone, checked the mini-cassette was the right way round and looking at Olive’s baffled expression said, ‘with a bit of luck we’ll get them on tape.’
‘I don’t care about that,’ said Olive. I want you to show them what’s-what. A ruddy good hiding.’
‘It’s the Rent Act,’ said Rick. ‘Last year. It’s made harassment like this illegal, and if we can prove it, the new landlord’s in real trouble.’ Olive looked unconvinced.
‘It may be criminal, but the filth ain’t going to do anything about it are they?’
Rick might have agreed, but there was a loud rattle at the front door, and Olive went to open it. We listened.
Aside from Olive, there were two voices making respectful greetings and saying, ‘how are you love?’
‘I am not yours or anyone else’s “love”,’ said Olive loudly, as if she were deaf.
‘There’s no need,’ said one man with the clipped tones of an officer or a gentleman. The other sounded like a schoolteacher with adenoids. Rick and I looked at each other. They weren’t the typical East End thugs I’d imagined. If they were ex-army, it might be altogether different, except looking at Rick, a mountain of a man, we had the odds on our side.
And then the conversation became louder with Olive saying, ‘I don’t want your filthy money,’ and the nasal one droned on about how four hundred quid was very fair.
I thought for a moment that there were three men in Olive’s parlour because the bloke with the posh voice had lost his graceful vowels and was becoming insistent on Olive hearing him out.
‘Listen to me Mrs Chapman. Listen to what I have to say to you. This is what is going to happen.’
Rick was holding the dicta-phone up to the crack in the doorway, hoping to capture an incriminating threat but then Olive cried out ‘Roger,’ and to my surprise yelled ‘Clive, get in here now,’
‘Come on then Clive,’ said Rick and yanked the door open.
Olive was staring up at a tall man, whippet thin, standing over her.
‘These,’ she said proudly, ‘are my grandsons. I’d like you to go now and leave me alone.’
An awkward silence followed. Long enough for me to take in Olive’s parlour, the wood panelling with it’s peeling green paint, the spectacular cut-glass lamp and Olive, sparking up a Park Drive cigarette. I like to know where the heavy, pointy things are, and apart from the lamp, there was nothing except whatever these men carried in their pockets.
‘What did you say is going to happen?’ said Rick to the beanpole looming over Olive. I had one eye on the other shorter and square man. He had a boxer’s broken nose. Funny how voices can be deceiving for there was nothing of a teacher about him. He wore a large gold earring so clearly, he hadn’t bargained for trouble and ripping it off might be an option.
Apart from surprise, I couldn’t work out what else they were thinking. I expected they got payment by results and short-arse’s handmade suit was worth at least fifty quid.
‘I would like Mrs Chapman to accept our very generous offer of five hundred pounds sterling to vacate the property,’ said the tall bloke. It was the sterling that irritated me, as if it made the offer more valuable. I glanced at Olive’s face. She wasn’t afraid, and she clearly loathed what they stood for.
‘Go on, sod off.’ she yelled, pointing at the door, using her other arm to get out of her chair. The thin man made the mistake of moving to push her down again, his hand outstretched.
I thought Rick would drop him right there. Years as a miner had left him heavy with muscle and he just took the man’s wrist in a firm grip, twisting gently.
‘I think it’s time to leave for good,’ he said as the man bent towards him. The other man didn’t move but was staring at Rick. I glanced at the crystal lamp with its beautiful Corinthian column of glass and a silver volute at the top. Fixed above it, a lamp-oil bowl, and a slender blown-glass chimney. It was gorgeous but I knew broken-nose wouldn’t hesitate to lay about him with it. It was the perfect weapon, so when he made his move, I got there first. Olive, who we both assumed would leave us to it and phone for the police from her kitchen, sat calmly smoking her fag.
‘We’re not here for any trouble,’ said the thug. Rick had wrenched the taller man into a chair and was controlling him simply through his grip on the slender arm.
‘But you are making trouble,’ I said. ‘Grandma told you to leave her alone.’
‘Olive,’ said Rick, ‘It’s time you called the police. We can wait until they get here.’
‘Sorry ducks,’ said Olive. ‘No phone. Never needed one.’
The thin man looked at broken nose. I saw he was hovering over the chair cushion as Rick turned up the pressure, his victim neither sitting, nor standing and distinctly uncomfortable, but given his position, valiantly said, ‘No fucking phone George. These ain’t family. How come they don’t know there’s no phone?’
George, for it was he who had the stillness and nose of a fighter, was now having to decide his next move; take care of me or go to his mate’s aid and take on Rick. He made the same decision I would and came for me. That way, Rick might come to my aid, and let go of the creature in his grip.
The way he walked was reassuring. Not full on and not barrelling forward. He came at me sideways as if uncertain of his first move.
Whatever he was thinking, he’d had fair warning and those expensive lapels were irresistible. A foot taller than him, I just grabbed him and butted his head on the sweet spot. He was too late to thrust my arms apart. Too late to counter the blow. My brother always told me to strike as if to drive your head through the other man’s forehead. It stops the instinct to hold off at the last instant. George went down heavily, stunned but not unconscious. He lay propped on one elbow. His wallet poked out of his trouser pocket, so I took it, found a private club membership card in the name of George Trowler and stuffed it all back in his pocket.
Rick let his man go. The thin man looked shaken and went over to George and said lamely, ‘are you all right George?’
I saw a look of tenderness. He looked back at me.
‘What have you done to my brother?’
‘I’m sorry, what’s your name?’
‘Edward.’
‘He asked for it Edward. It might have got very nasty.’ I said. I thought about the lamp. ‘So, it had to stop.’
‘You could have killed him.’
‘He might have killed me. Listen, if you come into an old lady’s house and menace her, you deserve what you get. What you do is . .’
I couldn’t think of the right word, but Olive completed my assessment.
‘You’re scum, now get out.’
‘It was our first job,’ said Edward, lifting George to his feet and backing towards the door as if we’d rush them. The door opened and Maddie came in with Kate behind her.
‘Alright?’ she said to me.
‘Sure.’
‘It’s just that, there’s blood on your head, here,’ she said, pointing vaguely to her forehead.
‘Oh, it’s not mine,’ I said. ‘George here has a little split head. Nothing really.’
‘I see,’ she said, glancing at George who was feeling for the injury himself.
‘I could get you a tea-towel or something. Some cold water?’ and headed for the kitchen. But by the time she got back, George and Edward had shuffled out, their career as winklers off to a bad start.
I like it. It has drama and a mild humor reminiscent of the “Thin Man” movies, where a small amount of violence and a fair amount of talking made the scene without destroying an entire building’s furnishings.
Thanks for taking the time to read it Calvin. It’s a first draft but our writer’s group were positive about it last night as well and they can be ruthless🤣