Review of Wicked Little Letters.
To a far greater degree than the Republican Party, Britain’s governing class believes that the real spirit of the nation can be found in its countryside. The national stage is not located in big cities like London, but in the shires and market towns, where conflicts social and political can play out in miniature form. Virtually every one of the post-2016 tranche of Brexit novels – most notably Jonathan Coe’s Middle England (2018) and Bourneville (2022) – is set in small-town Britain. Political coverage in Britain is also bucolic in its assumptions. When a Westminster politician heads out into the shires, during an election or in the aftermath of a flood, it is thought that they will there confront what is an essentially perennial Englishness – an Englishness that, it is implied, in some way has their measure. It is in places like these that the temperature of the nation is taken.
But unlike Middlemarch, which depicts England on the eve of the Reform Bill through the goings-on in a small Midlands town, modern portrayals of these places show us a settled idyll. In the fiction and the programming of the 2010s, depictions of these towns and villages are an exercise in pointed whimsy. Forelock-tugging ploughmen; local eccentrics; and a clergy and aristocracy that still enjoy something like social deference – these are always the essential ingredients. This is meant above all to be comfortable terrain, an England that has always existed and will exist forever.
In these depictions, the kick to the narrative is always provided by some outside force that threatens to disturb this idyll: a dodgy developer, an obnoxious interloper from out of town or a kulturkampf issue that divides loyalties. The task for our heroes, usually a local worthy aided by an enlisted posse of eccentrics, is to restore the old equilibrium. This is the basic narrative device behind the cosy mystery stories of Richard Osman and Richard Coles, where acts of gruesome murder are counterposed against church bake sales and colourful bunting.
The indispensable woman of this genre is Olivia Coleman. Her characters are known for being models of traditional provincial respectability. The people she portrays, we are told, are repositories of a musn’t-grumble English decency and decorum – which is held to be as eternal as the shires and market towns themselves.
But what if such a person suddenly screamed “Fuck”? Her decorous and polite characters often do. The device is the same: a beau ideal that has, briefly, been thrown off kilter.
But with Wicked Little Letters, which premiered on Friday, this carefully constructed set-piece has at last tipped in chaos to the floor. The film is not so much a picking apart of the genre as a keying up of each of its characteristics to the absolute maximum. The resulting atmosphere is one of fever and lunacy. The setting – the seaside town of Littlehampton in the aftermath of World War One – is not a collection of quaint eccentrics, but a traditional freakshow. The residents of Littlehampton are sub-sentient, swivel-eyed and illiterate. They burp, fart, shit, brawl and fuck one another with a glazed, dead-eyed mania. Figures of authority, like the local police chief and magistrates, are not merely self-important but simple lunatics: bug-eyed, shrieking, liable to burst at any moment.
Wicked Little Letters is about Edith Swan (Olivia Coleman), an overripe version of the usual Coleman character. Edith is a pious, though vain and foolish woman who lives with her parents in Littlehampton, and has started to receive foul poison-pen letters from an anonymous source. The police get involved, and the finger of suspicion quickly falls on their neighbor Rose Goody (Jessie Buckley), a single mother tearaway who swears, fights, drinks and co-habits with her boyfriend.
Rose is arrested and put on trial for libel. We soon learn, however, that Edith has herself been writing the letters, which she keeps in a portfolio hidden in her bedroom wall. Edith unconsciously hates her overbearing parents, especially her gruesome tyrant of a father (Timothy Spall), and writes these letters as a way to express her suppressed rage.
Olivia Coleman saying “Fuck” has been the go-to comedic device of English cinema for close to a decade. Here it is tested to destruction. It is essentially the only joke in Wicked Little Letters: Coleman’s character is a prim and proper English lady who’s been driven over the edge, and so her horrible letters are exercises in cutesy viciousness (Rose later makes fun of Edith for overusing the term ‘foxy’ in her missives).
The assumption here is that this gag really is enough to carry an entire film on its own. It is not. This is a complacent piece of work, and it shows the exhaustion of the genre.
Edith is eventually found out, cackling maniacally as the paddy wagon takes her away. But look a little past this general bedlam and you’ll find the real heart of Wicked Little Letters. This is the local policewoman Gladys, who is the one who cracks the case and exonerates Rose. Gladys is a thoroughly Mayite figure, a dutiful, unsmiling, and conscientious social guardian. Gladys is one of the few sane people in Littlehampton, and certainly the only responsible adult. In the 2020s, cosy English fiction makes greater and greater recourse to grim figures of authority like Gladys. These are the only people – it is implied – who can maintain the old idyll in the face of challenges to social order, which is always ascribed to a kind of reefer madness. Littlehampton is mad; England is mad, and it is up to people like Gladys to corral these loopy bat-eared freaks into some semblance of civilised order. More than anything else, Wicked Little Letters is a depiction of the social theory of Mayism, of Starmerism. It’s an aesthetic of exhaustion that breaks down into absurdism; but it’s an absurdism that, tellingly, still never thinks to leave the English countryside.
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There’s that redefined word again: cases.
Bill Gates : Reduce World Population With New Vaccines – In this Ted Talk, Bill Gates says CO2 causes ecosystem collapse, and top scientists tell him we have to get CO2 emissions down to zero. He then goes on to say that we need to reduce population, and we can use new vaccines to do that.
(REALLY CREEPY STUFF – I THOUGHT THIS WAS JUST A CONSPIRACY THEORY)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfstBe1buaA
Stand in South Hill Park Bracknell every Sunday from 10am meet fellow anti lockdown freedom lovers, keep yourself sane, make new friends and have a laugh.
Join our Stand in the Park – Bracknell – Telegram Group
http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
Any news on the 24 more dangerous things than COVID?
What do you think?
Bill Gates : Reduce World Population With New Vaccines – In this Ted Talk, Bill Gates says CO2 causes ecosystem collapse, and top scientists tell him we have to get CO2 emissions down to zero.
He then goes on to say that we need to reduce population, and we can use new vaccines to do that.
(REALLY CREEPY STUFF – I THOUGHT THIS WAS JUST A CONSPIRACY THEORY)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfstBe1buaA
Stand in South Hill Park Bracknell every Sunday from 10am meet fellow anti lockdown freedom lovers, keep yourself sane, make new friends and have a laugh.
Join our Stand in the Park – Bracknell – Telegram Group
http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
Even with covid the average age of death is 80+ and very similar to average age of death without covid. The news is that we die! Does it really matter of what you die of but covid is a nasty death the covidians say. I can’t imagine that the other 24 are very pleasant either!
Yes, you would think that the ‘Ministry of Truth’, obsessed as they are with the death toll, would announce daily stats regarding death from all causes/conditions, just to freak everyone out… oh!!!
Who cares?
“Cases” may or may not rise again in the autumn and we may or may not have more “lockdowns”.
But the real issue now is vaccine and testing fascism. Just as the “conspiracy theorists” predicted, it’s all moving in the direction of health passports controlling where you can and can’t go, in your own country and abroad. And vaccine mandates for lots of jobs. And vilification of the unvaxxed.
There’s no public health justification and none being offered any more. It’s full-on madness and evil that has nothing to do with the initial reasons that the government may have had for its overreaction.
Time DS accepted this and started to think about where we go from here.
Yeah I agree. The argument over whether Covid is a threat or not is over – it’s clearly not. But it’s made no difference. What is currently happening is not in any way shape or form a medical emergency and if this was the start of an outbreak no one would be batting an eyelid, or at least if they were suggesting health passports people would think they were insane.
This is purely now about monitoring and controlling behaviour through surveillance technology. The whole argument and direction of attack needs to be focussed around that now.
Israel is now offering booster jabs for the over-60’s on the basis that vaccine efficacy diminishes over time.
This was never a secret of course, but clearly shows the futility of vax passports.
The fact that governments, including our own, are still hellbent on introducing them is the biggest advert yet that this is absolutely nothing about a virus or health, and only to do with totalitarian control.
Add into this the UK NHS GP Data grab, to begin 1st September (opt outs to be received before 25th August!!). Medical information to be sold to the highest bidder… probably Big Pharma.
Unfortunately its no longer anything to do with ‘cases’. Its ADE and Pfizer ‘vaccine’ at least intially. Although I strongly suspect the UK is paranoid about the beta variant and the AZ vaccine having the same effect.
It is madness but its now very dangerous madness not just because of health passports et al, but because of the very real threat of a serious escape of a far more lethal virus. And we, the unvaxed , are in the firing range.
Yes, I think lockdowns as we had them will be hard to sell without cases but the vaxx and testing madness will continue – everyone thinks the vaxx and testing saved us and are necessary
These mean nothing. Thus sang Doris Day:
“Case error, sera.
Whatever will be, will be.
The future’s not ours to see.
Case error, sera.”
Brilliant
It is interesting what contrasting headlines you can make of the same data. It is equally true to say that daily cases have increased by over 30% in just two days.
Yes, we must not look as if we are cheating in our data presentation. Just give us a Table of numbers for the last week or two – and note that these will fluctuate, both randomly and because of reporting differences on different week-days.
Also, you might (ATL) note that ‘cases’ have to be considered with a massive dose of salt.
Yes I find this very strange; my guess is that the government is controlling the narrative to support ‘Freedom Day’ or should I say ‘Freecon Day?
Cases of what?
The data is all utter nonsense, which is quite deliberate.
Even if you think +ve tests mean anything, you need to look at % positive and then consider if the cohort being tested is consistent – no hope of knowing that
Hospitalisations and deaths of/with are meaningless numbers
Sadly DS is somewhat stuck within the mad fantasy world created by the covid loonies that thinks covid was exceptional
Reported cases. When looking at the cases by specimen date, the picture is rather different (newest data is for 2021/07/27).
Specimen date is hopeless for the last couple of days because not all the data for the most recent days will have come in yet. That’s why they are in grey.
If this was correct, you original statement would be baseless as we don’t have the exact data you’re referring to yet. But it isn’t: This is the most accurate information available at the moment.
The other data is by date reported. We have all the data that is going to be reported today!
Who cares about all this nonsense? It’s irrelevant. You just end up disappearing down rabbit holes.
For as long as the case counts or even “predictions” about future case counts are used as justification for political measures, they aren’t pointless.
According to Ferguson, we should be approaching 100,000 cases per day by now. He presented this as certainty on the 18th. It doesn’t look if his latest attempt to look into a crystal ball produced something more reliable than the predecessors which also failed to do so.
Every single prediction has been wrong. We know that. The arguments are the same as they were last year. All-cause mortality is unexceptional and there’s no evidence that any NPIs make any difference, and scant evidence that vaccines help either.
The main threat now is not from “case” counts, it’s vaccine and testing Fascism. The government no longer needs case counts to justify the coming implementation of the UK equivalent of the European Green Pass – it has been generally accepted as necessary here and all over Europe.
I care about a lot of other things a lot more than about the possibility that the UK government might declare vaccination to be mandatory for larger groups of the population in future. Eg, about not being forced to live in complete social isolation, as was the case from October last year until April this year.
That’s an awfully long time to spend alone.
Isn’t that a case of the government pushing way over the line then pulling back slightly, so you are grateful for the scraps, then they will push again.
I’m so grateful that I’ve considered writing to my so-called MP for the express purpose of warning him against ever meeting me in person should he ever again vote in favour of “COVID restrictions”. :->
Well I care about both of those things, of course, but think the long term danger comes from the universal implementation of restricting access to things based on covid or health status, because that’s something that will then not go away, whereas closing pubs is probably not sustainable forever.
Covid passes will cause me to be fairly isolated. I never stopped seeing the few friends and family who still wanted to see me during lockdowns, but I can’t see myself doing much more than that in the future that seems to have been mapped out for anyone refusing to go along with the health passport scam.
Maybe it’s time for new friends, or options to meet them. Fancy starting a no-jab jamboree? Un-bumble? Eventually we will be forced underground, but there’s still going to be millions of people in the club.
Oh yes indeed, working on finding new friends, just takes time especially in my covidian town
I don’t understand, why were you forced to live in complete social isolation?
I’m unsure if it’s wise to answer this but as “lockdown story”, it’s probably better told than not told.
I’ve been living in the UK since December 2010. All my relatives live in Germany and are (practically at least) prohibited from visiting me (or I them, for that matter). I’m not exactly gregarious, rather autistic and oftentimes, prefer to be on my own even when among other people. I’ve also purposely not sought to get to know anyone actively because this brought me in contact with all kinds of unpleasant characters I’d rather avoid in the town I had lived in last. Because of this, I don’t really know anyone here save a few pub acquaintances, bar staff people and DJs.
Due to external factors, my regular work time is 3pm – 11pm. I have half an hour of rushed shopping for necessities per day before work. Casual conversation with masked people usually doesn’t occur as it’s to bothersome and in any case, my first priority during this time was always “get out of here quickly so that I can remove the darned thing from my face and again breathe freely”.
The net effect of this and “every place where one could possibly encounter strangers/ lose acquaintance in a leisure setting” being closed was that I’ve so far spent 2332km with solitary night walks around the center of the town I’m living in. I had a 3 – 4 sentence conversation with a passing acquaintance I haven’t seen since some time in January and that was about it from the introduction of the 10pm curfew to reopening of indoor hospitality on 2021/04/17.
Ok, what I get from that is you’re a loner anyway. Just surprised that you’re more worried about further restrictions than the UK making experimental therapies mandatory. You can choose to ignore restrictions as many of us have throughout but to have the choice of getting jabbed or not taken away is absolutely abhorrent. I thought it was the unvaxxed who were supposed to be selfish.
I hope you find a circle of loyal, true friends. I quite enjoy people, sometimes, but also my own company. You’re better off being true to yourself. If you’re a good person, sooner or later you will connect with likeminded people who will love you and you will love them.
I think it’s worth trying to build a mutual support network. This goes for all of us. We should try to stay healthy and happy.
Oh, let’s guess shall we? – Government imposed LOCKDOWN = SOCIAL ISOLATION . Can you see the connection?
Because of this, it’s generally more sensibl to look at the number of cases during a certain time interval in the past, eg, the last 7 days. In this case, the picture looks like this.
finally PHE update flu and covid report
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1000373/Weekly_Flu_and_COVID-19_report_w27.pdf
page 61, daily all cause deaths at historic lows
“page 61, daily all cause deaths at historic lows” Yup, the only thing they have not faked, yet, and what does it tell us?
summer cold
Considering the amount of deaths in care homes, private homes and during vaccine roll out, it’s not really a surprise.
So: the miracle Jib-jab is successfully reducing death from all causes now? Well that’s what the trypanosomiasic majority believe anyway.
Wait until the boosters start resurrecting people
“Experts say hospitalisations may fall in the next seven days, and that they lag behind cases because of the time taken for someone who has caught the virus to fall seriously ill.”
although most are people admitted for something else but just happen to test +ve
so ‘number admitted’ will just track prevalence to a large extent
we don’t know prevalence because ‘cases’ are not well enough sampled
Yup all nonsense
Van Tam lying as usual
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-58014546
“Among those asking Prof Van-Tam questions was Sharnie, 19, a student in Coventry.
She asked why someone like her who has had Covid – and only experienced mild cold and flu symptoms – should have a jab when she doesn’t know the long-term effects of it.
“If there was anything very major going on in terms of side effects and long-term consequences we would have seen those signals and we just haven’t,” Prof Van-Tam said.”
you wouldn’t have seen them yet you daft twat. its only been a few months out of the lab
He’s not daft, he’s evil.
And getting wealthier by the minute.
Protected by Blackwater?
They have seen them though, it’s just that journalists have been told they will taken off air if they bring this up or allow guests to bring it up
How does he define “very major”? Maybe he means only “slightly major”.
Follow up question. So you don’t consider 1500 dead to be a long-term consequence? I would suggest that for those 1500 and their families, the consequences are already long term.
The UK governments actions re France say this is a lie. They see the CDC report on ADE and the Pfizer ‘leaky vaccine’. The only reason for their discriminatory action on borders with France and the so-called beta variant threat ( from Reunion in the Indian Ocean) is that the AZ ‘leaky vaccine’ is not good against the beta variant. So they are now paranoid about ADE from AZ and beta variant. Van-Tam lies.
They’re all lying about almost everything. As Yeadon says about Vallance et al, they’ve read the same books and studied the same things he has. The politicians are lying too – no-one gets to be PM without some critical faculties, if only because they need to be wary of being caught out in a lie. They are lying because they are getting away with it.
I would say 1500 dead people are “very major…side effects.”
But I don’t understand “the Science.”
“Around 60,000 deaths have been prevented in England as a result of the Covid vaccine programme, the deputy chief medical officer has said.
The modellers behind the figure looked at the number of infections we’ve seen since the start of the year. They then asked how many of those infected people would have died if the death rates from 2020 still applied.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-58014546
so, not applying the new and much lower CFR from the delta variant and then assuming the lack of deaths is due only to vaccines and lockdowns.
this is fraud
Fraud and if it’s being used to persuade people, especially young people, to get jabbed then it’s evil. As is pretending getting vaxxed helps others by preventing spread.
I don’t remember any “vaccine” last summer.
Agree, have just filed an FOI request asking how this figure was arrived at so hopefully will get an official admission that they did what you suggest.
There they go again with the myth that people only go into hospital when they are seriously ill with Covid, when we know that they have a 28 day window to go in for something else and still be listed as a Covid patient or to join the 60% who got a positive after they went in.
Tim Spector of ZOE thinks that the NHS figures are too low (hence his 60,000 estimate) because the NHS are testing the wrong kind of people. I kid you not!
French protest
Lasse Wikman – I det ögonblick som franska demonstranter… (facebook.com)
Maybe someone from the government should ask the funeral directors and local authorities whether there has been evidence of a pandemic over the past 18 months? And a subsequent significant upsurge in deaths being recorded? I think I know the answer…
Post Covid-19 Vaccine Shingles – YouTube
People getting shingles after the jab!
A friend of ours, late 60s but otherwise healthy, not jabbed, got shingles just after visiting friends who had been recently jabbed. Was hospitalized, the medics repeatedly asked “when were you jabbed” and had to be told forcefully by his wife that he had not. Which clearly indicates that they are seeing a lot of shingles cases and are convinced it is vaccine related. Also raises the question of the spike protein shedding (since it has been detected in breast milk, seems quite plausible that it could shed from the epithelial cells in the lungs). He has recovered, but there was concern he would lose the sight of one eye …..
Does anyone know when the EUA for the vaccines expires? I tried searching but couldn’t find an expiry date.
Unfortunately it doesn’t. It is “valid until expressly withdrawn by MHRA or upon issue of full market authorisation by MHRA”.
Thanks. Bad times
The emergency jabbing can carry on while the powers are in place in the UK afaik, these will likely be renewed in sept.
If I understand it correctly, the Americans are saying that the PCR test is no good and say they are introducing a test that can distinguish between Covid and flu. This does rather suggest that the current PCR test doesn’t distinguish between them, which raises the possibility that a lot of the positives may be flu, which could go a long way to explaining last winter’s wave.
The current test makes no differential between any number of Coronavirus. Why do you think flu disappeated last year?
There is some evidence that when one infection becomes prevalent, other infections are displaced, IIRC the body releases Interferons which protect against infections in general. Struck me then that pushing influenza vaccinations was a bad idea, you force the body to expend effort against that when it should be 100% ready for the bigger threat.
My understanding is that they are expanding the PCR casedemic to include flu. They are trying to add to the hysteria, rather than filter out noise from the (ludicrously oversensitive) PCR results.
It annoys me when they talk about hospitalisations and then look exclusively at hospital admissions as this is known to be a dubious statistic, they need to also look at total ”Covid” 19 patients in NHS Hospitals. And today was the first day for some time that the the number of ”covid” patients in English NHS hospitals fell. It went down from 5182 yesterday to 5056 today a fall of 126.
As this hoo-haa has progressed it is clear that the data is far from everything but nonetheless when it goes our way it does help a bit.
Here’s that “Do you have herpes?” video again, one of the best to have come out of all this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y2VoZkuRv4
Just a thought. Supposing – though I don’t believe it for a moment – that lots of unvaxxed people got covvie and died, would the vaxxoids accuse us of unfairly cluttering up the undertakers?
LOL – yes probably.
So how many “cases” were there in July 2019, July 2018 or at any other time prior to March 2020 when the test miraculously appeared along with all the other bullshit?
Oh that’s right, we have absolutely no idea what a normal number of ‘cases’ is.
Exactly!
We know there was a noticeable spike in deaths in spring 2020 and then again in early 2021. The first could have been covid or could have been denial of care, the second could have been covid or could have been vaccines. But taken with the rest of 2020 and 2021 they were not exceptional. Everything else is just noise, and if we were not testing or pretending to test for something or other, no-one would know it was happening.
Wife is a biologist, has worked in immunology (technician level but still knows a lot) and one of her pet peeves is that so little is known about what happens normally, so it is quite likely that a lot of the “oh god, covid 19 does X” is misplaced, because X is really quite normal, it has just never been looked at before.
Apparently we all need to become ‘ethical vegitarians’. Due to previous legal cases, employers or I think anyone else cannot discriminate against this group of people. So they can refuse to be vaxed or indeed use health passports on the basis it contravenes their beliefs.
Not sure exactly how you officially become an ethical veggie, any ideas?
It’s ‘ethical vegan’. As far as I can see you simply claim to be one.
I am as of today, an ethical vegan and therefore I cannot be jabbed! Hurrahh!
Isn’t the increased sadlidied number a function of the mass testing done over the past month? Find more (false?) positives and wait for a percentage to meet the no. 99 bus.
I am not interested in these daily contrived stats , they really are meaningless.
I dont give a fuck if fat jack has died as it was possibly his own fault- eating and drinking rubbish with the only exercise is bending his elbow. And so Nelly has a cough what a bunch of moronic wimps!
So Boris, as far as I am concerned your fear campaign has failed. So fuck off and enjoy the millions you have pocketed from big Pharma, it is over
Let’s remember that until the failure of the PCR is accepted, all of the numbers are totally meaningless. This includes cases and deaths.
AND they’re not ”cases” either.
March 16, 2020 was also the day that UK Gov issued their Guidance for Social Distancing for everyone in the UK where we were commanded that the over 70s and at risk groups should isolate for 12 weeks and everyone else should minimise contact, work from home, avoid pubs etc etc.
March 16, 2020 just happened to be the 169 th birthday of Martinus Beijerinck, one of the fathers of virology who is credited wit the discovery of viruses …
MG