Swayed

I SAW SUEDE ON WEDNESDAY!

It was utterly unexpected; a friend ended up with a spare ticket and asked if I'd like to accompany her. Naturally, I said yes. So Wednesday night was a rather lovely evening spent at the Royal Albert Hall (somewhere I've always wanted to go). I'm now also rather in love with Brett Anderson. And just when I thought they weren't going to play my favourite song, it was their final encore. Cue one very happy Brackers. As they said - let's do it all again in another seven years...

Finished Rebecca - love it. I then watched the Hitchcock film. It was quite good, but I'm disappointed that they changed a rather vital piece of the plot. It's difficult to explain without ruining the novel for people who stumble across this blog, but I felt its removal completely sanitised the entire story.

Apart from that, though, I liked it. Even Lawrence Olivier didn't annoy me, which was a nice surprise. I know disliking him is akin to blasphemy, but I think his scenery-chewing roles in Hamlet and Richard III are utterly terrible, and he was woefully miscast as Heathcliff. Slightly repressed stuffy upper-class types such as Maxim de Winter seem to be his forté, even if he's not quite how I imagined the character.

In an ideal world, the BBC would put out a new version with Richard Armitage as Maxim and Sian Phillips as Mrs Danvers (or David Mitchell in a dress). You know it makes sense. Sian Phillips' turn as Mrs. Driver in The Borrowers was one of the great villainous roles of my childhood.