A Passionate Woman

Is that Vosene I smell, or just the perfume of an angel?

Billie Piper is the star of Kay Mellor’s A Passionate Woman and she really has got a bum deal. She’s gone from the Tardis to being a housewife and mother in a two-room apartment that seems to be made entirely of mildew, wailing baby and a lot of brown. We're in the 1950s, which was a time of steak and kidney pudding and no sex, especially in Leeds, and no one, including our Betty, knew any better. Her husband is kindly, yet dull — he’ll put food on the table, and "give baby boiled egg", but he’s resolutely not Chatty McAnecdote, and the sex is, predictably, utilitarian. He’s still dealing out the hoggins according to his Ration Book. This is turnip jam shagging.

But! Look! Who’s just moved in downstairs? It’s hot Pole Chris — "Call me Craze for short" — Crazenovski. He’s got cheekbones like the Goss twins, and lips all like I don’t know what. Phwit phwooo! He also owns a set of very 21st-century teeth and a pack of cheesy chat-up lines. Betty bumps into him at the local dance — she all lipstick and overbite, he with his shirt unbuttoned down to here, unlike the British boys, we note. Sexy McSexingtonowski comes on to her — "Is that Vosene I smell, or just the perfume of an angel?" — but she runs away, flustered.

This does not meet with approval from her racy sister, Margaret. "You’ve got to live a little!" she counsels, while banging some likely Herbert behind the bandstand. Betty twists her wedding ring, anxiously, waiting for her to finish. Two hot sisters christened Elizabeth and Margaret, you think to yourself. One dutiful, one dirty. I see what you’ve done there, Mellor. Nice one.

But this Elizabeth doesn’t have to worry about looking slutty in front of the whole Commonwealth. And, besides, she’s facing unendurable provocation — old Letch Walesa downstairs keeps going out into the street, looking buff while picking up heavy things. The first time Betty sees him do this, from her kitchen window, she becomes so lost in reverie that she lets her potatoes overboil. Yeah. You know what it means when a lady’s spuds overboil. It’s like when a train goes into a tunnel, but better. And with mash at the end.

So this was Billie Secret Diary of a Call Girl Piper playing, yet again, a chick who’s all stocking tops, gasping orgasms and red-hot filth. At this point in Piper’s career, I think we can all draw our own conclusions about this. Mine is: I love Billie Piper. Over the course of an hour, she and her lover have sex in the rain, against a birch tree; in the marital bed; and in a corridor of Stygian gloom while a baby wails, distantly, like a warning-bell. Suddenly no-getty Betty is sweaty getty-lotty Betty. It's a thin line, sometimes, between period drama and soft porn.

Meanwhile, poor Donald, Betty's husband, is left sitting at home, wondering where his wife and his pudding have got to. Obviously, it all ends really badly: Betty’s passion for Craze becomes so intense that, when she next spots him through the kitchen window, she becomes distracted and lets her glass of water fill from the tap until it overflows. Yeah. You know what it means when a lady’s glass fills to overflowing. She’s going to have to towel up a big mess.

That mess turned out to be Craze getting shot by his enraged, pregnant wife — splattering plot goo all over the shop, and lining everyone up for the concluding episode, set 30 years later. Good, frankly. No one likes to see nice English girls running off with Johnny Foreigner, just because he's handsome and a better lover, and makes her feel not only like a woman but actually alive, instead of dead, which is what she feels like when she's with you. Well, no one apart from the ladies themselves. I think this is one for them, to be honest.

As the first episode ended, it was hard to know exactly how you felt about it all, really. If I’m to be honest, as the credits rolled, I realised that my main pleasure had come from seeing a character — Betty — shuffling outside in a pork-pink candlewick dressing gown. Man, I haven’t seen a candlewick dressing gown for years. That texture is satisfying. I'll let my girlfriend watch part two, and open us a nice tin of steak and kidney pudding.


Television Series: A Passionate Woman (E01)
Release Date: April 2010
Actress: Billie Piper
Video Clip Credit: Trailblazer



http://rapidshare.com/files/375137448/Billie_Piper_A_Passionate_Woman_TB.mpg