I write, others bake cakes...
Jul. 25th, 2015 07:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessI posted a ficlet the other day A time and a place, Agents of SHIELD, Melinda May/Phil Coulson, PG. I was relieved to find I could still write something after a while of staring at prompts and blanking. When responding to feedback, I've felt obliged to say that the scenario wasn't my idea - I just expanded on it. Do other people feel like that when you're working off someone else's idea?
Because of Home Front, I watched Cake Bakers and Trouble Makers: Lucy Worsley's 100 Years of the WI. It's the first time I've watched anything presented by Worsley, so at first her voice struck me as a bit strident. She likes pointing, doesn't she? By the end, you could see her folding her arms as if in an attempt to control that.
Although informative, it was, perforce, a bit of a canter through selected highpoints in the Women's Institute's career so far - the inception, the influence of suffragism, its popularity, the second world war - with some bits from the author of Jambusters, suggesting we'll see can-making and more evacuees at Great Paxford? - the swinging sixties and the subsequent decline of the WI in the face of the women's lib movement, Calendar Girls, slow-clapping the PM and finally following the Shoreditch branch (how buccolic) protesting. So, inevitably, it was only informative up to a point and I was reminded of why I don't watch so many documentaries, because I want to pause the programme, get into it and ask 'Why?' to the talking heads about lots of things.
There was quite a bit of patronising because of bias, too. Worsley and some professor had established that some WI members had taken in evacuees who were, understandably, bed-wetters, at a time when they would have had to do all the washing themselves on top of the usual grind. The WI had bothered to ask them how it went, and so they complained about some aspects like poor hygeine, and to these modern day commentators, that sounded a bit like 1960s racism around immigrans. I did think, hold your horses, there.
I also suspect that because Worsley approved thoroughly of the women's lib's campaign's aims, she set it up rather easily in opposition to the staid image the WI had gained at the time, painting it as a generational clash. Okay, there was a glancing mention of how the WI had campaigned for some of these issues decade ago, but that didn't lead to the obvious point that the new crop of campaigners didn't know their history. Never mind going into the fact that they started off in Oxford University, making them more privileged than many WI members, and so ignoring class, which had been discussed previously but still matters, or indeed rural vs. urban aspects.
Anyway, I chortled over the fact thatthe WI's anthem is Jerusalem (while feeling sorry that it has been stereotyped as being all about 'Jam and Jerusalem'), which goes on about England's greenery or whatnot, when the WI actually started in Canada and then came to Wales. Llanfair PG, in fact. On Anglesey, which probably doesn't consider itself Welsh on some days. Hearing Worsley butcher 'Llanfair PG' repeatedly was chalk up a blackboard - I thought the Beeb had a pronunciation unit.
And now I feel like a bad woman who isn't showing sisterly solidarity, but I don't think the programme was either, entirely. Of course, I'd never make it in the WI, I abhor tea.
Because of Home Front, I watched Cake Bakers and Trouble Makers: Lucy Worsley's 100 Years of the WI. It's the first time I've watched anything presented by Worsley, so at first her voice struck me as a bit strident. She likes pointing, doesn't she? By the end, you could see her folding her arms as if in an attempt to control that.
Although informative, it was, perforce, a bit of a canter through selected highpoints in the Women's Institute's career so far - the inception, the influence of suffragism, its popularity, the second world war - with some bits from the author of Jambusters, suggesting we'll see can-making and more evacuees at Great Paxford? - the swinging sixties and the subsequent decline of the WI in the face of the women's lib movement, Calendar Girls, slow-clapping the PM and finally following the Shoreditch branch (how buccolic) protesting. So, inevitably, it was only informative up to a point and I was reminded of why I don't watch so many documentaries, because I want to pause the programme, get into it and ask 'Why?' to the talking heads about lots of things.
There was quite a bit of patronising because of bias, too. Worsley and some professor had established that some WI members had taken in evacuees who were, understandably, bed-wetters, at a time when they would have had to do all the washing themselves on top of the usual grind. The WI had bothered to ask them how it went, and so they complained about some aspects like poor hygeine, and to these modern day commentators, that sounded a bit like 1960s racism around immigrans. I did think, hold your horses, there.
I also suspect that because Worsley approved thoroughly of the women's lib's campaign's aims, she set it up rather easily in opposition to the staid image the WI had gained at the time, painting it as a generational clash. Okay, there was a glancing mention of how the WI had campaigned for some of these issues decade ago, but that didn't lead to the obvious point that the new crop of campaigners didn't know their history. Never mind going into the fact that they started off in Oxford University, making them more privileged than many WI members, and so ignoring class, which had been discussed previously but still matters, or indeed rural vs. urban aspects.
Anyway, I chortled over the fact thatthe WI's anthem is Jerusalem (while feeling sorry that it has been stereotyped as being all about 'Jam and Jerusalem'), which goes on about England's greenery or whatnot, when the WI actually started in Canada and then came to Wales. Llanfair PG, in fact. On Anglesey, which probably doesn't consider itself Welsh on some days. Hearing Worsley butcher 'Llanfair PG' repeatedly was chalk up a blackboard - I thought the Beeb had a pronunciation unit.
And now I feel like a bad woman who isn't showing sisterly solidarity, but I don't think the programme was either, entirely. Of course, I'd never make it in the WI, I abhor tea.
