Wicked Little Letters is based on a wonderfully juicy sex scandal that took place in – wait for it! – Littlehampton, West Sussex. The Carry On team would have had a field day.
In 1921, Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley) was summoned to the Littlehampton County Bench for criminally libelling her neighbour, Edith Swan (Olivia Colman).
Swan had received poison-pen letters, saying things such as ‘You bloody old cow, mind your own business and there would be no rows – R.’
Rose was sent to jail for a year. Then an enterprising Scotland Yard detective inspector investigated other letters that appeared when Gooding was in jail.
He identified Edith as the culprit. She had been sending the letters to herself, her family, other neighbours and – wonderfully – the Littlehampton Sanitary Inspector (Kenneth Williams, if there were a Carry On version).
Edith was finally trapped when a Scotland Yard undercover operative sold her a stamp marked with invisible ink – which she used on a dirty letter.
Imagine how funny this would have been in the hands of, say, Alan Bennett and Stephen Frears. Instead, the story has been wrecked by director Thea Sharrock and writer Jonny Sweet.
First, they completely change the story. They turn Rose Gooding, in fact a married Sussex woman, into an Irish single mother with a black boyfriend – so they can win plus points for saying Rose was persecuted by Edith as a wicked outsider and strumpet.
And they make the male Scotland Yard detective inspector into a young woman (played with medium blandness by Anjana Vasan). Cue lots of bad jokes by her fellow police officers about how women shouldn’t be in the force.
It’s fine to play around with real life for dramatic or comic effect – but not to make the story boring with agitprop lines.
This is a laughless, flat exercise in British Olden Days Comedy – where writers think it’s funny just to have people in period costume speaking in a generic yokel accent and swearing a lot.
Olivia Colman is a gifted, natural actor but even she can’t raise a laugh from dead, unnatural, sweary lines, such as ‘You want f***ing in the nose, you old beetle!’. The talents of Timothy Spall (as Edith’s twisted father) and Eileen Atkins (as a wise neighbour) are wasted, too.
The swearing goes on and on – never funny; only boring. And the boredom eats away at any remnants of tension in what was naturally such a good plot. In real life, Edith was acquitted of libel in 1921 because she was thought to be so respectable – only to revive her wicked letters. She was finally convicted in 1923 – for the letter to the Littlehampton Sanitary Inspector.
For period comedies to work, the humour has to be as good as in modern comedy. The same goes for period drama – the Peaky Blinders are as compellingly vicious as the Sopranos.
Dressing people in 1920s suits and having them walk around charming seaside towns doesn’t make their bad lines any better. The same low standards apply to the theatre, where mediocre plays get laughs that would never raise a titter on telly.
Alan Bennett (90 in May, incidentally) knows all this. A Private Function, set in 1947, is just as funny as The History Boys, set in the 1980s. The Madness of George III, set in the 18th and early-19th centuries, is as sharp as The Lady in the Van, set in the 1970s.
To make jokes about a period, you need to know it inside out, as Bennett does. The characters in Wicked Little Letters speak – and swear – with no ear for how people actually talked in 1920s Sussex. At one point, the woman police officer has to refer to the ‘poor emotional well-being of women affected by crime’. Strewth!
In Life of Brian and Holy Grail – their best films – Monty Python were funny because they knew precisely what they were lampooning. A hundred medieval historians voted Monty Python and the Holy Grail their favourite film because it was so full of shrewd in-jokes.
Professor Carolyne Larrington, of St John’s College, Oxford, even uses it to teach her undergraduates about medieval literature. I can’t see Wicked Little Lies cropping up in any decent university tutorials any time soon.
