★★★ As beauty queen Barbara Parker, Gemma Arterton is a feisty, fearless heroine – but the comedy she’s supposed to be famous for is lacking ✒️ francescasteele
is Barbara Parker, a 60s Blackpool beauty pageant winner who hands back the prize when she realises that cutting ribbons at supermarket openings and being drooled over by photographers for a year isn’t quite what she had in mind. “If she’d played her cards right she could have been engaged to the best looking butcher in Blackpool!” laments her disapproving Aunt Marie.
Barbara heads off instead to the bright lights of London, her eyes set on the stage. She hopes to follow in the footsteps of her idol, America’s quintessential fifties funny woman, but finds herself working variously as a hat salesgirl in a boutique, auditioning for adverts for which she apparently never has the right body or accent, and as a scantily clad exotic dancer in Soho.
Arterton has great comic timing and brings a lot of vim to the role. But the script is undercooked and uneven, which rests on the old-fashioned idea that a Northern accent is intrinsically funny.Funny Girl . In the original, Barbara’s comedic talents were often hinted at rather than overtly shown. Laid bare on TV, her jokes and physical comedy – which involve a lot of pulling silly faces during exotic dances and clucking like a chicken at auditions – feel meagre, more like an amateur stand-up night than a rare talent just waiting to be unearthed.That’s not to say that it’s not a fun watch.
There are the prejudices of the theatre world to contend with too. “I thought kitchen sink drama was all the rage,” she says to her agent. “For angry young men, dear,” he replies. “Nobody wants an angry young woman galumphing around the stage beating her breasts like an orangutan.”
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