Mum’s the word

Press, 4 February 1986, Page 19

Mum’s the word

Watching “Lace” had the same type of revolting compulsion that might be occasioned by the sight of copulating tarantulas. It is certainly the worst miniseries ever to have appeared on the screen; the sludge in the sump of television, below which it is not possible to dredge. It comes as no surprise that was very popular in the United States. Its sole good point lies in its power to inspire analogies — it was the complete, utter abysmal yak’s droppings of television. “Lace” was entirely plot, of bewildering complexity. Just in case you missed it, or could not follow its intricacies, here is a summary. Adopted soft-core-porn film star, Lili rummages through the past to find which of three women, now middle-aged, was her mother. Like the beginning of a poor joke, the American, English and French girls spent their formative years at a Swiss school, rapidly following which one of them gave birth to Lili. They had her adopted and musketeered it through life.

Lili is one of the most uncongenial characters

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ever to have sprung from the small box. A prognathous jaw was balanced by a pout that would do credit to a camel. Her eyes were like end of the evening ash-trays, and her behaviour, supposedly ruthless, was reminiscent of a downmarket form of the soccer terraces. The series moved from cliche to cliche with impressive rapidity. English country houses, an Arab prince, a French chateau, industrialists on yachts. The characters, almost indistinguishable for the first few hours, were prompted to ever greater excesses by motives of sex, greed and revenge. They stayed fashionably thin as they fed off one another.

Everything about “Lace” was consistent with the plot and characterisation. The camera angles entered new realms of creativity, the

most significant being directed up through the keys of a typewriter to the typist’s nostrils, a technical feat of some magnitude. The music was like having sweet and sour pork stuffed in one’s ears. The colours had the feel of those blue American tennis courts, vivid and completely inappropriate.

The characters were so uniformly dreadful that at least it was not possible to identify with any of them, even the middle-aged “Charlie’s Angels” without the guns. The only points that the three mothers had in common were a penchant for wallowing in the foetid mud of their emotions, and legs shaped like Indian clubs.

But all this is as nothing, as it is the majesty of its language for which “Lace” will be remembered. It had a line which reverberated round the room for hours afterwards. “Now, which of you bitches is my mother?” — a conversation stopper of the first

water. There were others. “I must see you tonight; I want you to see my major accomplishment” “My son

did not exaggerate your beauty, Miss Trelawny.” The best lines though were quite rightly reserved for Lili. “None of you is good enough to be my mother.” (She would never have said "is” in this sentence.) “Who wants a porno queen for a daughter?” “I was always told my real mother would come for me one day. She never did . . .” "You’re always there when you’re needed, except when it’s a matter of life and death.” From this, should you think that “Lace” was slightly wanting, it was splendid in comparison with “Lace II.” In this, Lili became even more

repulsive by apparently being more pleasant. Two of her ageing mothers became thinner, but still stuck together to help the third, Lili’s actual mother, unaccountably inhabiting the body of another actress. Perhaps the first saw the light. Anyway, it was memorable for the second-best-ever line on television. “I want you to help me find out which of these bastards is my father.” Cricket tailpiece, in more ways Gian one: Even the New Zealand link man is entering into the spirit of things. “The New Zealanders will be pleased to see the rear end of Wayne Phillips as he disappears.” Umm.