What a show off...

So, I went to the premiere of History Boys last night.

This is obviously because I’m (s)wankier than I look. And I’m clearly blogging about it because I’m just a little tiny bit up my own arse. But goddamnit, I wore a surprisingly elegant little black Reiss dress (it’s not surprising that Reiss do elegant dresses you understand – it’s surprising that I wore something elegant), proper grown up shoes with enormously high heels and I even accessorised – definitely a first for me. So frankly I think the blisters that resulted* give me the right to show off just a bit.

Anyway, it was a somewhat special premiere – because for once I didn’t slope up the red carpet sheepishly (in my more usual jeans and trainers) while pointing and laughing at last season’s Big Brother losers and playing one of my favourite games - trying to work out whether those skinny teens in the tiny weeny dresses who are clutching the arms of said BB rejects are expensive whores or just kids’ TV presenters who like their makeup a bit too much.

And the reason they weren’t there for me to mock?

Because the film is actually too good for them. It’s bright, it’s witty and I can see instantly why Alan Bennett’s script was such a roaring success in the theatre. Now this does mean that the occasional aside or delivery (from the original theatre cast) isn’t quite suited to film. But once you let that triviality go it’s great.

My favourite scene has got to be one of the play-lets within a play – all in French – and all in the subjunctive.

And what pleases me most about this scene? Apart from the fact that it’s genuinely very funny?

It’s the fact that despite heavily insistent pressure from LA box office junkies, Fox Searchlight point-blank refused to subtitle the dialogue. They’ve assumed that the viewer is intelligent enough to comprehend this schoolboy French (now do you get why the Big Brother crowd weren’t there?). And the flattery works for me. Pander to my intellectual ego. Please. Since the world (or Hollywood as some people call it) discovered Banksy I haven’t felt all that reassured that I’m a cut above the ready meal eating reality TV watcher. I’ve lost that smugness that comes from knowing that Lord Peter Wimsey’s proposal to Harriet is all the more romantic for the fact that the tense he uses (in Latin) presumes that the answer will be ‘no’. So, personally, I love the fact that this film, with its esoteric quotations, its intellectually superior 6th formers and its resounding lovie-ness is aimed right at me.

Who needs a chick-flick for feel good factor? I’m ready to make my third attempt at Satanic Verses I feel so intellectually up to it…



*Top Tuesday Tip: Scholl’s “Party Feet” don’t, in actual fact, work.