CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: You’ll root for this modern-day Austen heroine
Queenie (Ch4)
This is my theory: Jane Austen wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary.
Yes, the smartypants among you can argue this is probably untrue, but you will be missing the point.
Bridget is stranded between adolescence and adulthood.
She wants to fall in love so much, she’s in serious danger of choosing the wrong man.
She’s talented but no one seems to appreciate it. And she’s so accident prone, she could wreck her own life at any moment.
Look past the South London setting, and this eight-part romantic comedy (staying close to its source, the 2019 bestseller by Candice Carty-Williams) is a direct descendant of a Jane Austen novel. Pictured: Dionne Brown, who plays lead character Queenie
In other words, she’s just like the heroine of any Austen novel, especially my favourites, Mansfield Park and Emma.
The heroine of Queenie, played by Dionne Brown, fits the same mould exactly.
Look past the South London setting, and this eight-part romantic comedy (staying close to its source, the 2019 bestseller by Candice Carty-Williams) is a direct descendant.
Queenie’s best friend, Kyazike, played by actress and singer Bellah, can get away with making remarks about her boyfriend Tom’s skin colour. She calls him ‘the Ivory King’ and ‘Mr Mayo’
None of Miss Austen’s novels begins with a gynaecological examination, it must be said.
But most of them feature key scenes at dances — and Queenie does too, if you can describe shouting and waving your arms about in a nightclub as ‘dancing’.
Like Bridget, Queenie is constantly talking to herself, and we listen in to her internal monologue . . . even during her internal examination.
She’s self-critical, blaming herself for everything that goes wrong — the features she doesn’t get commissioned to write by her editor (Sally Phillips), the arguments over nothing with her boyfriend Tom (Jon Pointing), the disapproval of her family and especially her strident Aunty Maggie (Michelle Greenidge).
Just like Bridget Jones (and Fanny in Mansfield Park), the more Queenie doubts herself, the worse her judgment gets.
At a friend’s engagement party, she gets drunk and, like the character in the Beatles song, crawls off to sleep in the bath.
She has a touching knack for making a bad situation worse.
At a birthday party for Tom’s mum (and Queenie has already lost the present she was meant to bring), the voice in her head picks the worst possible moment to start broadcasting out loud.
Tom’s well-meaning gran is saying all the wrong things: ‘If you two had children, they would be lovely.
Colour of milky coffee. And if we’re in luck, they’ll get Tom’s lovely straight nose.’
What she and Tom don’t know is that Queenie just suffered a miscarriage.
‘Hopefully you’ll be dead and gone long before that,’ she thinks — then realises she’s said it aloud.
Most of Queenie’s colleagues at work wouldn’t dream of saying anything crass . . . but then, they’re not really friends. Pictured Queenie (Dionne Brown) with Kyazike (Bellah)
Her best friend, Kyazike (played by Bellah, an actress and singer with just the one name), can get away with making remarks about Tom’s skin colour.
She calls him ‘the Ivory King’ and ‘Mr Mayo’.
Most of her colleagues at work wouldn’t dream of saying anything so crass . . . but then, they’re not really friends. Queenie is still learning to tell the difference.
Prickly and defensive, this heroine is less immediately lovable than Bridget Jones or Fanny Price.
But she inspires the same need in us, a desire to see her sort out her emotions and fall in love — with the right man!
