Parades End

I don’t know if many of you have been watching Parades End on TV, a very superior costume drama based on the novels of Ford Maddox Ford (Son of Ford Maddox Brown the impressionist painter) and adapted by the simply too wonderful Tom Stoppard (I’ve seen practically every one of his plays in the West End and every one of them a total joy and a mind fuck to boot!) 

 But I digress! In the first episode one of the less sympathetic characters says of a couple of the suffragettes who invade his game of golf that they should be spanked. I thought that would be the end of such references, but I was wrong. In episode two there’s more. The love interest character, Valentine Wannop, (young, doe eyed and a strange mixture of feisty and sexually naive and wonderfully played by Adelaide Clemens) is forcibly grabbed by yet another unsympathetic character who angrily tells her he would like to smack her on her bare bottom!

Dare we hope that in episode three things will go even further and we’ll actually get to see, say, the butler exercising discipline on the downstairs maid, or the lady of the house across his Lordship’s knee?

Almost certainly not, but it does leave open a question. Is it the saintly Tom Stoppard who introduced these spanking elements or were they already in Mr Ford’s book? Either way, if Sir Tom wants to come and show me what the punishment is for bad little girls like me who draw attention to all the naughty bits in his adaptation, my door is ever open to him!