Ugly truth behind Miss World
MISBEHAVIOUR ★★★★ (Cert 12A, 106mins)
IN NOVEMBER 1970, chaos erupted live on BBC One.An estimated 27 million viewers had tuned into the annual Miss World Competition, broadcast from the Royal Albert Hall. In between the swimsuit rounds and the bottom leering, host Bob Hope followed up a disparaging remark about the Women’s Liberation movement with a misjudged gag about preferring “feeling women” to considering “women’s feelings”.
When he was covered by flour and splattered with stink bombs, Hope realised that the protesters weren’t just camped outside.
Director Philippa Lowthorpe isn’t the first film-maker to take inspiration from the incident.
She takes the charges of female objectification a bit more seriously than 1973’s Carry On Girls but crucially retains the comic elements.
This is entirely fitting.The protesters were deadly serious but the spectacle played out like a very British farce.
Keira Knightley and Jessie Buckley makes us root for Sally Alexander and Jo Robinson, two of the activists who interrupted the broadcast.
Greg Kinnear raises uncomfortable laughs as Hope, the slick comic who lost his cool and his sense of humour at the worst possible moment.
And Gugu Mbatha-Raw is Jennifer Hosten, the dignified Miss Grenada who hoped to present a very different image of female beauty to the world.
Knightley gets the most screen time as earnest Sally, a mature student balancing her studies with raising her young daughter.As she falls in with Buckley’s ramshackle, almost Pythonesque, band of feminist protesters, Eric Morley (an enjoyably hammy Rhys Ifans) and his loyal wife Julia (Keeley Hawes) are preparing for the big event.
Lowthorpe has great fun taking us behind the scenes of this tacky show.
Morley is something of a buffoon but he’s a victim of rapidly changing times.As his wife Julia remarks: “He will be forever in the 50s.”
After being harangued by anti-apartheid activists, Morley decides to recruit a new contestant. Charming
18-year-old Pearl Jansen is flown over from South Africa to compete as Miss Africa South (Loreece Harrison).
The protesters and the contestants are both treated sympathetically with the best scene putting Mbatha-Raw and Knightley in the same room. Their different backgrounds and goals set them on opposing sides but, for a fleeting moment, they manage to find common ground.
“We’re not beautiful, we’re not ugly, we’re angry!” was the slogan of the Women’s Liberation protesters. But this funny, big-hearted drama makes the 1970s feel like a more gentle age.