Monday, March 28, 2005

A Grudging and Surprised Hooray for Meg Ryan

Have never been a fan of Ms. Ryan up till just now. All that fake ditzy, blond stuff was enough to make you want to take her pretty little head and screw it round and round on her neck until it found a proper grip (or else fell off). And all the more irritating for the fact that men fall for her goofy comedy guff.

So I was pleasantly surprised to watch the UK Gold re-run of the Parky show in which she was supposed to have made a complete fool of herself. I expected her to come on all goofed up, incapable of saying what she meant either through sheer incompetency, too much method acting or illiberal drug-use, but what it actually amounted to was that she just didn't want to play ball with Parky. This was because she spotted from the off his complete inability to understand the distinction she was trying to make as a first point and from then on just gave him short shrift, which in Parky's world looks to be an unforgivable crime, since as with the Beeb, New Labour and much of the rest of the population of GB, it doesn't really matter whether what you actually say is a good approximation of the truth or not. What matters to them is that you are "nice" whatever rubbish you may actually be spouting.

Parky, as with most of those who expect niceness over truth-seeking, immediately paradoxically turned really nasty and snide, making all sorts of vacuous insinuations about Ryan being paranoid about press intrusion et al.

I suppose I was right about something though. Ryan was never ditzy. She did have an unscrupulously good mind working full-tilt all that time and I suppose one must give her the further credit of realising that to be a comedic-romantic lead, this is best hidden and that the large majority of men simply won't notice the incongruities.

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