Middle Class Holes 6 - Emma Thompson

Saving the planet one air mile at a time

Actors should be fun. Often, I can report, they are fun; the most fun people you’ll ever meet. We all like to be seen and heard, at least when it suits us to be seen and heard. Actors are different only in that they’ve opted for a trade where being seen and heard is the sole object. For many of them, their free time away from the stage or the screen is precious, a chance to go unnoticed.

But for some, that’s unbearable. They must be seen and heard at all times, in character and out of character.

Dame Emma Thompson has been delighting us for over forty years. Imagine, if you will, an alternative universe where she appears to our gaze only in the roles she plays. In that happy dimension we smile when we think of her.

The problem is not that actors, and ‘creatives’ in general, have opinions, or that they express these opinions. It’s that these opinions are generally all the same, and utterly predictable. (This situation means that when actors break ranks in public we want to cheer - I’m thinking here of James Dreyfus, Frances Barber, Simon Callow and Tracy-Ann Oberman; that’s a good round number - four! - out of hundreds.)

Actually that’s not quite fair. The range of opinions in the creative arts varies, a bit, from diffident bog-standard democratic socialists to frothing Corbynite nutters to, latterly, more than a smattering of publicly subsidised blue-haired non-binaries who enjoy informing on people and agitating. Broad church, and all that.

Thompson has a fine pedigree. Her father was the magnificent Eric, writer and narrator of The Magic Roundabout. The adaptation to English of a five-minute French children’s animation shouldn’t, in the grand order of things, have made any kind of cultural wave. But Thompson Senior imbued it with a glow that was all his own. Everything that was good about Britain can be found in The Magic Roundabout - the humour and amiability, the understatement, the scepticism towards grand ideas. It’s ironic that that someone cradled, literally, in its aura should be so loathing of it, and enthusiastic about destroying it.

Dame Emma’s early life is exactly what you’d expect - the sausage machine of privilege - from Hampstead to the Camden School For Girls to Cambridge to the Footlights to the BBC. Before she became known to us she was, she tells us, ‘a punk rocker’. ‘Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it, I want a 2:1 in English from Newnham College’, as Johnny Rotten so nearly sang.

Appalled among other things by the ‘twaddle’ of teenage girls’ comic Jackie, the young Emma became a feminist. In 2023 she told The Independent, ‘What I feel is that we all need to speak up, and a woman who has got a louder voice needs to shout very loudly indeed’. We’ll return to this brand of feminism, and when its very loud shouting falls oddly silent, later on.

It is obviously a waste of time to sneer at the middle class Thompson trappings. But … she named her daughter Gaia. Why stop there - call her Ecover. Stephen Fry recalls ‘there was no doubt that Emma was going the distance. Our nickname for her was Emma Talented’. My nickname should be Gareth Own-Vomit, as I find that I am covered in it after reading that.

She can make even sitting on a chair annoying

But Fry is right here, as far as it goes. Emma Thompson is, undoubtedly, talented. She gets the lines out. She pulls the correct faces at the right point. All very able.

But she is not extravagantly talented, not for someone so succesful and so showered with awards. Many others can do what she does to the same level, but few are chosen for megastardom. Thompson is very confident - mesmerisingly so - but not actually all that good. She’s no Juliet Mills or Maggie Smith.

Americans in particular are, I think, blinded by posh, confident English people. Their critical judgments are rendered unreliable because they mistake being posh for being good. This is how Downton Abbey won so many Emmys and Golden Globes, despite it essentially being Hollyoaks in wigs. It looked good, and it had good people in it, so the dazzled Yanks assumed that it was good.