Tipping the Velvet (2002)

This is a lesbian "coming out while coming-of-age" story which is related in three parts as a BBC mini-series. I must applaud the BBC for tackling this Victorian London tale of Sapphic love at all, but more particularly for allowing copious nudity and simulated sex, including a fairly graphic dildo scene. Author Sarah Walters simply wrote the sort of lesbian novel she would like to read. For screenwriter Andrew Davies, it covered two of his favorite topics, Victorian naughtiness and a woman's passage from girl to mature woman. He felt the novel was so good, the screenplay wrote itself, but he worked harder to create several music hall songs.

Rachel Stirling is a meek oyster girl with a boyfriend that fails to ignite her fire, when she attends a music hall performance and sees male impersonator Keeley Hawes for the first time. She starts frequenting the theater, Hawes notices her and they become traveling companions, lovers, and then partners performing. Act one ends with Hawes marrying a man, and thus breaking Rachel's heart. In act two, Rachel falls upon hard times. She wears her men's clothing to turn tricks with gay men, and then becomes the property of a rich lesbian. She finally breaks away from her corrupted life, but is destitute. In act three, she finds the love of a plain but loving woman, and returns to the stage.

Overall, women score it 8.8, and men 7.8, making it officially a chick flick. It is a lesbian favorite, which is to be expected for several reasons. First, there is a lot of kissing. Second, it is a lesbian love story with a rare happy ending. Third, it shows the depth of genuine emotion possible in a girl/girl relationship.

I adored act one, partially because I liked the characters, and partially because I like Victorian Music Hall songs. Act two was not as enjoyable for me, but act three redeemed the series with a "feel good" ending. If we had TV of this quality (and sensuality) in the US, I might actually watch it.

 

Keeley Hawes

Rachel Stirling

Sally Hawkins

 

Scoop's notes:

I guess you can tell that it has chick-flick written all over it. Women rate this thing 8.8 at IMDB. No surprise. It has great production values and acting and period costumes and authentic music-hall tunes and that kind of tutti-frutti shit.

"So is there anything for us guys, Scoop?"

Dudes, you're not paying attention. Tuna already mentioned the hot girl-on-girl action. There's no frontal nudity and there are no explicit sex scenes, but there are plenty of naked women kissing and rubbing their breasts together and playing with dildos and moaning and calling each other "tarts" and making each other wear slave costumes and so forth. So you have to give it pretty high marks in the area of lesbotronic delights, especially by TV standards.

Thank God for the BBC! If not for their efforts, how could we ever get a chance to look at naked lipstick lesbians with our wives' approval, in a guilt-free environment where we can pretend to enjoy the witty dialogue and authentic period atmosphere. Best of all, women love it, so they will thank us for bringing it home as a rental! Only one important tip, guys - do not actually watch it WITH your wife. You should watch it on a separate occasion, when she can't catch you using the fast-forward through the witty fuckin' dialogue and the authentic period crap.

When you get right down to it, these BBC shows really need only one thing to be perfect. They need to provide some Cliff's Notes - some comments for us to make when people ask us how we enjoyed the show. Let's face it, our wives are going to ask how we liked it, and we can't say, "Whoa, honey, I love to watch those gazongas rubbing together. Why don't you get your sister over here, and try that out?" If we want to keep watching this stuff with their approval, we will have to offer some pretentious and fulsome codswallop that sounds sort of convincing. Therefore, at the end of each of these shows, BBC should suggest some appropriate comments that we might make to convince the wife, the boss, and our snarky friends that we are serious thinkers who are only watching BBC for the incisive cultural analysis. You know what I mean. The whole Alistair Cooke schtick. Some professors could tell us how Ibsen touched on similar themes in A Doll's House, or offer blather about the exploitation of the working classes or the repression of women in Victorian society, or how the themes of this movie foreshadow the emergence of the socialist movement in Europe. You know, all the basic phony-baloney crap we need to say so we can look at naked chicks in front of our wives and girlfriends.

Actually, I liked the show, especially when it reflected Ibsen's weltanschauung and the emergence of women's suffrage.

Just kidding.

I did enjoy it, but mostly I liked the tits.

I liked Keeley Hawes more than I liked the show. She is a turn-on for me. She basically looks like a refined lady - kind of a soft spoken Julie Andrews clone, with sparkling tender eyes. And then she drops all the Julie Andrews stuff along with her trou. She looks great naked, too. Big natural breasts, and a completely natural body that looks like what real women look like naked, as opposed to those who spend three hours a day in the gym. She has a bit of sag here, is a bit too soft there, too lumpy elsewhere, but overall she is gorgeous. Just a beautiful real woman. I kinda miss seeing those in the movies. It seems like the women today look like Cameron Diaz with no spare flesh at all, or like Demi Moore with muscles that indicate she could kick my ass, or like Pam Anderson with no recognizable human-flesh body parts. So bravo to Keeley for looking great naturally, and for letting us look.

And bravo to the screenwriters for ... um ... their incisive foreshadowing and metaphors and shit like that.

Our ratings:

Tuna says, "Scoring this one is not easy because it pleases across several genres. As a coming-of-age story, it is a C+. As a "gay coming of age musical comedy," it has appeal well beyond that genre, and deserves a B- as I read our definition. If you call it an historical romantic comedy, then it is probably only a C, because it is entirely too much fun for the costumer crowd. I suppose I will settle on a high C+ and give it my personal thumbs up." Scoop says, "The 8.0 at IMDb speaks for itself. It's obviously at the very top of its field among period dramas, so it can be no lower than C+. I think you can call it a B- because many other people will enjoy it who would not ordinarily sit through a period piece. If women drag their husbands to watch it, the husbands should actually have a good time, listening to some lively songs and watching some hot girl-on-girl action."

Two trifles for today.  One is Barbara Wood in Too Much Too Often, a Doris Wishman movie.  The caps come from a trailer to the movie found on the same disk as My Brother's Wife.

Barbara Wood

And the other offering is uber-cutie Nichole Mercedes Robinson showing off her uber-hooties in an episode of Huff, with the title of Assault and Pepper.  Nichole's character is a hooker named Pepper.  Funny, I feel like sneezing. 
 

Nichole Mercedes Robinson