I was watching some of Peaky Blinders (for the first time, what can I say) because I am writing something about Oswald and Diana Mosley, and they feature in the later episodes. Unconvincingly, to my mind (no fault of the impeccable actors), although I can see that as a boo-hiss couple - posh Dick Dastardly and Serena Joy on steroids - they generate good drama.
I can also see how amazingly inventive PB is, even though it is not quite my thing. What started to obsess me, however, was its deployment of the Eff word, quite literally in every sentence, sometimes more than once in a sentence, to the point where I found that I was no longer concentrating on the show, simply on whether it would get through the next ten seconds without an Eff.
For instance:
In a scene before one of Mosley’s fascist rallies, Diana (played by Amber Anderson, above), saunters into shot swigging from a bottle of champagne, which she then passes to her black-shirted boyfriend (Sam Claflin).
‘Eff lipstick’, she says, meaning that Mosley won’t mind the imprint of her carmine Max Factor around the neck of the bottle.
Well: I may be wrong about this (I really don’t think I am) but Diana would never have said that. I met her. Admittedly this was when she was a tamed white lioness in her nineties, but even so I just know, as near as dammit, that she would not have said it. Fair enough. The PB Diana is not a biographical portrayal. But that particular Eff did sum up for me the Eff problem, which is by no means confined to Peaky Blinders.
Eff is now said so often that actors might as well be repeating the word ‘cake’; yet it is clearly believed to hold some extra value, some quality that another word would not quite have. Which must be true, else one wouldn’t notice it so much, and its over-use wouldn’t feel so gratingly gratuitous. At the same time the word has become meaningless, like an aural tic: also grating. In sum, therefore, and as Queen Victoria will no doubt be saying in her next screen iteration, we are not Effing amused.
If I sound like a 21st century Mary Whitehouse, making a list of Number of Profanities per Episode in green ink, nothing could not be further from the truth. This is not a taste issue, it is an artistic issue. Of course I say Eff myself, as I assume does everybody else (although there is a woman in my home village, apparently normal, whose lifelong habit has been to turn off any TV programme in which the word is spoken; let us hope that her remote is well-supplied with batteries, because it must be kept extremely busy).
No: I couldn’t care less about the word, and the only reason I am not spelling it out every time is in case constant repetition goes down badly with Substack. I just think that it has become - in the phrase of Diana’s sister Nancy - a bit of a crasher.
It is almost sixty years since Kenneth Tynan declaimed Eff on late night television, asking the admirably straightforward question: ‘What exactly is wrong with the word “fuck”?’ According to legend, which may or may not be accurate, this was the word’s debut within the British broadcasting sphere. And it caused a genuine national furore. Four House of Commons motions were tabled, signed by both Conservative and Labour backbenchers; the BBC was forced to issue a formal apology (a typical letter, among the many received, lamented the ‘foul obscenity which has never before been heard in my home, and I trust will never be heard again’); Mrs Whitehouse wrote to the Queen. Since then, by slow degrees, the shock value has become blunted, to the point where Eff is a near-harmless old butter knife of a word…. although, were I were to hear it spoken by - say - Mary Berry (‘Eff choux pastry’), a faint frisson would be felt again.
Hence, perhaps, the excitable urge to place Eff into the mouths of unlikely characters (Diana) and into period dramas, where one might now hear - for instance - Churchill talking about Effing Dunkirk, or Cromwell about the Effing monasteries… The idea being that this, the ultimate dash of demotic, will impart a kind of hyper-reality to the elusive past. Eff cuts straight through old-style notions about ‘historical’ drama, which have indeed, quite often, left the impression of not being entirely real. And yet, in demolishing tired clichés about how people used to behave and speak, the irruption of Eff all over the place has become a cliché of its own.
(The C word, incidentally, is another story; it does retain some shock value although that, to my mind, is as much to do with its smudgy ugliness as its relative rarity; Eff sounds cleaner and clearer - almost wholesome by comparison).
No question: Eff can do things to a line of dialogue. And it does them easily. It has a punch and heft that other words do not. For that reason, it is easy to make it work too hard; whereas what one wants from it is a brief quick glint of the knife, a reminder to the butter-spreader of its former, tougher life. I am now writing scripts, and I already know about the temptation to chuck in an Eff - to impart rhythm, ballast, humour, immediacy, a quick little fillip of electricity... Think of Margot Robbie in The Big Short, doing her monologue about sub-prime mortgages from a bubble bath, taking a sip of champagne and saying: ‘Got it? Now fuck off.’
Delicious. Nothing else could do it.
And then - an entirely different example. I have been watching on YouTube a 1985 TV show, The Price, acclaimed at the time and still miraculously compelling. The premise is simple, and leads to complexity: a reasonable definition of what drama should be. A rich London computer magnate (flawless Peter Barkworth, who also conceived the premise) marries a young widow, a member of the impoverished Anglo-Irish gentry (Harriet Walter, whose soul-deep depiction of a femme fatale makes mere pretty-pretty smouldering seem facile). She persuades her husband to buy her ancestral home in Wicklow, and is kidnapped by the IRA (as is her child, played by TV presenter Susanna Reid). The drama plaits together the husband’s increasingly conflicted willingness to give up everything for his wife’s return, and her similarly complex relationship with her chief kidnapper (the actor now known as Charlie from Casualty; at the time he would have just been Derek Thompson, and he is very good indeed).
Anyway: the point is that throughout this entire six-part drama, written quite magnificently by Peter Ransley, the Eff word is spoken just once. The woman - curious, arrogant, seeking to seduce, to establish intimacy, both as a possible salvation and because it is what she does - asks her kidnapper how he became radicalized: ‘How did you start?’ And, with a kind of jocular venom, he tells her the story of how, as a child, he saw his father being brutalized by a group of British soldiers; who, in between bashing him around to the point of collapse, rip the crucifix from around his neck and say - he quotes: ‘You have a fucking cheek to wear that, paddy’.
That single use - its amazing impact - the way in which Harriet Walter winces, both at the viciousness of the story, and at the sound of the word - which her husband would never speak in her presence, which gives the story a fierce jolting emphasis…
Times have changed, drama has changed.
But that is still, in principle, a principle that applies to so much else besides, how to Do Eff.
Couldn’t agree more. I love the eff word but best saved for special occasions and full impact.
I hate it when they have modern slang and swearing being spoken by characters in period dramas. It just doesn’t work.