An actress previously so wooden she made wood even more wooden than wood, Natasha suddenly exploded into a bonfire of lacerating taunt as she strode from one building to the next. No television critic has ever hammered Coro characters as tellingly as this.
But ya, Coronation Street. Pfft! Columns should be of much fatter fries than this, like, where has all the money gone and how could the Lockerbie Bomber, who died last week, who killed 270, have been released from prison on compassionate grounds?
Coronation Street is only television. Why, it would make no more sense here to list the items I have bought recently from the Salvation Army Family Store in Princes St!I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw it sitting on the counter, atop a pile of unsorted unpriced framed photos. Is this ... Hayley Mills, I asked haltingly, tremblingly. It certainly looked like Hayley Mills. A young Hayley Mills. Yes it is, said Dorothy from behind the counter, who is not beyond a terribly gentle lilt of derision when the mood takes her, it says so on the photo.
And so it did.
In small print.
Hayley Mills. I had been transfixed by the face and never thought to study the title.
When do boys first fall in love?
New Zealand boys, I mean. I know American boys fall in love at 3 because our grandson has been grabbing girls' hands with a twinkle in his eye since that age. For his recent 6-year-old birthday, he demanded a party for his friends and one just for him and his current belle du jour, Amelie. But New Zealand boys come out from behind a rock many years later. One of my friends waited until he was 33 and he said it wasn't love anyway, he just didn't know how to cook. Which is why he was untouched at 33.
For me it was the day I saw Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap, one of the finest movies ever made. Even the Lindsay Lohan remake is good.
1961. So I would have seen it in a theatre three months after it opened in England, which is how things worked back then, the time it took for culture to arrive in a boat, which would have made me 12. No experience of girls whatsoever, and even though one of the twins Hayley played was a tomboy, the other one was definitely a girl, and I fell hopelessly in love with that girl. I had already discovered real rock'n'roll, but when she sang Let's Get Together (yay yay yay), it was better than anything ever. Yes let's!
I met Hayley Mills in 1992. She was in Dunedin doing Fallen Angels with her sister Juliet. The beauty of being a journalist is you can ring up famous entertainers and demand an audience, they'll come, they can't afford to appear mean. Hayley was at the Southern Cross, so I just gave her a bell one wet desultory Sunday afternoon and we met in the foyer. She was a bit posh and quite well dressed. I instantly knew admitting to hands-on-the-wheel monogamous love for her, and, it goes without saying, celibacy, since 1961, was not the right tack to take. Besides, she looked a lot different, I can't honestly say the home fires were burning any more. We chatted for 20 minutes about absolutely nothing, I got her to sign a big photo for my friend Gary in Los Angeles, who also fell in love with her in 1961 and who had written a screenplay for Parent Trap 2, which he had been trying to get to her for yonks.
I had treasured that photo. But now I have a better one, framed. I am looking at it closely right now. You may laugh, but I reckon this once belonged to her and sat on her bedside table. In 1961. I can feel it in my water.
- Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
