Suzanne Harrington: Here's to worrying about silly stuff like bad Irish accents in Wild Mountain Thyme
Could it be…..whisper it…..could it be that 2020 is finally taking its knee off our windpipe? Easing its sharpened fingernails out of our eyeballs? Ceasing its sustained kicking? Might there even be a scatter of glitter with which to end a year not even the Mayans or the scriptwriters for The Thick Of It could have dreamed up?
Obviously, we are not there yet. There is still an orange tyrant in the White House, weaponizing his defeat. It’s not Covid corpses he cares about, it’s ratings and retweets. Flogging merch at rallies where he can still inhale the adulation of his base. The longer the Republican elite – Mike Pompeo, we see you - feeds this extended tantrum, indulging Trump’s mad emperor Lukashenko schtick and allowing him to scream about rigged elections, the more the democratic process is undermined. Where, in that gun-crazed country, is a zookeeper with a net and a rhinoceros-sized tranquilliser dart when they need one?
But he lost. To another old white guy who is not Bernie, but we won’t quibble – Harris is there too, and AOC and the squad. Even better for Ireland, Biden remains profoundly unimpressed by the Latin-spluttering imperialist incompetence of Britain’s current PM, now flailing and without allies; getting Brexit done sounds as mouth-foamingly insane as Trump’s continued insistence on recounting an election he lost. Bigly. There will be no hard border. The adults are back in charge.
The uncurling of hope and optimism, after being eternally confined to barracks, doom scrolling and thunderstruck. When we eventually rip off our facemasks and hug each other, 2020 will seems like a bad trip.
So does this mean we can revert to getting het up about the stupid stuff again? God, I hope so. Like that hilarious new film Wild Mountain Thyme - was its creator on hallucinogens himself when he envisioned Oirish characters as authentic as Dick Van Dyke’s Cockney chimney sweep in Mary Poppins?
Were there no accent coaches available, or anyone to advise on what Ireland actually is, beyond the fevered cliché of a green-tinted American eye? How did it manage to be set somewhere around 1947 and still reference egg-freezing? Was Saoirse Ronan not answering her phone? Or had she blocked the number?
These are the questions on which I’d like to idly ponder. Not will I ever see my family again, or have I accidentally killed someone by breathing near them, or will the tidal wave of monstrous populism ever recede – no. We’ve had enough of those questions in 2020. They’ve made our heads hurt. What I want to know, going forward, is how soon Melania will file for divorce. And what Ivanka will be wearing at her dad’s trial.
