So, there are two or three more really dismal installments of The Catherine Cookson Experience coming up, and I thought that before I hit all the marital rape and spouse-slapping, everyone could use one that’s pleasantly absurd. Behold, The Tide of Life!

Here’s the thing about this miniseries; Gillian Kearney is a really good actress. She worked her ass off in The Forsyte Saga, and I really love the sort-of-documentary biopic she did on BBC, and – she’s not the poor soul who played Cissie Brodie, is what I’m saying. She has genuine charisma, and you root for her.

The problem with The Tide of Life is that while she seems perfectly sweet and capable of making normal-person decisions, she agrees to go steady with any dude who enters the frame, so you end up wondering if she has a concussion. Also a problem: the title sounds like a tampon ad. (Not Cookson’s fault; just saying.)

Era: early 1900s
Heroine: Emily Kennedy, housekeeper and concussion victim
Siblings that require looking-after: One sister, also a concussion victim
Illegitimate (Self or sibling): Shockingly, all the major characters are legit.
Asshole Father?: Nary a dad in sight.
Romantic interest(s): Sep, her first employer; Larry, her second employer; Nick, who wanders into frame in the last twenty minutes.
Bairnsketballs: One for our heroine, one from an extra, plus a tumor everyone thinks is a bairnsketball. (Nobody in this movie is very bright, come to think of it.)
Fistfights: Hell yes. Also, murder, pistol-whipping, chasing someone into the ocean, and lighting a houseful of stuff on fire.
Assaults: Two (attempted)

“That’s what you are – NOWT!”
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We begin The Catherine Cookson Experience with “The Glass Virgin.” This miniseries was the one that started it all – and stopped it all, since I didn’t go back to another one for over a decade. By the end of my re-watch, I knew why.

The Glass Virgin is about a young girl, raised as gentility, who finds out she’s actually the daughter of a whore and therefore socially untenable. Distraught, she leaves the house with estate groom (and total hottie) Manuel in tow. Will she make it in a cruel working world? Will he make it into a life as his own man? Will they, you know, Make It?

NOTE: These screencaps are awful. I can’t do better. Think of it as part of the joy, like that soundstage echo in the 1970s Masterpiece Theatres.

Era: 1870s
Heroine: Annabella LeGrange, gentlewoman, seventeen, dumb as a sack of hair
Siblings that require looking-after: None, unless you count Annabella.
Illegitimate (Self or sibling): Self.
Asshole Father?: Check!
Romantic interest(s): Manual Mendoza, the groom at her estate
Bairnsketballs: None
Fistfights: Four

“MANUEEEEEL!”
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So, before we begin dissecting individual episodes, there are some things we need to talk about. They are not spoilers, per se; that would imply that knowing about them spoils how the plot will go, which implies that there is any plot to begin with, which is very sweet of you to think but not really so much what Catherine Cookson was good at. So these aren’t so much spoilers as they are ingredients; combining them in different ways produces different kinds of cookies in an unsurprising but delicious process.

Please be warned; some of Catherine’s favorite tropes are totally skeevy. I’ll label the episodes that have nasty goings-on, so those who would rather not deal can just skip.

On to the tropes!

Class Issues: Universal theme that more or less singlehandedly pilots the plot of every single one of these suckers. I have not seen a Cookson miniseries with fewer than three social classes in the mix. If she had a primary obsession, it would be this.

Illegitimate Bairns: If she had a secondary obsession, it would be this. Cookson’s heroines are a spectacularly fertile bunch. If you’re in one of her books, be warned – you fall on a peen just once and you are probably going to turn up with a bairn*. If the heroine isn’t having an illegitimate bairn of her own, she probably is one, or her sister’s having one, or she’s going to end up marrying one. (Hopefully when he’s older.)

* Note: All bairns are portrayed by half a basketball strapped to the heroine’s waist. Poor little bairnsketballs.

Oh, that’s not all.
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When I was fifteen, my French teacher lent me The Glass Virgin.

“You’ll appreciate this someday,” she said, pressing it into my hands.

I watched it, and promptly forgot most of it. I retained some vague memories of a dude slathering himself with a lady’s bathwater as a sign of love (no joke), and a spindly woman shouting “Manuel!” at the top of her lungs, but it vanished into my memory and became a soft, pulpy mess. Given how I usually cling to movie memories more than any memories of my actual life, this seemed strange; I decided it must not have been very good, and as the years passed I assumed my French teacher had simply been wrong.

A few weeks ago, a friend came to visit and handed me a DVD.

“You’ll appreciate this,” she said, pressing it into my hands.

It was The Moth. I watched it twice in one day, sat back, and realized what my teacher had meant.

They are pulpy, social-commentary, random-romance, varying-production-values crack, and they’re hysterical.

I am in the process of devouring all I can get my hands on, and will be reporting here, to make sure that no incorrect hoop skirt, longing glance, windswept vista, class struggle, cave dwelling, pointless romantic interest, interrupted molest attempt, bastard dad, random occupation, or illegitimate bairn gets lost in the shuffle. I can’t promise perfection, though, since it’s possible to watch some of these and feel like you missed a plot point, only to realize later there was no plot to begin with.

Despite her issues (and girl has issues), I think she occupies some strange, ever-shifting space between Dickens and Nora Roberts, where women try to fight a class system that oppresses them and keep falling on penises by mistake.

Join me tomorrow as I begin digging through the luster of Awesome British Actor Camp graduates, past the visible chemises, to the stinky, mushy pulp that pulses in the very core of these overblown dramas.

Over at Tor.com, I talk about one of the great movies of our time: Hackers.

By all means, head over there to read the column, in which I tried to keep it together. Because below this cut, I just nerd out ridiculously.

Hackers: when cargo pants were king.

There is no good and bad. There is only fun and boring.
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