Just days before the United Kingdom goes to the polls came the sad news of the passing of actress Lynn Redgrave. The name “Redgrave” has been known to pop up around UK election time because of the late Lynn’s sister, Vanessa Redgrave, who is as renowned as a star of the Shakespearean Stage as she is for militant political activism. Though she tackled serious roles in her own right, more than one obituary declared that Lynn will be remembered for her congenital “comic flair” on the screen, perhaps unfairly contrasted with Vanessa’s often humorless and histrionic political theatrics.
Her obits also augur that Lynn Redgrave will be best remembered for her Oscar-nominated “comic flair” in 1966’s “Georgy Girl,” dubbed “a key film of the ‘Swinging Sixties'” in the Independent’s obituary. The Independent’s obit was alone in mentioning another film in which her “comic flair” shined, 1967’s sorrily out of print “Smashing Time,” a stylishly cheeky send up of “Swinging Sixties” London. Often aired during the 1980’s wave of Sixties nostalgia on cable’s then not yet misnomered Arts & Entertainment channel, “Smashing Time” follows the misadventures of two naive but plucky young girls from the grimy industrial North of England, who descend on London to make it big in Showbiz, only to get caught up in London’s vapid Mod madness.
In a memorable scene, the new arrivals drink in Carnaby Street, Mod London’s main drag of stylish boutiques and swinging discotheques. No longer as cutting edge, Carnaby Street remains a high-end shopping destination. It sits in a parliamentary constituency – the Cities of London & Westminster – that is perhaps the UK’s “poshest.” Unlike comparably exclusive wards of urban America – such as Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which has foresaken its liberal Republican heritage – this area has not abandoned its Conservative voting habits, though voters here prefer a Tory of a decidedly more urbane stripe.
As UK election day approaches and Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats surging, shaking up the electoral map by vigorously contesting seats where either Labour or the Tories fail to seriously contest, I wondered if “the Cities” might finally follow elite Americans’ lead. Even rebranded as “New” Labour, Tony Blair’s modernized party was too much associated with militant unions for a constituency that encompasses the City of London, the UK’s financial core. Have the more market-amenable LibDems finally presented the culturally cosmopolitan alternative that might put “the Cities” in play? Remembering Lynn Redgrave prancing about Carnaby Street prompted this American UK election junky to investigate.
Looking over a list of candidate for this constituency, I noticed that the rabidly Europhobic UK Independence Party was fielding a candidate. (In next door’s similarly EU-enthusiastic Kensington and Surbiton constituency, for instance, the short-lived Pro-Euro Conservative Party once outpolled UKIP in a by-election.) Considering this electorate, might UKIP offer up a candidate that expressed a more nuanced Euroskepticism?
Hardly. Paul Weston, UKIP’s candidate in “the Cities” comes off more mad than Mod. Despite having elbowed its way past Labour and the LibDems into second place in the UK’s European Parliament elections, UKIP remains sorely sans political savvy. With gross lack of oversight, UKIP’s official candidate profile page for Paul Weston links directly to his personal blog, whose most recent post is a racist rant that could pass for the unvarnished rhetoric of a candidate of the unabashedly xenophobic British National Party standing in its gritty urban North of England base, the provincial outpost from which Lynn Redgrave’s character fled from for a “Smashing Time” on Carnaby Street.
