I saw
The Young Visiters, which requires a brief explanation: In the late 19th century, a young girl named Daisy Ashford and her sisters used to make up stories to amuse themselves and their parents. Their parents took to writing these stories down, and when Daisy was nine she decided to write her first novel,
The Young Visiters, which she in fact wrote down herself in a notebook.
It's a romantic comedy of manners in which an ironmonger tries to enter the ranks of nobility in order to propose to a young woman. Complications ensue, but the real charm lies in a 9-year-old's naive views of Victorian upper class life and how adults behave in matters of romance. A lot of it is simply charming, and a lot of it is unintentionally funny. Daisy stopped writing while she was in her teens, but, after her parents passed away, one of her sisters found the manuscript, and eventually it was published around the end of World War I. They even kept many of Daisy's misspellings. The publisher got J M Barrie (author of
Peter Pan) to write an introduction, and the perhaps predictable result is that everyone thought it was a hoax and had really been written by Barrie.
The book has allegedly never gone out of print, although it's less common in the US. I used to have a copy but (d'oh) never read the whole thing. It's been turned into a play, a musical, and at least two films. The film I saw is the most recent, starring Jim Broadbent and Hugh Laurie and Lyndsey Marshal (who might be best known as Cleopatra from the recent HBO production
Rome), as well as Bill Nighy, excellent as a boozy earl.
I'm told that this version isn't all that true to the original, but it's pretty damned funny (and slightly sad) and quite beautifully done.
Unfortunately, either Netflix or the Silverlight player is bollixed up lately, and everything I try to watch is slightly garbled. In particular, it skips ahead about one second every thirty seconds or so, on average, and sometimes in little clusters of jumps. Extremely annoying.
