Gadjo Dilo’s Peccadillos #4: Housewives, choice

Mrs Dilo’s away this week and so Gadjo’s mind again starts to wander a bit - and he also realises how the housework builds up during the course of seven days... And so, as we focus in ever closer on the ideal of perfect female luvliness, this time we’ll discuss the necessary qualities of The Housewife:

Jane Asher

Is it apocryphal or has Jane Asher really promoted more homecare products than any other housewife?? Jane must be pushing 70 by now but she’s still quite pretty. And that’s the problem. To be a proper housewife you’ve got to age properly. Jane looks fine because she’s got some Ecuadorian slave lady on 50p a month doing her chores for her - I bet she’s never unblocked the lav in her life!! Sorry, not impressed.

Sheena Easton

“My baby takes the morning train,
He works from nine till five and then
He takes another home again
To find me waitin’ for him”

She’s just been sitting there, waitin’ for him. Maybe she’s rearranged some things in the fridge or thought about doing the ironing, but she’s mainly been just waitin’, and we know what that means – right, lads? You’re exhausted but as soon as you get in you have to listen to her rabbiting on about who was going into Mrs Tibbs’ house, what was on Richard & Judy, and can she buy a new washing machine. D.I.V.O.R.C.E.

Dame Edna Everage

The self-proclaimed “Housewife Superstar". But is she? She’s certainly sturdy and has aged appropriately over time, but there’s something not quite right there and I can’t put my finger on it. Too much make-up, possibly.

Freddie Mercury

Something fishy going on here too but again I’m not sure what. Ah yes, I’ve got it now, it’s the hovering technique. Take a look: she doesn’t go under the sofa or the table. Move the chairs to the side, tell Gran to stand up for a minute... come on luv, it’s really not that difficult!

Sofia Loren

2nd time in for Sofia. She’s a statuesque and Cleopatra-nosed housewife in A Special Day, therefore fulfilling most of my previously elaborated criteria; (the chance to do some pole-vaulting in that film’s rooftop scene amongst the washing lines was missed, which I think was a mistake, but I’ll let it pass). The character she plays is dowdy, yet underneath a well of passion that’s been suppressed by years of domestic choirs and an unthinking twerp of a husband. Luvly.

Pam Grier

Pammie was always well-proportioned and in every way up there with Sofia according to my criteria. Admittedly, we’ve seen her more often toting a Colt 45 than an Electrolux Z1030C, but I reckon she could still do a job about the house - in fact she may be yearning for it after all those tough-girl rôles. The best thing Quentin Tarantino ever did was in Jackie Brown when he simply let the camera soak her up, often just walking from one place to another. It had been 20 years since she’d been a Blaxploitation Babe but she was luvlier than ever (though just imagine, just for a second, if she’d also been pushing a Eubank carpet sweeper at the time, mmm…). Yep, I think we’ve got a winner!

To end, here’s some of my favourite flamenco music; get a load of gypsy housewife La Perla de Cadiz:

Gadjo Dilo’s Peccadillos #2: Big Nose Special

Yeah, in this latest instalment Gadjo Dilo plumbs the depths of his depravity and reveals that he finds women with big noses quite attractive, and he makes neither apology nor justification for this. Was it not Blaise Pascal (or was it Asterix?) who said "Cleopatra's nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed".

He’s chosen to present this latest divertissement by way of films he’d like to see made – it could have been another SomeChance film festival - as there’s nothing the camera loves more than a big conk:

Barbra Streisand in Yentl: Diesel Dyke

I watched the original with Mrs Dilo the other day; I’d seen it before and knew she’d lap up every adorable, schmaltzy, Talmudic nanosecond of it, which she did, including where Streisand, disguised as a man so she can study in the yeshiva, has to get through her wedding night with the woman she's married. The film ends with Yentl now in women’s clothes sailing for the scholarly freedoms of America. I’d dearly like to think she continues to have her pretty nose stuck in a book, perhaps going on to become the world’s first lady rabbi; but she’s already grasped the fundamentals of Feminism and she’s sailing to New York for heavens sake, anything could happen. It may come as a surprise to some that I’ll still be more attracted by Streisand’s Schnozz than by anything she might get up to there, but there’s no accounting for taste.

Sofia Loren: in The Fall of the Roman Empire #2

The Italians have foisted some rubbish on us over the years: unjustifiably expensive clothes, frothy operas, Charlie Cairoli and Joe Dolce. But the Italians I’m least fond of are footballers, people like Claudio Gentile, Romeo Benetti and Marco Materazzi, who turned our Beautiful Game into cynical gamesmanship, the plods who man-marked talented players out of the contest, fouled them when the ref's back was turned and called Zidane’s sister a slag. My punishment is to put them in a house with Sofia; she spends her time walking fragrantly from room to room, the light from the windows catching her profile most exquisitely, and making sumptious, aromatic Italian food. Punishment?? They’re locked in the attic. With (my old schoolmate) Vinnie Jones.

Rossy De Palma in ¡Tie Me Up Tie Me Down Again!

Rossy’s a big girl, has a funny face with a big nose, and she can’t really act; (she’s therefore, incidentally, the ideal gay icon). For me, ¡Tie Me Up Tie Me Down! is Almodóvar’s most enjoyable film, not because of any S ‘n’ M vibe - which is not what it’s about - but because, for all of that, it’s somehow so healthy. For one thing you have Victoria Abril and a young Antonio Banderas to look at, there’s the underlying Reichian thesis, and then there’s Rossy, looking for all the world like a Picasso painting. I envisage the sequel to this film featuring Rossy as the star, Banderas as her househusband, and Madonna (who “made” Banderas’s Hollywood career and is a greater gay icon by the can’t-act-criterion) nowhere in sight.