By Michael Billington | June 20, 2012 | The Guardian
by Tom Sutcliffe | January 27, 2012 | The Independent
Sutcliffe’s Third Law of Dodgy Dialogue runs as follows: “If an East End character employs both elements of a bit of rhyming slang then they are probably a Cockernee – television’s caricature of an East Ender – rather than the real thing.” Example: a young jack-the-lad photographer asks his assistant: “What happened to that bird from Pinner with the big Eartha Kitts?” If he’d said this at all, surely he would have said “big Earthas”, and left it at that. But, since the audience can’t be trusted to work it out, or, possibly, to know that Kitt follows Eartha, it had to be clumsily signposted in We’ll Take Manhattan, John McKay’s drama about David Bailey’s romance with Jean Shrimpton. Bailey spent quite a bit of time being a Cockernee in this film because one of its themes was the clash between the brash young upstarts who would make the Sixties swing and the old guard who thought it was vulgar for it to move at all.
“You utter beast,” panted Lady Lavinia, her couture skirts hoicked northwards in a most unladylike fashion.
“Go on. You love it,” drawled the tradesman’s-bejacketed David Bailey towards the nape of her pearl-encircled neck as he ravished her.
Roll over, Sherlock. For it was at this precise moment that the blink-and-you’d’ve-missed-it clue purporting to crack the conundrum at the heart of We’ll Take Manhattan (BBC Four) – a stylish, pleasingly frothy drama about the fashion photographer David Bailey and his first, defining muse Jean Shrimpton – was revealed.