Remember The Thorn Birds from the 1980s, especially the “forbidden love” scene when Rachel Ward and Richard Chamberlain sank to their knees kissing passionately on the sand, despite him wearing a white three-piece suit that would have been ruined, even after a decent dry clean? Sensational television.
She played beautiful Meghan and he was Father Ralph de Bricassart, the original “hot priest”, as they enjoyed a secret, intense sexathon. My friends and I honestly thought it was the most romantic love scene we had ever seen. I think my bosom actually quivered. I have just rewatched it and, let me tell you, if it still had the energy and the hydraulics, my bosom would have quivered again. “Sorry,’’ it said, “I just don’t have any quivering in me today.”
• Richard Chamberlain obituary: Heart-throb star of Dr Kildare
But forget all that. Everything’s spoilt now because it turns out that Ward has let herself down horrendously. Why? She has posted an Instagram video in which it appears that in the past 43 years she has (trigger warning: prepare to be disgusted)… aged naturally. What a slattern.
No Botox, no filler, no hair extensions, no “tweakments”, just shortish grey hair, zero make-up and a pair of specs that, brace yourselves, may not even be designer. The woman clearly has no vanity and thus no shame. She is 68 and looks, well… 68. Bring me tar. Bring me feathers.
Ward has spent the past four decades being happily married, running a cattle ranch in Australia and enjoying her beatific-looking grandchildren. What she has not been doing is getting her lips inflated so that she looks like a sexually frustrated koi carp on the pull. What a loser.
Ward was ripe for an online kicking for the crime of looking perfectly normal for her age and, by Jove, she got one. “OMG, what happened to u? U were so pretty??” said one comment. “I read she is 68. Looks way older!!; “She looks ravaged”; “Did she turn into an old woman or is it AI?”; “What happened to you, dear?”; “Old is one thing but completely giving up and throwing in the towel is not the way to go out. Rachel, fix yourself.”
It would be easy to blame sad, halitotic incels, sitting in their mothers’ spare bedrooms spewing out misspelt misogyny. But women are just as bad and often worse when it comes to attacking other women’s looks. It wasn’t men, on the whole, who bought those women’s magazines that, on a celebrity’s photo, circled a patch of cellulite, a cankle or a thut, where the thigh and buttock meet in a way that’s deemed too chunky. Most of Ward’s trolls seem to have female names, though I know they could be fake.
What a strange juncture we have reached when women aged 68 are vilified for looking 68 (if you have seen her documentary Rachel’s Farm you will see she looks younger, which makes her trolls seem even weirder).
Rachel Ward with Mick Green Jr, her colleague and neighbour, in Rachel’s Farm
BBC/WILDBEAR ENTERTAINMENT AND NEW TOWN FILMS
Timothy Spall and Robert Bathurst are also 68, but I don’t see any trolls writing “Oh my God — shocking” under their photos. Hilarious that strangers are offended because a woman doesn’t look exactly like she did in 1983. Life must be hard for them.
Happily Ward doesn’t give a stuff and wrote online that she felt sorry for “poor souls” terrified of ageing, calling it the “ultimate freedom” to let youth and beauty go with a cheery goodbye. “It was lovely while it lasted but there’s so much more to life.” Expect to see that slogan on a jar of anti-wrinkle cream on the 12th of Never.
This is basically what Ulrika Jonsson, aged 58, said last year when she was similarly attacked. “Ulrika Jonsson has let herself go”, “she’s gone to seed,” they wrote. “I know I look older. But then I should,” she replied. “I’m a menopausal mother of four whose body and face have lived quite the life.”
What would have happened if Ward had pumped up her face and hoisted up her rack like two silicone balloons? She would have been called mutton dressed as lamb. You can’t win, so best just to embrace it, own it and laugh at the immense comedy in ageing, which is preferable to its alternative. As Joan Rivers said, “I now consider it a good day when I don’t step on my boobs.”
No posho would nick prosecco
I wish to take issue with the story of the upmarket shoplifter, aka “Britain’s poshest thief”, aka Pauline Al Said, who has been banned from Sainsbury’s after stealing almost £12,000 of vodka, wine, gin and prosecco and previously stealing Le Creuset cookware. And who, paradoxically, is a former criminology lecturer.
Oh please. Everyone knows that any true self-respecting posho wouldn’t be seen dead in Sainsbury’s and would only deign to steal from Waitrose while obviously steering well clear of the plebs’ Essentials range with its “value” style of packaging. Frightful! (An online review of some humble Essentials potatoes once declared them “… a disgrace to grower and seller alike”, which is exactly what a true Waitrose shopper would write).
• ‘UK’s poshest thief’ spared jail after stealing £12,000 of alcohol
And prosecco? Prosecco? Are you serious? If you brought that to a real posho house, you would be laughed out of the drawing room. Call me a wine snob but Amanda from Amandaland would shudder and put it in the utility room for the next school raffle, and rightly so, because it tastes like battery acid mixed with a Sherbert Dib Dab. Actually, I take that back. Battery acid wouldn’t strip your teeth quite as much.
Theft is theft, so you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb and go for the nice Bollinger. Still, isn’t it thrilling to learn that the police have finally put their coats on and arrested a real, live shoplifter rather than waving them cheerily on their way?