Home for Christmas (Netflix) and other things

I realised today that one of the reasons I haven't been writing so much, is that I have been using twitter and facebook and exhausting my opinions and frustrations in those places. I have about 1700 followers on twitter, which seems like a lot of people, but is just a handful compared with others and of course a grain of sand compared with celebrities with millions of followers.

I've been watching Home for Christmas on Netflix, which I assumed from the still on the selection page might be one of those horrific Hallmark card made-for-television films with corny plotlines and terrible music. I have an infallible internal detector for those sorts of films, and know within five minutes if it is going to be worth watching or not. But it isn't like that at all.

It turns out to be a Norwegian television series with subtitles. Yes, that does put me off, mainly because I tend to enjoy doing other things while I watch television, and you just can't do that with a programme in a foreign language unless you are one of those clever knitters who can knit without looking at the needles. Trying to do any craft, or write Christmas cards or tidy up while watching a subtitled programme is impossible.

The main character is a nurse in her early thirties who is being pressured by her family to settle down with a nice boy. She has the air of a young Helen Baxendale, while her mother has the air of a younger Wanda Ventham. I wasted some time musing upon the possibility of a script drawing together Ida Elise Broch discovering she has a birth mother in England in the form of Helen Baxendale, and then her adoptive mother discovering she is the daughter of Wanda Ventham. But that suffered from the problem which all my fictional creations suffer from - a surfeit of characters. 

I've noticed that successful television programmes keep the cast of characters to a mere handful. You can have people who are in the background, or partnered with some main character, but a successful and sensible author keeps the cast list tightly knit around no more than about eight characters. My attempts at fiction start with a small cast which rapidly expands until I have trouble keeping track of who is who, let alone some poor benighted reader.

It's good though. I am enjoying it. Even though I can't decorate baubles or write my Christmas cards while I watch.