Sheridan Smith is Cilla: anyone who has a heart must agree

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/24/sheridan-smith-cilla-national-treasure

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We live in a divided world, torn apart by ideology. But right now, it seems, there is one thing absolutely everyone agrees on. Vladimir Putin very much agrees with the Ukrainian prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, about it. In Glasgow’s George Square battle-scarred veterans of the yes and no campaigns are hugging each other at the thought of it. And Hamas and the Israeli Defence Force have pretty much issued a joint communique about it: Sheridan Smith is absolutely bloody marvellous as Cilla Black!

I only realised what a phenomenon this supremely lovable and talented performer had become when I read the following words in Peter Hitchens’ column in the Mail On Sunday: “Sheridan Smith is astonishingly good as the young Cilla Black in ITV’s Cilla.” If you’ve captured Peter Hitchens’ heart then everything is possible. Sheridan Smith is being fast-tracked to national treasure status, and no one deserves it more. She should be gazetted as an NT way ahead of the usual pageant of grumpy-cuddly middle-aged males.

When Sheridan/Cilla got the news in this week’s episode about Anyone Who Had a Heart going straight to number one and she started dancing round with her boyfriend, Bobby, in the street, I have to admit … I choked up. Sheridan Smith’s performance is not the traditional karaoke-biopic impersonation; there are no elaborately observed tics and Cilla Black’s broken nose, though mentioned in the script, is not prosthetically recreated. Yet Sheridan Smith just is Cilla Black: she unselfconsciously taps into the same energies that once flowed through Cilla Black herself.

Devotees of the Blind Date feature in our Saturday Weekend magazine will, incidentally, have loved Smith’s beguiling account of her 2010 date with Rav Wilding. But I like to think that it implanted in TV executives’ minds a subconscious association with Cilla Black, the host of the ITV show Blind Date – and planted the seed for this great performance. So when Sheridan Smith picks up her awards at the end of the year, we can bask in a little of her reflected glory.

Purr-lease, enough

A Sky News microphone picked up David Cameron gloating over his Scottish referendum victory in an over-excited exchange with New York’s former mayor Michael Bloomberg. He said: “The definition of relief is being the prime minister of the United Kingdom and ringing the Queen and saying: ‘It’s all right, it’s OK.’ That was something. She purred down the line.” Purred? For the prime minister to preen himself on his political virility in this way is in excruciating taste. It is horribly like the moment in When Harry Met Sally when Billy Crystal says to his buddy Bruno Kirby, after an intimate moment with a girlfriend, that “she actually meowed”. Stunned, Kirby says: “You made a woman meow?” As for Cameron’s conversation with Bloomberg, most of the rest was inaudible, but perhaps Bloomberg said: “You made the Queen purr?” I suspect the Queen was not purring at the sound of her tediously smug prime minister – but snoring.

Conspicuous abstinence

Next month sees an unprecedented pile-up of novelty month-renaming charity campaigns. As in previous years, October is going to be Stoptober, in which people stop smoking for a month.

But it is also Go Sober for October, in which people refrain from drinking, and get sponsored for Macmillan Cancer Support. In both cases, the participants will of course be endlessly talking and tweeting about their self-denial. What is less known is that the following month will be known as Bingevember. “Are you doing Bingevember?” someone will ask, and you will reply: “Yes, for Bingevember I’m drinking three litres of red wine, smoking 60 Marlboro Lights and then the next morning I’m posting a no-makeup selfie of me being sick and then becoming short-tempered and disagreeable with family and co-workers. Can you please visit my Just Giving page and donate 50p per snappy remark?”