Tonight's TV
Hannah’s manor
Hannah Hauxwell: Past & Present
(ITV Yorkshire/Tyne Tees, 8pm), Dirty Sexy Money (C4, 9pm)
THE remote farm in the Pennines
has changed out of all recognition.
A makeover has turned it
into a family home with all mod
cons. Its former famous owner,
on the other hand, seems to have
changed little over the years.
Hannah Hauxwell, now 81, lives quietly in
a nearby village in a cottage piled high with
accumulated rubbish, everything from empty
food cartons to papers that she can't bear to
throw out.
"I know I keep too many. It's the way I am.
You can't teach an old dog new tricks," she
says.
She'll never win any prizes for tidiness but
she's still a star, an early example of an ordinary
person thrust into the spotlight and capturing
the public's attention.
Nowadays we call it reality TV, back in 1973
it was a documentary when film-maker Barry
Cockcroft went looking for ordinary people
for a Yorkshire TV documentary. Someone
left a message on his desk reading: "Met this
woman. Good talker. Might be worth looking
up."
It was Hannah Hauxwell, then 46 and single-
handedly running a remote 80-acre farm
without electricity or running water. It was a
hard life that viewers could scarcely believe
still existed in the 20th Century.
The new documentary catches up with her
30 years after becoming a national celebrity,
interweaving excerpts from past films with a
fresh interview in which she reflects on that
amazing time in her life.
Her ease in front of the camera made her a
TV natural. She enjoyed the company of
Cockcroft and the film crew. "They were lovely.
I liked them and we became friends. I was
sorry when they went, I missed them," she
says.
SCENES of her breaking the ice on a
frozen lake to collect water for her cattle
and her obvious enjoyment on a rare
night out at a harvest festival supper and
dance are two scenes from the past replayed
here.
Another sequence showed her hanging
food in plastic bags from the ceiling to prevent
it being eaten by rodents. She recalls
meeting a rat at the foot of the stairs. "I
don't know who was more scared, him or
me," she says.
After Cockcroft's film Too Long A Winter
was screened, Yorkshire TV's switchboard
was jammed for three days by the public
with offers of help.
She reflects on not getting married and
running the farm on her own - a good
thing in a way, she decides, as she didn't
have to take orders from anybody.
She met royalty when she went to the
Savoy Hotel in London for the Women of
the Year luncheon, wearing the first dress
she'd bought since her mother's funeral.
Fifteen years later, her life changed
again when she reached the decision reluctantly
to sell up and leave the farm. Today,
she knows it was the right decision. "I think
once a country woman, always a country
woman," she says. "But it was the right thing
to do at the time, I couldn't have stayed there
forever."
She did a bit of travelling too, touring Europe
with Cockcroft and a film crew in tow for
the series Hannah Hauxwell: Innocent
Abroad. But her heart will
always be in the Dales. "I
was, still am and always
will be a plain Dales
woman," she says.
How very different
to life with the Darlings
- no relation to
Alistair Darling - in
Dirty Sexy Money,
the latest US import
featuring a
d y s f u n c t i o n a l
American family.
Six Feet Under's
Peter Krause succeeds
his father as
lawyer to the Darlings,
headed by
Donald Sutherland's
patriarch. He's being paid $10m on top of his
salary to give to his favourite charities. He'll
earn every penny.
Mrs Darling was his father's mistress, the
daughter takes an overdose, the son is a playboy
and the politician son has a transsexual
lover. My favourite family member is another
son, Brian, a man of the cloth with a love
child and a foul mouth.
By the end of the first episode, Krause's
character suspects someone killed his father
in a plane crash. The scene is set for a rich
family drama with the Darlings making Dallas
and the Ewings look like My Family.
9:41am Friday 21st March 2008
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