Dorret Conway

Knitting is set to make an appearance on the big screen with the annoucement of the making of The Friday Night Knitting Club - movie based on a book. Knitting enthusiast Julia Roberts is involved in this production which is due out in June 2008.

I will interested to see it. Not purely because I love knitting, nor for the lovely Julia, but because I want to see if the characters can knit. We all know Julia can knit but will her cast of stars have her cast on skills?

Are you good at spotting things in movies? I can spot continuity botch ups. And at the moment my “ooh look, they are knitting” radar is very much tuned in. I’m not exactly keeping a diary but I do notice whether characters are sporting knitting needles.

I think the tendency started when someone told me that Charlton Heston always bares his chest in his movies. Well so far, in all of his movies that I have watched, he doffs his kit and shows his naked torso. Ben Hur, El Sid, “the one with the deserted ship”…

I’m not particularly a Heston fan, but that bit of info passed on by a friend of mine, and don’t ask me where she got it from, made me watch Heston movies - intently. btw TCM is a good source if you want to test the theory.

So my question to you is, do you know of a Charlton Heston film where he doesn’t take off his top-half clothing? Perhaps it was a condition of his contract….?

With the small screen knitters the thing that I have noticed over the past months is - they are not knitting!! Oh yeah, they got all the equipment, but that’s all.

for example:

Mama Solis (Desperate Housewives series 1 or was it 2? ) before being run over by a neighbour, sitting on the porch spying on her cheating daughter-in-law, wielding knitting needles but definitely not knitting! And then another scene in the house. Don’t know what the producers suggested but it looked like harder work than it would have been to actually learn to do a knit stitch!!

Bree (Deperate Housewives series 1) filling in time on a pleasant afternoon in between her domestic chores - before she decided drinking wine was a much better way to spend free time.

Meredith (Gray’s Anatomy last series) took up knitting as therapy for a broken heart, after coming to the realisation that knitting is much safer if not more satisfying than going out with married men. Sensible girl.

Ruddy Hell! its Harry and Paul: in the new series with Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, they got a couch potato character doing who knows what with a pair of knitting needles and some yarn. I was so busy watching the needle action that I missed the whole point of the sketch!!

So Julia, if you are one of the producers on this movie, perhaps you need to be working on a real Friday night knitting club to get all your characters up to speed with their knitting before you shoot those crucial scenes - because I will be paying attention! I can just see the reviews now…….