“I saw something nasty in the woodshed,” was the stock phrase of one Ada Doom Starkadder, the matriarch of the Sussex homestead in Stella Gibbon’s Cold Comfort Farm.
I saw the 1996 film version tonight. It’s a hoot.
Gibbon’s nephew and biographer has a page on the background for the novel. It’s a send-up of a style of rural romance, made popular by the writer Mary Wood, who died five years before Cold Comfort Farm was published. I’ve not read Wood’s books, but they sound like The Archers, with added sex and pathos.
Even more fun is that Cold Comfort Farm is Science Fictional. It was published in 1932, but the novel takes place in a 1950 where people have personal airplanes and video phones.
It’s a shame that the film version played it straight, and set it in the early 1930′s. With some grungy technology, they could had done Ivory-Merchant meets Terry Gilliam.
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