AUTHOR’S NOTE: This column contains no Star Wars: The Force Awakens spoilers – unless you are incredibly good at interpreting non-specific noises that I’ve probably mistranscribed anyway. No, really, you have nothing to worry about, promise.
Star Wars Star Wars Star Wars Star Wars. Everything recently has been about Star Wars. Tickets had been booked for the earliest possible performance once the school holidays had begun. Lightsabers had been wielded. Films four, five and six (ie the original trilogy – at least Doctor Who fans only argue about the titles of the first three stories, rather than their numbers) had been watched in preparation. The boys also consumed a fair amount of additional media, which meant that I generally didn’t have a clue whether their conversation was about something so obscure from the movies that I’d never noticed it, or was something that had only ever popped up in a book, a cartoon, or a comic. I had a sudden thought. Is this what it’s like for someone who only watches Doctor Who on TV and doesn’t think about it all the time? Maybe if you gave them a list of Sentreal, Beep the Meep and Banto Zame they wouldn’t actually know which one was from a TV story, which one was from a comic strip, and which one was from the audios? The horror!
Anyway. Back to Star Wars. It had been lived and breathed in the days coming up to the end of term. Could it possibly live up to the hype? I’m delighted to tell you that the answer from our household was a resounding yes. After we’d been to see the film, I was also very proud of the boys for their restraint. Husband and I had explained to them how knowing things in advance can spoil a film for other people, so although they desperately wanted to talk about certain events as we left the cinema, they very conscientiously referred to things as “the bit where mmm-mmm mmm-mmm-ed and there was mmmmmm” until we were safely home again. (If only people on Twitter could exercise the same restraint.)