The Bitch List

So, you want to be as sweet and virtuous as Audrey Tautou in Amlie?

Pass me that ice-pick, says Rachel Cooke

THIS touchy-feely let's-allbe- nice- to- each- other mood is starting to get on my nerves. If one more person urges me to see Amlie, a film which tells the story of a beautiful, young Audrey Hepburn-lookalike who secretly goes about repairing the lives of those around her, I will have to hit them with my new Pradastyle tan handbag. Get a grip, girls.

Do we really need a heroine who wears silly little hair slides in her glossy bob? Probably not, I'd say.

Unfortunately, I seem to be in a minority of one when it comes to this movie. Women are queuing up to see Amlie because, according to Harper's & Queen magazine, consideration for others, good manners and virtue are suddenly the very height of fashion. Naomi Campbell has attended anger-management classes and Madonna has declared that her husband Guy has succeeded in making her feel "more self-conscious about being a bitch".

In the United States, meanwhile, some companies are enrolling female executives in special recovery programmes for "bully broads".

Jean Hollands, author of Same Game, Different Rules: How to Get Ahead Without Being a Bully Broad, Ice Queen or Ms Understoods, now advocates policies such as "Cry, Don't Shout" and "Down Girl! You Don't Need to Confront at Every Turn".

Then, of course, there is the subliminal message from the catwalk.

No sooner had we got to grips with last season's dominatrix look than we're told it's time to put away our skimpy leather and skyscraper heels.

Victorian collars, prim little suits, Marc Jacobs-inspired girly dresses and Mary Jane shoes are making a comeback. The other day I saw a picture of Yasmin Le Bon in a magazine. She was wearing a frilly white lace blouse that looked as if it might have been stolen from the BBC costume department.

Somehow, this is all very depressing. The truth is, every woman loves a wasp - assuming, of course, she doesn't have to work for her. Dorothy Parker, Nancy Mitford, Germaine Greer, Nora Ephron, Diana Vreeland - there is nothing so cheering as reading these women's stiletto-sharp putdowns and then storing them at the back of your mind like so many missiles, to be brought out in your hour of need. Personally, I don't want Posh Spice and Naomi Campbell to be friends; I want them to scrap, playground-style.

Luckily, however, this Saturday night Channel 4 is screening an antidote to the new sweetness when it devotes the latest in its series of Top Ten TV to Bitches. OK, so these women are fictional creations - and, consequently, they are truly, unbelievably monstrous - but don't let that put you off. If you like to see a girl fully armed - her lips a slick of red for danger, her heels as spiky as a couple of ice-picks - then this is the show for you.

Naturallythe usual suspects are all there: Joan Collins as Alexis in Dynasty; Anne Robinson in Weakest Link mode; Michelle Collins as Cindy Beale in EastEnders. But the joy of this Top Ten lies not in guessing which women have been included and in what order, but in sitting back and listening to the bile pour out of their mouths.

Their best lines - as chilly as Vladivostock, as lethal as arsenic - will make you want to punch the air with joy.

Dynasty's costume designer once spent $175,000 on the outfits for a single episode. The result, as one of Joanie's former co-stars points out, was dresses so outlandishly over the top that Alexis usually looked as if she had a pair owls sitting on her shoulders.

But no matter: in one clip, she stands at the top of an ornate staircase, hands on hips, false eyelashes fluttering like newly hatched caterpillars, and addresses her ex-husband, Blake Carrington.

"Take this junk and that blonde tramp and get out of my home," she says.

She then tosses Krystal's fur coats over the balustrade. From the expression on her face, they might as well be a couple of cheap anoraks.

Then there is Kim Tate from Emmerdale ("Dallas with dung"). I have not seen this farming soap since I had mumps as a child, but who could not relish the sight of this vixen - a bottle blonde in black leather gloves - watching her husband die of a heart attack?

Once he has done moaning, Ms Tate holds the mirror of her powder compact over his mouth to ensure he really is no longer breathing; she then uses the same mirror to check her lipstick is all in order. Atta girl!

But my favourite bitch of all is Kate O'Mara, who, with her permatan and panda eyes, has turned playing the cow into an art form. She did it in The Brothers (Seventies drama set in the glam world of airfreight services), Triangle (awful soap about the Felixstowe- Gothenburg-Amsterdam ferry - Kate was the purser) and Dynasty (she played Alexis's sinister sibling, Caress).

Then, joy of joys, she popped up again - complete with fetching leopard-skin swimming costume - in Howards' Way, an everyday story about sailing folk.

In one scene, her business rival, slimy Ken Masters, comes up behind her.

"Hello, Ken," she says, without turning round. "Have you got eyes in the back of your head?"

says poor Ken, rattling his gold identity bracelet. "No," replies Miss O'Mara. "I just happened to be downwind of your aftershave."

Designers, film directors and politicians may tell us that the mood of the moment is caring and wholesome, but the truth is - as Nick Hornby suggests in his novel How to be Good - virtue is vastly overrated. Jane Austen put it best when she wrote: "I do not want people to be very agreeable as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal."

Please: give me Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde over Audrey Tautou in Amlie. Give me Edwina Currie over Yvette Cooper, sheer stockings over white knee socks, naughty jokes over huggy round- robin emails. On Saturday night, be sure to get your girlfriends over to hear the bitch's rallying cry. The backlash starts here.

You have been warned.

Top Ten TV: Bitches, Saturday, 9pm, C4.

Copyright 2001
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