5 Feet of Fury

Thirteen going on fifty: Julie Burchill finds her teenage self in Jackie the Musical

Julie Burchill writes:

My colleagues at the IPC-owned NME delighted in telling me that Jackie was the product not of fevered London-flat-sharing teenage girls’ imaginations, as we readers had somehow convinced ourselves, but rather was cobbled together by a bunch of bitter, middle-aged men at IPC’s rival publisher D C Thomson. But cynicism can be a real buzz-kill, and for one night only I was happy to be wearing my short-sighted head. (…)

I always found it freaky to think that my grandmother was alive in Edwardian times, but the world before the internet and Islamofascism – rocked in the bosom of Cold War security – seems equally foreign now. I’d expected there to be a somewhat maudlin mood among the audience, but detected none at all; instead, the overweening feeling was one of relief, not just that we’d made it this far, but that we weren’t young now, in these desperate days.