Shut your mouth, dear

Now, listen, and listen good, or I’ll come round and box your ears. Should anyone happen to say to you, ‘Shall we go see The Nanny Diaries tonight?’, you must answer, ‘No.’ There should be no need to embellish this. Just say ‘no’. It’s very simple. Practise it now. No, no, no, no, no. Should you not listen, and should you allow an ‘OK’ to pop out, you will not only prove yourself the lily-livered, pathetic, no-good shmuck I have always suspected you to be, but I will also have to box your ears — I know where you live — and I do not want to box your ears. Don’t you think I’ve got enough to do?

On the whole, I don’t mind a turkey, as there is usually some fun to be had with it, especially if it’s a nice, big, fat, proud, preening one, but this is such a dim and dismal runt of a turkey it would surely have been much, much kinder to have wrung its scaggy neck at birth. Well, kinder to us, at least. Speaking for myself, this is not only 145 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back, but it’s also 145 minutes I could have wasted more productively on the internet and making prank calls. I’m behind with both as it is.

Anyway, if you care, which is in itself inadvisable, I guess I should tell you it’s based, apparently, on the bestselling book by two real New York nannies who wrote, in novel form, about their experiences working for the super-rich families of the Upper East Side. Here, the story is told in the one voice of Annie (known by her employers as ‘Nanny’) as played by Scarlett Johansson, who looked like an interesting actress for nearly ten minutes (with Lost In Translation) but now isn’t.