Bwell, we’ll just have to bow our heads and accept it. Some assignments are unavoidable, and Dame Judi and Jay: The Odd Couple is one of them. Someone gets wind of the fact that nearly ninety-year-old Judi Dench, a national hero and probably the greatest actor of her generation, and 54-year-old dyslexic furniture restorer Jay Blades, who grew up on an east London council estate, have become close friends since she appeared on his show The Repair Shop two years ago. Their names begin with the same letter. Summer plans must be filled with things that don’t matter in the slightest. And lo and behold, an hour-long travelogue is born, in which the two take each other to the places that have meant most to them in their very different lives.
Blades takes “the lady”, as he usually calls her, to the venerable Ridley Road market in Dalston, a haunt of the local black community during his childhood, and where he went every weekend with his mother, gathering gossip and bargains in equal measure. “Oh, this is heaven!” says the lady, clearly an inveterate shopper, as she buys one knick-knack after another despite Blades’ attempts to keep her in check. Inevitably, the really interesting material – just watching the two chatting, joking and laughing together, experiencing the authenticity of their relationship and a little wonder at the miracle of human connection – has to be punctuated by stunts like having them take over a market stall and sell plantains to (busy and unimpressed) customers. Later, there is a pub quiz at the local pub, where the young Dench and her new husband Michael Williams – “the love of my life” – spent a lot of time when they lived in Stratford-upon-Avon, and which serves the same confusing purpose.
There are many moving moments between the stunts. Dame Judi returns to the Old Vic, where she made her London debut at 22 as Ophelia in Hamlet, and is almost overwhelmed as she stands on stage for the first time in over 60 years. “I never heard of Shakespeare at school,” says Blades in the stalls. “Make a sonnet! Anything!” She gives him number 18 and it doesn’t matter if you’re hearing it for the first time or the thousandth time – she makes it new and we’re all Blades in the stalls, full of anticipation of what she can do. “So long live this, and this gives you life.”
To do this, he reads her the “To be or not to be” speech, which, especially for anyone who has seen his documentary about learning to read at age 51, has a meaning all its own. It unobtrusively lifts him over the stumbling blocks of “resistance,” “accomplishment,” and “pious.” It’s a microcosmic version of actor and director in rehearsal, and it’s intimate, beautiful, and over far too quickly for us to get on with the nonsense, like riding down the Thames on a speedboat past MI6 headquarters because the lady played M in those James Bond movies.
But we meet the woman Blades credits with saving him from a life of violence and crime – Janet, who, despite having two children to care for at 17, started a youth club to create a safe place and provide nourishment and boundaries for kids like Blades who needed it. “You created this incredible childhood,” he tells her. “I’ve never said that before – but thank you.” “That touches my soul, it really does,” she tells him with a grin. Roy, one of the “elders” who helped watch over the boys, joins them. “He taught me that respect doesn’t mean getting in trouble,” Blades says. It led him to the restoration and repair business – fixing things instead of destroying things and himself – and to the life he leads today. The lady takes it all in, saying almost nothing until she’s outside. “What two unusual People.” Rare is an actress who doesn’t do something she shouldn’t do.
She takes Blades to the house she shared with Williams and their daughter Finty, and then to Williams’ grave nearby. She reads Blades the inscription: “‘You have taken all my words away.’ It means ‘I don’t know what to say.'” They stand there in comfortable silence. Good thing the speedboat is coming, otherwise we’d all be very bored, wouldn’t we? I wish directors trusted the audience more. It may have been an unavoidable assignment, but nonetheless, there was such a beautiful program here, desperate to be released.
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