Walking the Tightrope: The Calendar Girls
Sally Codman muses on whether or not she would allow herself to be featured in a nude calendar.
Walking the Tightrope by Sally Codman - If you'd asked me twenty years ago to appear in a nude calendar the answer would have been an emphatic 'no way' - but if you asked me today the answer would be 'maybe - provided you could make me look as good as the Calendar Girls!
That's NOT those nubile, long-legged calendar girls on some greasy, garage wall or in a tabloid paper, but THE Calendar Girls - the 'girls' of the Rylstone Women's Institute - who first appeared nude for a charity calendar that's become a worldwide bestseller.
Their true story inspired the much-publicised film of the same name, starring Julie Walters, Helen Mirren and a host of other famous names. I finally got to see the film recently and I wasn't disappointed. I laughed, cried and had a great evening out.
I also had the satisfaction of being able to say 'I told you so', because I've followed the true story behind the film ever since it broke some four years ago.
Mr C first spotted a couple of paragraphs about the exploits of the Rylstone
W.I. ladies, which made him smile and made me declare 'what a great story!' Turns out I was absolutely right.
When the Rylstone girls first planned their calendar they expected to sell a few hundred copies to raise money for leukaemia research and buy a new sofa
for the relatives' waiting room at Jimmy's hospital in Leeds. John Baker, the husband of one of their members who died of leukaemia in 1998, had been treated at Jimmy's.
His widow, Angela, was Miss February in the original calendar.
The tale of the W.I. Calendar Girls travelled round the world. The calendars, featuring 11 middle-aged women dressed in pearls and hats performing traditional W.I. activities; such as baking, sewing, knitting and making jam, sold like the proverbial hot cakes.
Sales of the original calendars, plus a follow-up American version, raised over £600,000 and enabled the calendar girls to buy not only a new sofa but also an entire new leukaemia unit for Jimmy's.
Royalties from the film and the new calendar - all signed over to leukaemia research - are expected to top £1m.
So, apart from being a 'good cause', what's the secret of the calendar's success? Why do people want to look at photos of middle-aged naked women when there are so many younger alternatives?
The secret has to be that those photos for the original calendar were all done in the best possible taste. Flowers, cakes and an imaginative variety of other props' hide the 'naughty bits' and leave everything to the imagination for a change.
The calendars appeal to us gals as well as the guys because the women featured are 'real women' with real bodies and slight imperfections - just
like all of us. They aren't impossibly-perfect Barbie-style-babes with silicone-enhanced breasts and mile-long legs.
They are women who went-ahead and bared all in a good cause, despite not being a size ten and aged twenty-something. The results are lovely, tasteful pictures that make you smile and hope you'll look half as good when you reach their age.
