Having seen its fair share of romance and tragedy over the years, the grounds of Chatsworth should have been the perfect location to premiere Love Is All, a film about love in the 20th century directed by Kim Longinotto. Edited by Ollie Huddleston and soundtracked by Sheffield's own Richard Hawley, it promised a gaze back on 100 years of love and courtship using archived film footage from the BFI and Yorkshire Film Archive.
As the sun set over the stately back drop on Wednesday night, the audience enjoyed picnic food supplied by local vendors and unapologetically northern parodies from The Everly Pregnant Brothers. By the time this underrated Sheffield band had closed their set with No Oven No Pie - lovingly dedicated to "Anyone that had a Nana" - the crowd were in a buoyant mood.
Which would have been great – had Hawley not then been called on stage to do a Q&A with the film makers and the comedian, Jeremy Hardy. Struggling to cut through the chatter coming from the floor, an unimpressed Hawley, apparently on strong painkillers for his back, announced he would like an ice cream.
What followed was a somewhat uncomfortable interview which resulted in the word "cunt" booming out over a loud speaker for probably the first time in the long history of the Chatsworth show ground. Hawley seemed to think they were wasting everyone's time. "You don't want to listen to a bunch of cunts like us," he said, charmingly, delivering a quick tutorial on how Margaret Thatcher invented the Mr Whippy before leaving the stage.
Hardy made a valiant attempt to try and salvage the situation, but Hawley was long gone. It was hard not to blame him - the clear indifference to the Q&A was evident from the noise and may have been better placed after the film had finished.
Once the film rolled, all bad tempers were forgotten as the audience engaged with the beautiful and sometimes slightly haunting journey back through the liberation of love. Same sex relationships, sexism, interracial relationships and sexual liberation were all echoed in the footage. At times, the film provided a stark reminder of an emotion that was once so often out of the control of the person experiencing it, subject to the cruel whims and prejudices of society.
Kudos to Hawley and his foul mouth: his soundtrack perfectly married the archive clips as we were led seamlessly through seduction, apprehension, jealousy, innocence, frustration, sex, rejection, comfort, elation and heartbreak. At the end you were left feeling you'd experienced a very real and very human depiction of what it is to be in love - and heard a former member of Pulp drop the c-bomb.
