Jane Edwards, 30-something virgin, is the secret point of the retirement home 1990s Britcom “Waiting for God.” She pines after her insufferable (but handsome because played by good-looking actor) boss, Harvey Bains, but periodically threatens to become a nun. She’s so horrified by sex that she calls it “the s word,” but also kiiind of sexually harasses Harvey, always finding an excuse to give him a little comforting pat on the arm, thus inspiring his catchphrase, “Jane, you’re touching me,” nearly always followed by a, “Sorry, Harvey.” Harvey is a cad, or aspiring at any rate, and prefers bimbo to buttoned-up. Jane’s buttons reach as far up as her eyebrows. He tortures her by telling her about his quest for a wife. His conquests include a posh young woman with a “summer tan,” and a Norwegian aerobics instructors. She doesn’t stand a chance, until the show up and gives her one.
Jane is pure, pent-up desire and frustration, although she denies this. She wants Harvey, desperately, but what does she want with him? This is hazy until the last episode. Following several improbable, fifth-and-final-season plot twists, Jane is engaged to marry Harvey. What she’s always wanted! But she announces she does not plan to do that, even on the honeymoon. She changes her tune only after a visit, with the women of the retirement home she works for, to a male strip club. She’s horrified at first, but then all the strapping male nudity awakens something within her, and then she’s all-in, just in time for the wedding finale.
Jane is a rare breed, a youngish single woman character, with a love interest, who is not meant to be even slightly desirable herself. She does the objectifying, and even if she’s miserable, and even if in real life if you met her, you’d tell her to for crying out loud leave Harvey alone, in the context of the show, you kind of have to hand it to her.
Fast forward about 15 years and Duvitski is Jacqueline Stewart on “Benidorm,” my other favorite Britcom. I like to think of Jacqueline as a grown-up Jane, a postscript of sorts. Jacqueline is what happens after Jane seens those naked dancers and un-represses herself. But Jacqueline is not—and thank goodness—married to a Harvey Bains. She’s in a “very broadminded” marriage to a Scottish man named Donald. The two are bisexual swingers, up for anything and anyone. And instead of working at an English retirement home, changing linens and so forth, she’s on a well-deserved vacation in Spain.
Jacqueline is the star of the pair, as well as the one with more screentime, given Donald’s fake-death plotline, and, later, the unfortunate real-life demise of the actor who played him. She segues more or less seamlessly from the wife role into a social group with the men who operate the resort’s hair salon. The joke, although it’s presented as a matter-of-fact character detail, not a joke, is that Jacqueline is far more sexually experienced than the young and youngish gay men in her circle, one of whom has an extremely active social life in that area.
Jacqueline looks like a frumpy, middle-aged-plus lady, neither sultry nor vain. The sexuality is all in the script and the acting. Jacqueline’s catchphrase is “ohhh, yes,” spoken with more innuendo than Mrs. Slocombe delivering a “my pussy” line. Like Jane, Jacqueline is more desirer than desired, although Donald’s charming conviction that his wife is universally sought-after (not a problem for him, quite the contrary) is well-established.
Harvey Bains may have wanted “a beauty queen,” but Jane/Jacqueline are all about disentangling woman-as-object from woman-as-sexual-being. It’s not that Duvitski herself is grotesque—she’s not modelesque but very normal-looking, and is equally plausible in more of a crush-object role in the third ep of “Midsomer Murders.” It’s that she’s good at playing plain and unassuming. It’s the opposite of the Emily Ratajkowski school of female sexuality, wherein to ‘be sexual’ is about looking hot. What she looks like simply doesn’t enter into it. It’s wonderful.