It is quite rare to find someone who hates television and loathes the violence that pervades the medium. Pearl Douglas classifies the soap ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ as a ghastly TV series that inspires millions of fans the world over. A teacher of drama and spoken English, Pearl trains a diverse range of nationalities and age groups in the art of public speaking. She has her own highly successful method of training students. It is a mixture of ingenuity and feeling, qualities which have marked her career in the performing arts.
While getting ready to face the day, Pearl indulges herself and listens to classical music – her favourites are Beethoven and Mozart and Mendelssohn’s violin concerto which she adores. Once dressed, she is ready to face the world together with all its trials and tribulations — the fuzz has cleared and she is ready to start her day’s work.
Pearl has quite a few Iranian and Japanese students. Planning is the most important part of her day. Her main subjects are elocution and direction for drama. For several years she was running the Department of Drama for the Arts Education in London and she also had a full-time drama school in Elstree (a village in England), where so many films were made during the time she lived there.
Pearl’s early teacher training was with the Cypriots who wanted to learn English. It was a coincidence that she and her husband later bought a house and lived in Cyprus. Pearl’s first stop in the Middle East was in Baghdad. She says that it was one of the richest periods in her teaching career as she had the opportunity to teach spoken and written English to people of so many different nationalities and from varied backgrounds.
In Baghdad, Pearl met and taught a professor from Yugoslavia who was quite taken by her methods and keen to adapt them to her teaching programme. Pearl said, “You see, I work with tapes much of the time. My students have tapes of their lessons as well as answers to their special queries for reference.”
Pearl feels her system of teaching works remarkably well. She says, “In my view, speech comes first and therefore it is better to start off with the spoken language. After all, people learn to speak before they do anything else. Until you speak a language, you can’t write it. My students are at different levels so class usually begins with a chat about what they have done in the last week or so.”
Lessons run non-stop through the afternoon. “No, I don’t rest in the afternoons”, she answers, “it’s such a waste of time.” Pearl never looks at the time. She used to hate working in a school because the bell would only interrupt a lesson. “I am quite impossible in that respect! I appreciate it is good discipline and all that to stop with the bell, but in the theatre, you see, you just carry on until you have finished.”
Pearl explained that she used to train children in drama and believes mime is such an important part of growing up and when you work with children you discover how original and unusual they are in their expressions and interpretations. Children start off shy, very shy, but after a few lessons you just cannot hold them back. “I love reading autobiographies, when I can find the time. I hate television. I loathe the violence which is so pervasive on it these days. It turns me off completely. Yes, I know there is some wonderful acting on television but that does not make up for all the violence. Violence has a great influence on young people. What are we breeding, that’s what worries me. The violence may be subliminal but it is there. It is so much a part of the ethos of today. I won’t deny there is violence in Shakespeare but at least it is clothed in wonderful language. And even if violence is part of man’s nature, my argument is that surely, we do not need to be indoctrinated from birth into the ways of violence.”
“I enjoy biographies especially if they are to do with the theatre and the National Geographic which is often a starting point for my lessons.” You cannot succeed in the kind of work Pearl does if you don’t understand that each student has a different personality. “And I try to provide them with words they require in daily living.” She does not have a television in the lounge “because I absolutely refuse to have friends ask ‘can we watch the Bold and the Beautiful’; it is a ghastly series. It is written in the most appalling manner but I dare say, there is a compulsive fascination about it to find out what will happen next. My husband, Alan, finds the whole series funny and wants to watch it while I am invariably irritated and attempt to switch it off. He laughs and I am infuriated that he can laugh at such rubbish!”
I had the pleasure of knowing Pearl in the 1990’s and she is truly a woman for all seasons.
