HAVE you seen Mare of Easttown? Not everyone will be able to, since it is on Sky Atlantic/NOW but it is an outstanding piece of television and will probably win every award going, so you might want to join the party (try a NOW entertainment pass).

On the face of it, Mare of Easttown is yet another crime drama featuring a hard-drinking detective burdened by sorrows, but at the same time it is not just another crime drama featuring a hard-drinking detective, etc. This detective has a belly. And wrinkles. And looks permanently exhausted. She is, in short, a middle-aged woman.

So what, you might say. British television drama broke that particular mould years ago with Vera, played by Brenda Blethyn.

This time it is different, or so we are encouraged to believe. This time it is the Oscar-winning Kate Winslet who is acting close to her own age (45) and sees no reason to hide it. The one-time Marianne Dashwood of Sense and Sensibility is wearing sensible shoes. The Rose DeWitt Bukater that blossomed in Titanic is playing washed-up Marianne “Mare” Sheehan. Goodness, has anyone alerted the press?

Of course they have. Ms Winslet spoke to the New York Times about her role and has since made headlines with her forthright views on acting, ageing and women. The director, Craig Zobel, offered to cut a “bulgy bit of belly” from a sex scene, she said. “Don’t you dare,” was Winslet’s response. When she saw how ads for the show had airbrushed out her wrinkles she insisted they go straight back in.

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Of her character, a grandmother, Ms Winslet said: “She’s a fully functioning, flawed woman with a body and a face that moves in a way that is synonymous with her age and her life and where she comes from. I think we’re starved of that a bit.”

Anyone of an age with Mare or older may recognise something familiar in Ms Winslet’s remarks. This is not the first time she has spoken out about body image. She blew the whistle on a glossy magazine for airbrushing a photo to make her look taller and thinner. She has frowned upon plastic surgery. She dislikes the entertainment industry’s obsession with youth.

Good on her for speaking out, but how disheartening that in 2021 any woman should still feel the need. Disheartening maybe, necessary certainly. When it comes to body image, the clock is going backwards. Not in all cases, though.

Gone are the days, post-Titanic, when it was open season on Ms Winslet’s weight. "If she just lost 5lb, Leo would've been able to fit on the raft,” quipped Joan Rivers. “It was almost laughable how shocking, how critical, how straight-up cruel tabloid journalists were to me,” the actor told The Guardian.

Today, such attacks would be called out on social media. The cry would go up for consumer boycotts, a hashtag established. All of it right, but some of it missing the point. There may come a time when we all arrive at a sensible, grown up position on body image, but the sterling efforts of Ms Winslet and others notwithstanding, we are still some way from that point, particularly in the entertainment industry.

There is a certain irony in naturally beautiful people extolling the virtues of ordinariness to the rest of us. Keeping it real is not what we look for in film, theatre, art in general. We can all manage that on our own, thanks. The entertainment business is built on our need for escapism. To that end it has turned artifice into an art form.

The same demand to look good, to be “on show”, has spread from acting to sport. While one can have some sympathy for Naomi Osaka’s dislike of press conferences, they are part of the business the tennis player has chosen to be in. Coverage means sponsors and advertisers and prize money. Keeping up an image and staying in shape is as much a part of an athlete’s career as competing.

For the rest of us, maintaining a healthy weight is just part of staying fit. Tedious but true. The problem is not “a bulgy bit of belly” here and there but obesity.

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A University of Glasgow study published in February found obesity had overtaken smoking as a cause of death. It is harming increasing numbers in childhood, causing lifetimes of ill health and unhappiness and costing the NHS billions.

We know this, but the problem is becoming worse. It is not “fat shaming” to talk about it. Fat is not a feminist issue alone. It is a health issue, a food industry issue, and a poverty issue, with increasing numbers unable to afford a healthier diet.

If Covid-19 has shown us anything it is that we have a responsibility to look after our own health as much as other people’s. Having grown up with the idea that the NHS will always be there for you, it has been a cruel shock for many to find that is not the case.

The debate on body image is changing. We think attitudes are becoming healthier because the likes of Ms Winslet and others have spoken out. True, more magazines are turning away from sample-sized models. Catwalks are no longer full of painfully thin youngsters sporting a so-called "heroin chic" look (though they are still too thin).

Some progress has been made, but it sometimes seems as though the problems have not gone away but are simply lurking somewhere else. We have traded one set of unrealistic expectations about body shape for others, ones that are turning out to be just as harmful if not more so, for men as much as women.

It is customary at this point for the prosecution to call The Internet, as though the genie can be put back in that bottle. But it is frightening to see what is out there, and how easily accessible it is. Generations are growing up with unrealistic notions of what ordinary bodies look like, and in trying to live up to what they think is the norm, youngsters are damaging their physical and mental health. How quaint it seems now to want to ban Page Three or disrupt Miss World. If we had known then what was coming down the pike ...

It may seem too late to make a difference, but that is defeatist talk. If it takes a television drama to get people talking about health and ageing and real bodies then all power to Ms Winslet in her battle to bare the bulgy bits.