The photo above shows Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones in a still from   ‘The Theory of Everything’, where they play Stephen Hawking and his first wife, Jane Wilde Hawking. 

Shortly after meeting in 1963  they discover that they are unlikely to have much in common in terms of their subjects, she being a student of Modern Languages and Literature  (as I was) and he a Cosmologist. I went up to Cambridge in 1957 and doubt if I would have had any more idea than Jane Wilde exactly (or even vaguely) what a cosmologist is interested in.

One thing I did find out within my first couple of days, and that within a matter of yards of where this scene is set, is that no-one except ‘Senior Members’ of a college (i.e only Fellows, or people in their company,) is allowed to walk on the lawns of a court. (Not a ‘quad’; that’s what they call them in Oxford, I gather).

So, some time in my first week as a callow freshman, I set off across the lawn of  New Court (not that new; it’s a neo-gothic building completed in 1831) and was shouted at indignantly by a more senior member of the College.

And so, in fact, was this other callow youth, in a Gillray print of 1806, the accompanying text of which reads:

Ah me! That though the Freshman’s Guide should read,

Yet dares upon the hallowed grass to tread!

                                                

                                                          

(Click here for more about ‘The Rake’s Progress at the University’)

But the future Mr and Mrs Hawking are going even farther than this poor chap: they’re actually playing croquet on the hallowed grass. And, if you want to be a wee bit pedantic about it, a St. John’s College undergraduate or graduate student wanting to play this delightful game would leave New Court and head for the Backs, the open space of lawn leading down to the river and not bounded by buildings.

                                             

The young Stephen Hawking did not in fact attend St.John’s at any time in his career. He’d actually obtained his first degree at University College, Oxford (which is where he’d coxed one of the boats, though you’d never realise that from the film), then went on to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, as a graduate student, before being awarded a research fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (universally known as ‘Caius’, pronounced ‘keys’).

But who cares. St John’s is admirably photogenic, and has all that space on the Backs to film a May Ball in full swing, with the ‘Bridge of Sighs’ in the background, as well as the older ‘Wren Bridge’ built by a local man in the late 17th-early 18th centuries to the designs of Sir Christopher (and used, in the film, as the setting of the young couple’s first kiss.)

                                                           

                                                             

                                                                             

In this morning’s Guardian, Peter Bradshaw took the film to task for something completely different: that there was something missing in certain scenes, those set in pubs, for example.

All the details and the superb production design were wonderfully clear. So where was the blue haze, the fug, the horrible brimming ashtrays and the nasty fag smoke?  A lot of people would have been smoking in those places at that time. But we’ve cleaned them up - fictionally.

Now that’s something I didn’t notice, though - as an undergraduate - a quite ridiculous amount of my grant money went on cigarettes. Both my parents smoked, and that’s what most men did. Thank God I gave the filthy habit up in 1976, but would it do much harm to show what actually went on in the bad old days?