1995  EVERY BRIDE’S NIGHTMARE

With her chiselled cheekbones and Big Hair, you would expect to see Harriet Earle on the screen rather than behind the camera. And she did in fact act in her "chick-flick" comic short, Ready For Sex, a finalist at last year's ICA Dick Awards for taboo-breaking films, miraculously made for a mere pound 150.

In the film, a farce unfolds as Earle chaotically gets ready (waxing, creaming, shaving, showering) to have sex with her boyfriend, who comes home and promptly falls asleep.

"It needed comedy," she explains. "It was an excellent way of getting an unpalatable message across palatably." Earle is earnest about being funny: "Women have got this dreadfully boring image of being really PC and unfunny. I aim to be a female Woody Allen for the '90s."

She took a step down that route when Peter Richardson picked up Ready For Sex for his Comic Strip Presents slot on TV last year. Now Earle has made a sequel, Every Bride's Nightmare. A comedy set on the streets of London, where men -young, old, new and old- fashioned -at tempt to help the bride in question solve the problem of a period stain on her dress, the film once again taps "the wealth of unmined material, which it would never occur to men to make into a film."

Currently at work on two feature ideas, Earle has no intention of being slotled into the file marked women's film director. "I took my latest short to St Petersburg, where even a male White Russian producer said 1 was appealing to two audiences," she explains proudly. "Women because they recognise the situation and men because they are learning about women's lives."