Life in Squares

We are probably not the best judges of this 3-part offering from BBC2, since Dan is reluctant to watch anything that neither makes him laugh nor worry in any way and Ali tends to feel suicidal even thinking about Virginia Woolf.  But we tried.

'Life in Squares' is a biopic about the bohemian lives of the so-called Bloomsbury Set, a  group of early 20th Century artists and writers whose illustrious members included the above-mentioned author of 'Orlando' et al (here played by Lydia Leonard), her sister Vanessa Bell (Phoebe Fox) and husband Clive (Sam Hoare), Lytton Strachey (Ed Birch), John Maynard Keynes (Edmund Kinglsey) and EM Forster.  No doubt they were a lively lot, but this managed to be mannered and turgid despite the numerous sex scenes with various combinations of lovers.  Part of the problem, we suppose, is that it represents a fast set from a much slower age.  What would have shocked and/or excited their contemporaries in pre-WWI England is mundane a century later, and other than a rather staid aunt (Eleanor Bron) there is no real context to show what the friends were rebelling against.  Corsets and marriage were the rather heavy-handed symbols of conformity that the Stephen sisters rejected, at least in part, and the script was hampered by references to everyone by name and their relationship to everyone else, so that we wouldn't confuse two men with, for example, similar moustaches.

By the end of the hour we left the Bells exploring an open marriage and the promiscuous Duncan Grant (James Norton) switching his affections from Strachey to Keynes, strangely interspersed with a scene of the older set (still painting and chatting in a garden) in the 1930s.  It painted a picture of gilded and indulgent types who daubed everything in sight in lurid colours, yet still managed to be miserable.  We think assertions that this will cause a flood of tourists in Bloomsbury a la Poldark in Cornwall are premature.

Lucan

Lucky Lord Lucan won over £20,000 in one night at the tables in Le Touquet, in the days when you could easily buy a couple of 3-bed semis for that sum.  Had he also been Logical Lord Lucan he would have walked away and never entered any place of gambling again.  He was, however, a gambling addict, a bored husband and, by Jeff Pope's account (based on John Pearson's book 'The Gamblers') a bit of a waste of space.  In short, if you think the British aristocracy are, or even were, a bunch of loveable eccentrics, or bores a la 'Downton Abbey', then you won't enjoy ITV's dramatization of this case, arguably of Britain's most famous missing criminal.

John Bingham, Earl Lucan (Rory Kinnear, superb) is a deeply unhappy 'professional gambler' who spends his time at the tables of John Aspinall's Clermont Club in Berkeley Square.  To most of us under 50, Aspinall is synonymous with zoo-keeping, which is ironic considering his belief in animal instincts and his wilful interpretation of Darwinian theory.  Here played by a cast-against-type Christopher Eccleston, his chief assets in life are his easy-seeming charm and his hosting abilities, which he uses to lure the scion of England's landed families into gambling away their inheritances.  Along with his waning wealth, Lucan is tired of his marriage to Veronica (Catherine McCormack, whom we don't see enough of these days) but determined not to lose custody of his children.  Unfortunately for him, he confides in Aspers, who advises using any means necessary to get what he wants.  When Lucan's original plan to accuse his wife of insanity backfires, his pathetic self-pity turns to anger for which the children's nanny, Sandra Rivett (Leanne Best) will ultimately pay.

Lady Lucan and the children are very much alive (and unsurprisingly did not collaborate in the making of the drama) but Lucan's disappearance after that November night in 1974 has made him into an enigma.  Unproven sightings are many and varied, as are claims that he is definitely dead, and next week's conclusion to this re-telling may not convince us either way, but this is a very watchable, well-cast and acted production.  It's a shame that the subject matter leaves a sour taste in the mouth.  No doubt the idea wasn't to glamorise people who were only extraordinary for their (largely unearned) wealth and possibly their viciousness, but there's no satisfaction in realising that who and not what you know is still the way things work, and that there is still a sense of entitlement from those at the top, with a widening gap between them and those at the bottom.