The Go-Between

The past is a foreign country: they made things differently then.  The 1971 adaptation by Joseph Losey starred three stalwarts of British cinema in Alan Bates, Edward Fox, and Julie Christie as the luminous Marion.  The three instantly-recognisable stars and Losey's distinctive style somewhat swamped the novel's close adherence to Leo, the boy at the centre of the story.  Ben Batt, Stephen Campbell-Moore and Joanna Vanderham as farmer Ted Burgess, Viscount Hugh Trimmingham and Marion Maudsley are, while not unknown, easier to accept as people whose lives swim in and out of the focus of a twelve-year-old boy.

This is the third in the short series of 20th Century classics adapted by the BBC and to our minds the most successful so far.  It hasn't the controversial baggage of 'Lady Chatterley' nor the stage bound setting of 'An Inspector Calls', just a first line that (unlike the current shenanigans with Hamlet's monologue on the London stage) belongs in the opening scene.  Nuanced performances from Lesley Manville as Mrs. Maudsley and Campbell-Moore as the facially scarred Trimmingham keep the novel's fine balance of ambiguity and acuity as young Leo (Jack Hollington) is dropped deep into the maelstrom of adult love, class and propriety, never to be the same again.

Much has been made of the scheduling opposite the opener of the final series of 'Downton Abbey', but they are surely not fighting for the same audience.  That's cod roe, and this is caviar.

Banished

Considering how few dramas are set in penal colonies, compared to, say, cop and doc shows, this felt unsettlingly familiar.  Convict James Freeman (Russell Tovey) sticks up for Anne Meredith (Orla Brady) when a nasty blacksmith steals her food.  Being a classic bully, the blacksmith promptly returns the woman's food and takes Freeman's, delivering a brutal assault as he does so, and sneering that Freeman will never eat again.  No-one helps out the hungry man, not even his friend Tommy Barrett (Julian Rhind-Tutt), who has trouble of his own in the form of Elizabeth Quinn (MyAnna Buring).  She has been caught paying him a nocturnal visit and when she refuses to name her lover, is given 25 lashes.  The lovers wish to marry but have living spouses back in England, and when Barrett refuses to live without her it looks like tragedy will ensue.

Timberlake Wertenbaker got there first, and crafted a curious, lyrical and often brutal tale of unfortunates shipped off to a barren land as punishment.  This is very much McGovern's take on proceedings, and while he's an old hand at old lags, he's had most success with contemporary tales, and his decorously begrimed actors betray their well-fed 21st Century origins with almost every line.  As you'd expect, the main characters are noble, have honour, feel love, and fight a gutsy battle with tyranny and their straightened circumstances.  Barrett even claims he is innocent.  Meanwhile the soldiers and the clergy protect the blacksmith because they need his tools; the soldiers use the women prisoners for sex with impunity, and state that a dead convict is just one less mouth to feed, that scum and whores shouldn't breed etc.

It's entertaining enough, but has found a strange berth at BBC2.  The first of seven episodes had a histrionic climax and a sudden happy ending, leading us to think that the remaining six will tackle a familiar issue each week: rebellion, disease, pregnancy, unlikely friendships, the ever-present threat of death.  No doubt McGovern has done his research, and there are contemporary accounts to supplement any histories with authentic voices, but to his viewers the past is less a foreign country than an all-too-familiar landscape.

Dancing on the Edge

The trouble with Poliakoff dramas these days is that they're so over-hyped as 'Event Television' that they're almost bound to disappoint.  'Friends and Crocodiles', 'Joe's Palace', 'Gideon's Daughter' and 'Capturing Mary' blend into one mannered, pretentious and seemingly pointless mess which wasted hours of our lives.  Like many established talents, Poliakoff attracts starry names and seemingly no editors with the gumption to question the great man's decisions.

There are recurring obsessions in the recent work: the war, the aristocracy vs new money, photographs, secret pasts, shadowy and reclusive millionaires, the chaos and clashes of the 20th Century and a great slab of a house which often seems to put in an appearance (Mr P's own perhaps?).  It looks like most if not all of these themes will turn up in 'Dancing on the Edge', a tale of a black jazz band, a jobbing music journalist and some English gentry in a very stylish and stylised 1930s London and Home Counties.  The romances are signposted, the cliches are present and correct (the very last singer to audition blows them away...!  A Prince takes a shine to the band at a garden party!)  Of-course it all looks sumptuous, with everyone and almost everything looking glamorous and polished - if not always quite authentically 1930s - and the cast are good enough to beg forgiveness for the funereal pace, even if Joanna Vanderham doesn't quite convince as sophisticated socialite Pamela and some of the band's American accents are shaky.  Janet Montgomery, as the contrasting brunette Sarah, is meant to be bohemian but isn't very, and incidentally bears a striking resemblance to Poliakoff's last muse, Ruth Wilson. 

It's not bad overall (the going-nowhere-on-a-train interlude and the histrionics by a band member in an upmarket hotel excepted) but... we're reminded of what David Hare said about Bertolucci's epic 'The Last Emperor': "no-one says a single interesting thing."  What do you know, but the idle, decadent rich were rather liberal in their last hurrah, and paved the way for acceptance of black musicians this side of the pond!  And there were we thinking that Duke Ellington had gone down a storm with the everyday folk as well as the Windsors at the Palladium in 1933.  It's not subtle, and people ruminate endlessly as they do in all Poliakoff dramas.  "One never knows what goes on in people's private lives, does one?" etc.  This is said about John Goodman's reclusive Croesus, Mr Masterson, who has trashed a luxury suite and assaulted a young woman.

It's difficult to know whether there will be a worthwhile payoff.  'Shooting the Past' delivered, as did 'Perfect Strangers', 'She's Been Away' and the superb 'Caught on a Train', but the most recent of these was over a decade ago.  The opening scene shows musician Louis (Chiwetel Ejiofor) appearing caped and hatted out of the shadows like an extra from 'Ripper Street', on the run and calling on his music journalist friend Stanley (Matthew Goode).  The action then slips back 18 months.  We hope the next 4 hours aren't wasted.

The Paradise

Prepare to suspend disbelief.  Emile Zola wrote 'Lark Rise to Candleford'.  If you don't believe it, you'll have to forget that Zola wrote the novel that 'The Paradise' is based on, because Bill Gallagher wrote both and the similarities far outnumber the differences.  Even the casts have names in common.  We are sure that this wasn't given a Sunday scheduling because 'Lark Rise...' fans would get confused.

Now don't get us wrong, one half of us quite liked the story of Laura Timmins and co. as comforting Sunday night fayre, and this is shaping up nicely to be equally camp and clunking.  Young Denise (Joanna Vanderham) fetches up from an erstwhile Lark Rise, arriving doe-eyed and clueless in a bigger, brighter version of Candleford's haberdashery store, which happens to be run by a handsome devil with dimples and a moustache which ought to twirl.  She may be naive, but by golly she's a natural!

If you don't know what happens next, you need to stay in more.  There's lots of frills, gossip, and snobbery, and so far no-one except Denise is better than they ought to be.  Forget Zola, or you'll be in trouble.  Think 'Lark Rise...' with a dash of 'Downton' and smidgens of what you've heard about the origins of Selfridges, Liberty, Whiteley's, Swan and Edgar and Fortnum.  Can't see this winning Emmys, or winning a new audience for heaving corsets, but it adds a warm hazy glow to autumn evenings.