Howards End is ravishing, it’s just a pity we can barely hear a word
HOWARDS End (BBC1) looks so sumptuous that it would be wonderful even without dialogue, the sound muted, to be relished as an abstract cascade of scenery.
The second episode opened with a truly spectacular shot of mourners walking in line across a frozen field. The landscape was sketched around them in white and black lines.
Other beautiful images unfolded: soft light reflecting off the carved wood at the country house of the title, reflections of Wedgwood blue china in the burnished silver tea- sets, horse carriages in the leaf-strewn streets of Bloomsbury. It’s all ravishing.
Unfortunately, for many viewers, watching with the sound down and the subtitles on is the only way to enjoy Howards End, because the background music frequently overwhelms the actors.
Some televisions cope better than others with the burgeoning piano and strings. Wouldn’t it be marvellous if TV remotes came with extra volume controls, allowing us to turn up the dialogue while muffling the music?
Nothing can stop us from admiring the costumes. Rather than fitting out sisters Margaret and Helen Schlegel (Hayley Atwell and Philippa Coulthard) in an everchanging array of Edwardian finery, this production appreciates that the young women are not well-off.
Margaret has only one coat and Helen only one hat. But what a coat — festooned from shoulders to ankles with saucer- like buttons. And what a hat — a voluminous red beret that looks like someone has knitted a cosy for a hot air balloon.
That someone was probably dotty Aunt Juley, played with bewildered eccentricity by Tracey Ullman. Let’s hope we see her in more dramatic roles soon.
Middle-aged comics can make outstanding character actors — look at Adrian Edmondson, whose career has surged since he was absent-minded Count Rostov in War And Peace last year. Now he’s doing Twelfth Night with the RSC.
There’s more joy to be had in the social customs of a bygone era. It’s fascinating to think that, almost within living memory, an unmarried woman could not lunch with a gentleman without a chaperone, for decency’s sake.
Other things haven’t changed. Tibby (Alex Lawther), the affected Oxford student, was parading his virtuous politics as he berated his sisters for not caring enough about the plight of rubber plantation workers in Africa. He was toasting muffins and smoking a pipe in his dressing-gown at the same time. If only he’d been born 100 years later, Tibby would have loved Glastonbury.
Tibby’s generation, of course, were plunged instead into the unimaginable slaughter of World War 1. Guy Martin explored one aspect of the horror in WW1 Tank (C4), as he set about building a replica of a 30-ton Mk1, the ‘Big Willie’ — built to roll over trenches and barbed wire, and break the deadlock in Flanders.
Grease monkey Guy is no historian. All he wants to do is get on with the engineering. But the facts broke through regardless. The name ‘tank’, he discovered, was a piece of subterfuge — designed to fool the Germans into thinking these machines were armoured water carriers.
Inside, it was too loud to think, let alone talk. Crews communicated by hand signals and were sometimes overwhelmed by carbon monoxide fumes.
But the tanks were too successful for their own good. At Cambrai in 1917, they crashed five miles behind enemy lines on the first day — and were stranded at the mercy of enemy artillery.
This two-hour documentary should have been split into a pair of episodes, but it was Martin’s best to date.