How to humanise Howards End’s pompous bores
Apart from having given away in the trailer after episode one that one of the main characters was going to cark it, it’s hard to find fault with the BBC One’s new adaptation of Howards End. There will be some viewers, I imagine, who might find the argument at the heart of the series, and of the novel on which it’s based, a little highfalutin: is the great divide between intellectuals and men of affairs really a big thing in a world where the redesign of the emoji poo is headline news?
Anyway, the telling of the story so far has been immaculate, with Hayley Atwell and Matthew Macfadyen both terrific as Margaret Schlegel and Henry Wilcox. Last night, we were treated to some marvellously nuanced two-handers, through which both actors managed to make a forthcoming love affair between two people from camp chalk and camp cheese seem not just plausible but inevitable.
Writer Kenneth Lonergan and director Hettie Macdonald are also starting to make their presence felt, embellishing EM Forster’s story with a couple of exquisite scenes. I remember studying the novel and thinking that characters like Margaret and Helen Schlegel, with all of their pontificating on the poetry in life and the plight of the lower classes, could easily become pompous bores. But in this Howards End the actors have made them believable human beings and the writing breaks up the theorising with humour. There was, for example, a truly wonderful vignette all about cheese that had, as far as I could tell, very little to do with only connecting.
By far the highlight of this episode however was Alex Lawther as Tibby Schlegel. Tibby may be the most irritating character on television since Mr Blobby, but, like the pink-and-yellow character, I suspect his appeal may become cultish. Tibby is a man-boy who wafts around in his smoking jacket doing precisely nothing, except growing his fringe or complaining about errant bass notes in Beethoven or the indignities of his current head cold. The other characters find him infuriating too – I counted five separate “GO AWAY TIBBY!”S in this episode, a meme I would like to lay claim to right now. Ideally, we would have a 10-minute section at the end of each episode like they do with Blue Planet – Tibby’s Diaries – in which he can whinge, peeve and piddle about, sucking on his pipe and spouting Goethe to camera. And at a time when the BBC desperately needs a new sitcom? Well, I give you “Tibby!”, ready made and fully formed.
In the days following the Brexit vote last year, a team from the National Theatre interviewed people nationwide, aged nine to 97, to hear their views on their country. The poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy and director Rufus Norris embroidered these vox pops on to a play called My Country: a Work in Progress, and now that play has been retrofitted for BBC Two.
It began on Saturday with a bewildered, forlorn-looking Britannia, aka “Britney” played by Penny Layden in the feathered helmet familiar from so many 50p pieces, as she gathered together representatives of Cymru, the South West, Caledonia, the East Midlands and Northern Ireland. Her question, basically, was what the hell just happened. Each one of them then voiced words from the real-life interviews. This was intercut with politicians’ speeches from the time, which was supposed to offer a state of the nation tapestry of Brexit Britain.
Of course, the state of the nation was, and is, divided. Those who tuned in looking for BBC bias will have been disappointed, but if the teleplay had a message it was that Britain is in a pickle. Immigration, identity and inequality were all debated by means of different voices offering sharply different opinions. The arguments crescendoed time and again to the shoutiest of peaks, at which point Britney tended to roll her eyes and walk out. The aim, I think, of My Country was to show what disunity looks like – a point that can’t really be contentious given how close the Brexit vote was.
Whether an hour of disunity and dogma makes for good television is another matter, however. We already have Question Time. The prevailing mood of My Country, when it wasn’t anger, was one of exasperation, and that will have been felt by the viewer too – debate is all good and proper but where is all of this anger getting us? Indeed, screening My Country a year and a half on from the referendum was only a reminder that these arguments about what Britain is, isn’t, and should be haven’t moved on one iota.
Howards End ★★★★ My Country ★★