WATCH OUT! Here comes trouble

Lily James and Emily Beecham look for love in this rip-roaring comic drama

THE PURSUIT OF LOVE Tonight, BBC1, 9pm

They got the rumour mill working overtime when they were spotted getting very cosy together last year on a trip to Rome. Now Lily James and Dominic West demand your attention once more but for a very different reason, as they share the screen in a new threepart adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s comic novel.

This dazzling, unpredictable tale of dysfunctional families, sex and romance is set amid the upper classes from the 1920s to the Second World War, revealing a darker, more cynical side to the high society depicted in Downton Abbey, in which James (above, with Emily Beecham) played the giddy Lady Rose.

Here she stars as Linda Radlett, an equally headstrong character, pithily summed up by the narrator’s description: ‘Her emotions were on no ordinary plane. She loved or she loathed. She laughed or she cried. She lived in a world of superlatives.’

As we meet Linda she’s a young girl trapped under the roof of the sprawling country home ruled over by her tyrannical and incomparably intolerant father, Matthew (West, inset), who holds no truck with most of the modern world – anything from women’s education to Germans – and is happiest hunting foxes and honing his skill with a horse-whip.

As Linda longs for freedom and the adventures of adulthood, she finds company and a fellow soul in her cousin Fanny (Beecham), and together their pursuit of love will take them on a mad gadabout through debutante balls and Oxford undergraduate parties before their lives are eventually enveloped in the shadow of war.

A richly memorable roll-call of characters includes the swooningly handsome banking heir Tony Kroesig (Freddie Fox) and the daringly eccentric patron of the arts Lord Merlin (Andrew Scott, oozing effortless charisma). And then there’s Fanny’s ludicrously irresponsible mother, known to all as the ‘Bolter’ for her incurable habit of abandoning her men, played with gleeful relish by Emily Mortimer, who also writes and directs.

Perhaps taking her cue from Baz Luhrmann’s rip-roaring Moulin Rouge!, Mortimer refuses to be constrained by the staid conventions of period drama. Instead, the production pulsates with verve, invention and fastpaced visual gags, while the soundtrack freewheels between the music of the time and modern pop and rock.

The merrily mischievous Mitford would surely have approved.