Television Roger Lewis
Wilkie Collins will be responsible for the clumsy and protracted narrative of The Woman in White. Spooky stately homes with epicene Charles Dance in the shadows; wet girls abducted and locked in asylums; other damp lasses wandering foggy graveyards in a Laura Ashley frock; false funerals; concealed identities; peculiar Italians named Fosco.
As so very often with Victorian novels, the plot revolved around marriage laws and the conundrums of inheritance – so the most terrifying revelation or crime is that of bastardy, as then nothing can come your way. There is no such thing as love in such a society; only property.
Unfortunately, Collins’s melodrama was wrenched out of its socket to fit today’s accusatory and self-pitying preoccupations and perspectives, ie masculine wickedness. Sir Percival Glyde was basically Harvey Weinstein.
‘How is it that men crush women time and again and go unpunished?’ wailed Jessie Buckley’s Marian, whom God had hit with the ugly stick. ‘If men were held accountable they’d hang every hour of the day, every day of the year.’ Right on, sister!
Contemporary pieties, which give shrill voice to disappointed and bitter women, were also animating The Split, which was about a thoroughly horrible bunch of divorce lawyers.
‘Divorce shouldn’t be easy,’ opined Deborah Findlay. ‘It’s there to remind you that however bad it is in that godawful state called marriage, getting out of it will be an even greater hell.’
It is always useful to have this spelt out – and the way men are chiefly punished is through the wallet. The solicitors and barristers specialising in ‘family law’ lived here in expensive homes and wore flashy clothes, everything funded by exploiting and aggravating human unhappiness. ‘Cut the tweets and we might get him his Wednesdays back,’ said one character, advising her client, a stand-up comic, on a custody battle.
What a deplorable, cold-hearted profession. Nicola Walker, last seen on our screens as a lesbian vicar, marched about her glass office being mean and withering. In every scene she clutched a cardboard coffee cup – why do people do that? In this soapy series, written by Abi Morgan, there was no evidence of decency, sanity or fineness. The philosophy was ‘In life, men will come and go. The only relationship really worth having is the one you have with yourself’.
What children must quickly work out in the modern world is that the adults in it are not worth emulating. All they do is compromise what Henry James called the ‘futurity of youth’.
This may almost be the theme of the tremendous series I found on Netflix, called The End of the F***ing World. (Asterisks in original. I am not being prudish for my Eastbourne readers.) It was a kind of macabre road trip – exploding cars, stabbings, theft. The two characters, played by Jessica Barden and the magnificent Alex Lawther, who possesses the pale, tragic face of Alec Guinness, learn that you can’t in the end keep blaming yourself.
Given your background and upbringing – which may involve suicides, depression, cruel step-parents and
indifferent and absent biological parents – actually you’ve coped pretty well, perfecting a defensive panic. The programme was shot on the Isle of Sheppey, a place as bleak as the Baltic.
Another show I found (on iplayer) and thought brilliant was Keeping Faith, which was never broadcast on a proper channel, only BBC Wales. All about a Carmarthen solicitor whose husband goes missing, the eight episodes had a style and verve that kept me gripped. Kicking off her shoes and letting rip, Eve Myles gave the blistering performance of a lifetime. The courtroom scene, where she is threatened with the removal of her children by the social services gestapo, was so powerful I was blasted off my sofa.
Eiry Thomas, as the creepy detective inspector, must be one of the sourest, nastiest women characters on our screens since the death of Agnes Moorehead. The music by Amy Wadge was uplifting and soulful, the scenery unfeasibly unrainy, and though the story (gangsters, corrupt cops) stretched credulity, here was telly at its best.