I’d swear by the book... but not this BBC mess
The Pursuit Of Love
BBC1, Sunday
Holy F*** RTÉ One, Sunday
The BRIT Awards 2021
UTV/Virgin Two, Tuesday
First off, an apology. Last week here, I recommended you watch the BBC1 adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit Of Love. I read it many years ago, and its sequel Love In A Cold Climate, and enjoyed them immensely, largely because of Mitford’s wonderful self-awareness about the absurdity of the British aristocracy. Well, sadly, I also took my own advice and tuned in, and what a lamentable mess it was. The book opens in the 1920s and is narrated by Fanny Logan, but it really is about her first cousin Linda. When we first meet them in the series, they are supposed to be teenagers, but this proved to be the first monumental leap of imagination required of us. Emily Beecham plays Fanny and is 36 in real life, while Lily James, playing Linda, is 32. Ingenues they are not and neither proved able to convince us that they were.
There is much comic mileage in the book before it turns a great deal darker, and most of it comes in the form of Lord Alconleigh, Linda’s father. Matthew loathes foreigners, keeps an instrument over the fire which he claims he used to bludgeon eight Germans to death in the First World War, and believes girls never should be educated at all. There is a way to play a caricatured character like Matthew without going over the top, but Dominic West is half way up Everest, and bellowing like a bull who had a bad day in Pamplona.
Andrew Scott plays Alconleigh’s neighbour, Lord Merlin (delivering his lines with that now over-familiar air of ennui), an aesthete who arrives to a stuffy party with a troupe of dancers and promptly performs a bizarre dance himself, to Dandy Of The Underworld by T Rex. Modern music often can work as a counterpoint to the stuffiness of the era depicted, but it takes a much bigger dollop of camp, à la Baz Luhrmann and Moulin Rouge, to do it convincingly. In the hands of writer/director Emily Mortimer, who also stars at Fanny’s mother, it simply didn’t work at all.
Nor did freeze frames underscored by lettering introducing us to all the characters by name. Honestly, it was a mess. Narrated series can be spellbinding – I’m thinking of Brideshead Revisited all those years ago – but the trick is to narrate as little as possible and let dialogue and drama do the rest. That wasn’t the case and here and the lingering feeling was not of having watched a coherent drama, but rather having listened to an audiobook with a few pretty pictures thrown in. All in all, a major disappointment.
Much more fun was Holy F*** on RTÉ One. Hosted by Ardal O’Hanlon, it was a semi-scientific look at why we Irish are so fond of swearing, and how the likes of ‘feck’ is acceptable but it’s big brother less so. Bravely, it went all the way to more taboo words, and I suspect it had thousands wincing on their sofas. Dr Emma Byrne, author of Swearing Is Good For You, posited that it offers a happy release from frustration, but there’s nothing particularly epiphanically pleasurable about the use of the F word as noun, adjective or verb, just an occasionally delightful punch of emphasis that makes the mundane glitter. As Billy Connolly once memorably noted, you could read every book in the world and never stumble across a sentence that read: ‘Eff off,’ he hinted.
There actually is research, though, that shows people who curse a lot are more intelligent, and I went to bed happy in the knowledge this makes me a virtual Einstein.
There was no need for cursing at this year’s BRIT Awards, but Scottish singer Lewis Capaldi, clearly enjoying all the hospitality that went with his first night out for months, went there anyway. I have little idea what he said because, despite it being over an hour past the watershed, ITV decided to blur out maybe two-thirds of his speech.
Much more eloquent were winners Little Mix and Dua Lipa, who between them called out sexism in the music industry (in 42 years of the awards, the former were the first women to win the award for Best Group, astonishing when you think of everyone from Bananarama to The Spice Girls to Girls Aloud) and advocated pay rises for the 4,000 key workers who made up the audience at London’s O2 Arena.
As for the award for Best Solo Male, there were five nominees, none of whom I ever had heard of, which is as sure a sign as any of creeping old age. The staging highlight was a version of Pet Shop Boys’ It’s A Sin, with Elton John on piano accompanying Olly Alexander of Years & Years, who starred in the recent Channel 4 drama of the same name that chronicled the early days of the HIV epidemic.
It’s sad to note, but while Tom Jones’s vocal chords are as fine as ever, Elton’s are shot. It wasn’t quite as bad as his ‘I’m dill danding’ performance in a charity telethon last year, but the power is gone. Pity.
The stars of the show, though, really were the audience. It was a pure pleasure to see people at a gig again, and hopefully one not to be denied to all of us for too much longer. Personally, I can’t effing wait.