So that’s what happened to Downton’s cut scenes!
The Gilded Age
Sky Atlantic, Tuesday/NOW TV
The Responder
BBC1, Monday/Tuesday
Jay Blades – Learning To Read At 51
BBC1, Wednesday
The problem with period dramas is that, at least in the first episode, they have to tell you all about the period. Thus it proved with HBO/Sky Atlantic’s The Gilded Age, the lavish new history lesson – sorry, drama – about New York in the late 19th Century. Much trumpeted, it arrives from the pen of Julian Fellowes or, perhaps a little more likely, from the ‘Deleted Scenes From Downton Abbey’ folder on his desktop computer. Many of the tropes from his earlier smash hit have sailed across the Atlantic, but seem to have become a little seasick en route. As always, the downstairs staff (sadly including a racist Irish parlour girl) sit around and moan about the lot upstairs, their barbs and observations kept in check only by lickspittle butlers who mutter cautions such as ‘it is not for us to question’.
This is not Upstairs Downstairs Stateside though, because there is a sort of mezzanine in between, too. The Gilded Age is set in 1882, a time when the United States was becoming the greatest industrial power in the world and there were fortunes to be made in steel and railways and finance. Brash robber barons were in the ascendancy, grinding down the Old Money tycoons who were no match for their guile and ruthlessness. When one existing railroad owner refuses twice to sell a valuable strip of track that would link two new routes, arriviste George Russell (Morgan Spector) decides to lay his own track alongside.
‘Why would you waste a fortune when you could buy my railroad?’ his victim asks.
‘Because the message will get round that no one refuses me twice, so I’ll save a fortune in the long run,’ is the logic.
George and his social climbing wife Bertha (the wonderful Carrie Coon) have just moved into their new mansion designed by Stanford ‘isn’t he the greatest architect in New York?’.
The city still is something of a village, with sheep grazing in Central Park, and the newcomers are viewed with suspicion and distaste by the descendants of Manhattan’s New Amsterdam Dutch settlers.
Chief among them is Agnes van
Rhijn, played by the usually dependable Christine Baranski as a dime store version of Maggie Smith’s Violet Bracknell, all withering quips about the lower orders and their pretensions. Throw in the arrival of Agnes’s niece Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson, a carbon
copy of her mother Meryl Streep), who conveniently has feet in both worlds, and we have the go-between we need to stoke tension between new and old. When it arrives, it will be welcome, and maybe drama will unfold. For now, I just feel like I’ve been to the School for Snobbery all over again.
At the completely diametric end of the scale was BBC1’s The Responder, with Martin Freeman as former detective Chris Carson now demoted to constable in Liverpool. We don’t yet know what transgression led to this, but we do know he is in therapy, and has a lot of issues to work through. His childhood friend, psychopathic drug dealer Carl Sweeney (Ian Hart, clearly having great fun playing deranged) needs Chris’s help to track down Casey (Emily Fairn), who has stolen heroin.
Chris does find her, twice, and I was settling in for yet another White Knight tale, with a middleaged man finding redemption for his own sins by saving the life of a young, vulnerable woman. At the end of this week’s second episode, though, things took a turn. Chris also found the drugs and now has them in his house. Will he turn them in – or sell them himself? I was lukewarm on the first episode, but the second was riveting, and Freeman, who plays Chris like an IED about to explode at any second, is magnificent.
Finally, a year ago, if Jay Blades of The Repair Shop happened to come across this column, he would not have been able to read it. He is one of millions of people in the UK, with those figures surely proportionally reflected here, who had reached the age of 50 without basic literacy skills. Only when he was 31 was he finally diagnosed dyslexic and now, just before his daughter turns 16, he has an ambition – to read a story to her while she technically is in the last days of childhood.
How he set about it was detailed in Learning To Read At 51, also on BBC1, and while his approach to the challenge was compelling, what was even more so was an ancillary message; children like Jay were streamed into classes on the assumption they never would amount to much, and many, deprived of the basic right to education, turned instead to crime. Illiteracy rates are much higher in the prison community than in the wider world. His personal achievement, when he got to read that story, was heart-warming, but the underlying message, that children still are being abandoned to circumstances that easily could be improved, was chilling.
The Gilded Age
It’s like I’ve been to the School for Snobbery all over again