Beautifully choreographed wartime soap a real treat
AN unexpected new highlight of the week’s viewing – not to mention a refuge from the harrowing, edgier new shows like Ray Donovan and The Walking Dead – is Australian historical drama A Place to Call Home (Sundays, TV One).
And that’s despite a distinct Thorn Birds overtone to the story. Amazingly, this was never a big, fat girly novel of moreish melodrama by Colleen McCullough. It was devised for TV by the creator of Packed to the Rafters, Bevan Lee, set picturesquely just after World War II.
He really knows how to make a story worm its way in, despite the stoutest viewer resistance.
Our new heroine is Sarah, your classic, noble, mysterious and feisty young woman such stories depend on. She’s a nurse, working her passage home to Australia from years in Europe. She meets and treats the Blighs, a wealthy pastoral farming family also voyaging home after a Grand Tour. One night she intercepts the deeply depressed young Bligh heir, newly married James, about to fling himself overboard, and invokes the old cliche – there’s no Nothing Trivial, TV One Is the romance between Mac and Catherine heading for the rocks is tonight’s unanswerable question, in this engaging local series about the ups and downs of a pub quiz team. surer way to make an enemy than to render someone a service.
Family matriarch Elizabeth, who alone knows that James’s suicide bid is tied to a break-up with his male lover, insists Sarah say nothing to the rest of the family about the incident. Elizabeth is furious that the other Blighs, specially her lovely widowed son George, have grown fond of Sarah, and incandescent when Sarah agrees to George’s offer to fix her up with a job at the Blighs’ local hospital.
But the story’s main arc, Elizabeth’s repeated attempts to drive Sarah out of town, is almost incidental to the series’s other theme – social change and people’s desperate efforts to pretend it isn’t happening.
It’s the old bittersweet tide of history. As a result of the war, some of Australia’s social glue had begun to come unstuck for the better: class distinction, cultural obeisance to Britain, the shunning of minorities, attitudes to single, independent women, even sexuality.
All of these issues are explored in the manner of a beautifully choreographed soap opera.
The show’s also stunning to look at, from the New Look full skirts and little cardies, to the bright Aussie landscape, curiously still over-decorated with pretty English affectations like manor houses and cottage perennial gardens, but unable to hide its authentic self: utility buildings, red dust, shady verandas and rough roads.
It’s a major treat.