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I lost myself completely in this tale of love, death and the ravages of war
LIFE AFTER LIFE TUESDAY, BBC2
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To my great shame I have never read Kate Atkinson’s award-winning 2013 novel Life After Life. I remember people raving, but for some reason the premise – the story of an upper-middle-class girl growing up between the wars told via a series of different timelines – somehow didn’t appeal to me. How wrong I was.
BBC2’S adaptation, starring Thomasin Mckenzie in the lead role of Ursula Todd, Sian Clifford as her mother Sylvie (remember the annoying older sister in Fleabag?) and a supporting cast of admirable talent, young and old, is really quite magical. It’s the quintessential literary TV adaptation, really, the kind of thing the BBC still does so very well, and I confess I was mesmerised from the start.
It is 1910, and a baby girl, Ursula, is stillborn. Rewind, and the doctor
I didn’t think I was going to like Chivalry (Thursday, Ch4), mostly because it stars Steve Coogan; but once again I was proved wrong. Co-starring Sarah Solemani (who also wrote it alongside Coogan), it’s a witty, fast-paced and very clever pillory of the movie industry. Coogan essentially plays himself, an unreconstructed middle-aged white film producer adrift in a sea of wokery, Solemani is the avenging feminist director, and there’s a supporting cast of scumbags and divas (including Sienna Miller as the kind of actress who makes Joan Collins look shy). It’s cynical, funny and self-aware – warning, though: it’s very sweary. All4 arrives on time to save her. She survives into childhood – only to drown on a trip to the seaside. In another iteration, she is rescued from the waves by an eagle-eyed bystander, who spots her where her mother, preoccupied with her baby brother, does not.
In yet another scenario she dies after falling from a window-ledge trying to save a treasured toy tossed there by her brother; then again, she survives after the maid walks in on her, only to succumb not long after to the Spanish flu, brought home by that very same maid after a night out in London celebrating the end of the war.
On and on it goes, in a dreamy, melancholic loop of sun-drenched English summer afternoons and snowy winter evenings, adorable children in pinafores and tragic young men in uniform. It’s rich with febrile visions and quiet tragedies, each alternative time
line folding in on itself to reveal another, the twists and turns of the family’s life ebbing and flowing like the tide.
You never quite know what is going on, but it really doesn’t matter: the whole thing is so captivating, and incredibly beautiful
to watch. It’s like an old photo album found in the attic, or a cache of faded love letters bound in an old piece of string: full of ghosts and bittersweet emotions, intangible and hard to reach yet rich with meaning.
It’s hard to tear your eyes away
from it – or at least I couldn’t. I was spellbound by the endless plot twists, but also transported by the visuals and the fine acting. James Mcardle is great as the benign but ineffectual father-figure; Clifford delivers a simmering performance as the mother; Jessica Brown Findlay (Lady Sybil in Downton Abbey) is a star turn as Aunt Izzy from episode two onwards.
And the parallels between now and then – the war in Europe, a deadly pandemic – added an extra dimension. That’s partly why the show is so successful: it has a supernatural premise, and yet the fundamentals – love, loss, the ravages of war, the randomness of death – are eternally relevant, universal to us all. It’s been a long time since I’ve lost myself in something so completely.
It’s like a cache of faded loveletters,full of bittersweet emotions