Mr Selfridge unleashes his mad hatters in the duel with Downton
Asuccessful salesman can always sniff out a gap in the market, and Harry selfridge has found a doozie: ladies’ millinery, or extravagant, exotic and fanciful bonnetry. In short — hats.
Downton Abbey rarely bothers much with hats. The Dowager countess usually wears some faded silk relic or other from her Victorian youth, but you can see her granddaughters wrinkling their noses at the reek of mothballs.
And it’s plain to tell what lady Mary thinks of her own headgear from the way she announced, in a recent episode: ‘I’m going upstairs to take off my hat!’ she said it like she was going to scrape something off her shoe.
Mr Selfridge ( ITV) has been searching for an advantage over Downton, its costume drama rival in the era after World War I.
As the new series opened, Zoe Wanamaker arrived wearing that advantage on her head . . . a magnificent turquoise dome, flanked by swooping blue wings.
If this hat hadn’t been held in place by pins like knitting needles, it would have lifted off her head and flapped up into the rafters. It probably lived not in a hatbox but in a cage, with a mirror and a cuttlefish.
And there were other hats, even more splendiferous. Mr selfridge’s daughter Rosalie, who was being married off to a Russian playboy, wore one that looked like sydney Opera House to her wedding breakfast.
And Zoe, as the Russian’s aristo- cratic mother Princess Marie, outdid herself with a furry black pillbox sprouting an enormous feather, so that it appeared as if she was wearing an inkwell with a quill pen in it.
The Princess had an accent as outrageous as her dress sense. Hurling herself into guests like a pinball at the wedding reception, Her Royal Highness purred, ‘I lahhrve parrties!’
But no accent could outdo the Gallic growl of Henri leclair, a man so french he makes charles Aznavour sound like George formby. Henri was back from the war to sweep shopgirl Agnes Towler off her feet and ravish her on a picnic rug — though he did marry her first, which doesn’t seem terribly french.
The horrors of the trenches had left poor Henri with a terror of the dark. In the gloom below-stairs, he imagined he saw the bloody corpses of his Army pals. let’s hope he doesn’t wander onto the candlelit set of Wolf Hall by mistake, or he’ll be having nightmares for months.
sarah lancashire, as bereaved head teacher caroline in Last Tango
In Halifax (BBc1), has been seeing ghosts, too. for the past couple of episodes she has been talking to her dead wife Kate (Nina sosanya), who was run over and killed the day after their wedding. What with fatal accidents, one-night stands and a drunk- driving Mary Poppins, there has been no lack of incident in this series of last Tango.
caroline’s phantom conversations could add to the mad melodrama of it all, but in fact they have become moments of calm, tethering the story to reality.
Writer sally Wainwright’s script evoked the banality of grief, as caroline and Kate bickered about what to name their baby and whether to hire a nanny — discussions they should have been able to have in real life. for all the blazing dramas in this story, it’s these details that ring most true.
It’s the same with the comedy. Wainwright was trying too hard at the start of the episode, when caroline’s teenage son and his schoolmate tried to re- enact a scene from the cult gangster movie Pulp fiction. It was wincingly unfunny.
But a throw-away scene made me laugh out loud minutes later, when caroline rushed to a police station to collect her daughter (after the boozy nanny had been arrested) and found three fraught coppers trying to stop the baby from bawling.
What becomes more evident by the week is that Wainwright really doesn’t think much of middleaged men. caroline’s ex, John, has always been a wino and a wally, and now we’ve got Rupert Graves as millionaire Gary, who needs to be constantly reassured that he’s wonderful.
should we blokes feel insulted? You know the saying . . . if the hat fits, wear it.