Sun, sex and a pelican on the loose? The cheerful lunacy of The Durrells
Lasagne, followed by chocolate cake and ice cream — who can resist a mouthwatering mountain of comfort food, even if it does make us fat?
Comfort viewing is just the same. a double bill of The Durrells (ITV) followed by The good Karma Hospital is irresistible, and never mind if it turns us into a nation of sunday evening couch potatoes.
The sunny, silly adaptation of gerald Durrell’s memoir, My Family and Other animals, returned for a third series with nothing altered from the original recipe.
Louisa ( Keeley Hawes) was worrying herself to distraction over her children, devoting most anxiety to the older ones so that young gerry and his menagerie were left happily to their own devices.
novelist Larry (Josh O’Connor) was as much the sardonic hypochondriac as ever. airbrained Margo (Daisy Waterstone) had some mad notion about carving sculptures from soap, and their eccentric, wealthy aunt Hermione (Barbara Flynn) was coming to stay, as always.
Younger brother Leslie (Callum Woodhouse) was the centre of attention, as his love life careered out of control. In this greek island idyll, someone’s erotic entanglements are always getting knotted — either Louisa is in love with a
CHILDHOOD FUN OF THE WEEKEND: For the past two years we’ve been watching Dick and Angel Strawbridge renovate their French castle in Escape To The Chateau (C4). But the joy of the new series is seeing their young family play. C’est formidable.
gay Viking, or Larry’s mistress is threatening to stab him, or Margo is planning to elope with a notvery-orthodox Orthodox Monk.
Meanwhile, the pelican has got loose, the otters are breeding, there’s a bat in the out-house, the goat won’t give milk . . . and that’s before the island’s stock characters, bookish Theo and rascally spiros, get a look-in.
But though this cheerfully lunatic fantasy world adheres strictly to its own rules, it would be quite wrong to accuse The Durrells of following a formula. The characters are too richly drawn for that.
amid the farce and the romantic slapstick, there lurk some acute observations. Doctor’s wife Florence (Lucy Black) has been desperate for a baby since the show began. now she’s a mother, she doesn’t know what to do with herself.
Unable to sleep, she dreads her infant’s cries, and sobs uncontrollably when she holds him. Today we’d call it post-natal depression, but on Corfu in the Thirties it was simply ‘real life’.
The Good Karma Hospital (ITV) lacks that same ring of truth, but still leaves us warm and satisfied. It’s an oldfashioned tale of love on the wards, set in a ramshackle Indian medical centre.
The genre is as old as telly itself: it used to be called ‘doctors and nurses’, though today that concept is so sexist, it’s practically a hate crime. nurses? Perish the thought, ladies.
Our heroine Ruby (amrita acharia) is a fully fledged doctor, and is her boss Dr Lydia (amanda Redman). so too, of course, is the love interest — sullen, smouldering Dr gabriel Varma (James Krishna Floyd), brilliant but arrogant. Ruby and gabriel have argued so often and so angrily that they can barely stand to look at each other. Yet fate decrees that they must work side by side to save lives . . . and though both would rather die than admit it, a spark is kindling in their hearts.
Wise Dr Lydia sees it and wisely says nothing, because she’s very wise — except where affairs of her own heart are concerned.
This stuff writes itself, of course, and that’s the essential ingredient in comfort viewing. We don’t want to be surprised, or even excited. We just want to settle back for a couple of hours of supremely satisfying television. For the next few weeks, that much is assured.