So long to the show that put the sun into Sundays
Gloriously escapist. Delightfully saucy. And ending with bittersweet perfection. Our devoted critic says...
Goodbye to blue seas and endless summer days. Goodbye to family spats round a bare wooden table, broken hearts and leaking roofs, pelicans in the pantry and bats in the privy, and sunset picnics on the cliffs.
Goodbye most of all to the yearning, impossible love between a scatty english widow, gently marinaded in gin, and a clumsily chivalrous taxi driver, too proud to follow his heart.
Goodbye, in other words, to The durrells. This perfect family TV drama reached its perfect, poignant conclusion last night as the shadow of World War II fell over Corfu.
Louisa durrell (Keeley Hawes) and her children were forced to abandon their ramshackle rented villa above the Ionian Sea, and close her youngest son Gerry’s amateur zoo, before fleeing to britain.
Louisa and taxi driver Spiros finally shared a kiss on the sands . . . at the very moment they realised they might never see each other again.
It was that strangest of happy endings, the one that makes you want to cry.
but that’s the spirit which made all four series of The durrells so wonderful.
The drama, loosely adapted by Simon Nye from naturalist Gerald durrell’s autobiography, My Family And other Animals, has never been afraid to thread veins of reality through its silly, surreal fantasies.
At its centre was a bagful of dreams — perpetual holiday romance mingled with a life of gypsy ease among wonderful friends, in an innocent era of youth and clear skies.
The counterpoint to this was a streak of darkness that would be unsustainable in most family entertainment. The durrells was so full of life that it could not ignore the possibility of death.
WITH storm clouds gathering in europe, Louisa had to confront the danger facing her family when a telegram brought tragic news. Her bumptious cousin basil, the gauche and over-eager lover who decamped the island after a fling with Spiros’s wife, had died in Albania — shot for the crime of being english.
This was the spring of 1939 and not only were Mussolini’s troops a couple of miles across the water, on the Albanian mainland, but the Italian dictator was also becoming bellicose about Greece. Louisa, who had fled debt and depression in rainy england, had to accept that her family was no longer safe in sunny Corfu.
That this should happen just when Spiros — who had loved Louisa ever since she had first set foot on his island — was free of his miserable marriage was a bitter irony.
Louisa could not stay and face the invaders — and he could not abandon his country. They ran to each other along the sea’s edge and wept into each other’s arms, before dissolving into a kiss that had millions of viewers sighing: ‘Thank goodness for that.’
Whether, in the words of the
song, the kiss was ‘just a kiss’ was left to our imaginations. This was slightly unusual, for a show that has never been coy about sex.
delightfully dim daughter Margo spent much of the final episode telling everyone she intended to fling away her virginity by sleeping with boyfriend Nikos.
What this rite of passage was going to involve she wasn’t sure, and brother Larry’s books on pagan sex rituals weren’t much help. She was adamant Nikos was wrong when he referred to her ‘maidenhead’. ‘That’s in Kent,’ she insisted.
When it came to the deed, though, poor Nikos wasn’t involved. Margo’s old flame Zoltan made a dramatic return, wading from a boat as the family tried to stage a play as a thank you to all their neighbours.
Grabbing Zoltan’s hand, Margo dragged him into the house . . . and emerged a few minutes later, her cheeks flushed, to resume the amateur dramatics.
Louisa’s sexual frustrations have driven many of the storylines: in the first series, she fell head over heels for Swedish hermit Sven, and was crushed to discover that he was gay.
Sven put in a saucy, fleeting cameo as a satyr in the play, thrusting his loins at the Greek orthodox monks seated on the front row and jeering: ‘I’m having more fun than you!’ The monks crossed themselves in horror.
Finally, Louisa’s middle son, Leslie got to see his trio of lost loves — including daphne, holding the baby he once believed was his (‘ We did it two- and- a- half times,’ he solemnly admitted to his mother).
Perhaps these sexual undercurrents were only to be expected, when we recall that oldest son Larry became one of the most sexually explicit novelists of the 20th century.
but The durrells wasn’t all sex and death. There was a playfulness too often missing from Sunday night drama.
There was booze-sodden lecherous rascal Captain Creech, who kept turning up like a bad drachma. There was lugubrious maid Lugaretzia with a face like an oracle of doom, and booming Aunt Hermione who expected to be treated like visiting royalty.
Most of all there was animal-mad Gerry and his burgeoning menagerie. It began as a couple of stick insects and a puppy, and took over the house — goats on the stairs, sea-birds in the kitchen, otters in the outside loo, parrots everywhere, and even a couple of Madagascan aye-ayes.
No wonder that, in real life, Gerry grew up to run one of britain’s best-known private zoos, in Jersey: he was no doubt trying to recreate his idyllic childhood.
Whether you were after soap or slapstick, costume drama or ravishing landscapes, romance or adolescent mishaps, The durrells offered it all.
BUT its lack of pretension served it badly with many critics. despite a first- rate cast, the show never won a bafta and was only nominated once.
The closest was a tongue-incheek Palm at Cannes for its A-list guest star, Leslie Caron — whose pet Tchi Tchi won the dogmanitarian Award in 2017.
Not that most viewers cared. They lapped up the chaos of a family where everyone bickered good- naturedly and grudges evaporated in the sunshine.
Tragically, sunny optimism such as this is in short supply on TV.
It’s hard to know when we’ll see it again — but thank goodness the producers had the courage to bring the show to a natural ending, and not drag it out until it became terminally stale . . . the usual fate of a TV hit.
God forbid they should revive it by sending the family back to Corfu after six years of war.
Part of the sweet sadness was Louisa’s constant sense of loss. She gave her children the courage to spread their wings, but was terrified of seeing them leave.
In the end it was Hitler who put an end to their childhood.
And because we couldn’t bear to see them sail away, the family left us, framed in our memories like a photograph, enjoying one last picnic at the water’s edge.