Clever and romantic? No, these foppish failures were just awful
Television more pretentious than Life In Squares (BBC2) cannot be imagined. if you’d watched wearing a beret and neckerchief, while smoking cheroots as long as knitting needles, you would not have looked half as ridiculous as the effete, languid fops who styled themselves the Bloomsbury set.
The awfulness of it was summed up by a scene in which James norton and ed Birch lay in bed, kissing each other’s bare arms. it wasn’t just Birch’s straggly beard, like the hair on a coconut. it wasn’t even that the characters were cousins, revolting though that idea was.
What really grated was how grandly significant the drama pretended these characters were, with their contempt for convention and their self-conscious witticisms: ‘i do consider being an invalid more of a hobby than a career,’ quipped Birch, like a sixth-former who has just discovered oscar Wilde.
The story centred on sisters vanessa Bell and virginia Woolf — one a painter whose works are forgotten today, the other an author whose novels are read only by students hoping that, since the books are short, they’ll be easy to understand.
The decadent cousins were Duncan Grant — another painter justly consigned to oblivion — and lytton strachey, who wrote one book that caused a brief scandal and is unreadable now. other characters included John Maynard Keynes, a left-wing economist whose theories were demolished by Thatcherism.
life in squares conveyed the impression that these upper- class edwardian rebels were destined to change the world, rather than remain a pack of self-indulgent failures. But viewers did not get any sense of the casual racism and virulent antisemitism that were hallmarks of this sorry set: writer Amanda Coe avoided all suggestion of that.
like a sex-mad spinster, Auntie Beeb has been warning for weeks that the first episode of this three-part drama was crammed with torrid bedroom scenes. it was billed as a cross between Downton Abbey and last Tango in Paris, posh but depraved — a sort of Fifty shades of earl Grey.
in the event, it was perfectly demure and respectable — even the scene in which Phoebe Fox, as vanessa, lay in a bath while Grant, her husband’s best friend, stood shaving. They were discussing what Truly Mattered in marriage (here’s a clue: not ‘fidelity’).
All the scenes, not just the bedroom antics and the fumbles in alleyways, were shot in misty soft-focus. And everything was overlaid with a syrupy piano soundtrack to remind us how intellectual and romantic all this was.
The episode was capped with the most cack-handed timeshift scene, not so much confusing as plain nonsense. As vanessa romped with her caddish husband, Clive Bell, apparently to reward him for an attempt to seduce her sister, the scene flashed forward 30 years.
The Bells were in a summer garden, on deckchairs, Grant sitting beside them with his easel. We flipped back to the bedroom, and then to the garden, repeatedly.
it served a purpose. Up to that point, some viewers might have been trying to convince themselves they hadn’t just completely wasted an hour. This final disintegration in narrative did underline what a load of rubbish the whole thing was.
sneakily scheduled against life in squares, the corporation was making a bit of a confession on BBC: The Secret Files (BBC4) and hoping that no one would notice.
Penelope Keith had been delving into the archives at Caversham in Berkshire, where the Beeb keeps copies of every letter and memo, and discovered a history of institutional incompetence.
Arrogant, smug, petty-minded and with an utter absence of selfawareness, the mandarins of Broadcasting House appear to have insulted just about every actor and comedian who ever appeared on screen.
Dame Penelope was still stung, 50 years on, by the note that described her as ‘pleasant, but no life or character about her at all’.
she got off lightly. Bruce Forsyth was ‘ a third-rate music hall act’. elton John had ‘precious little musical ability’, while David Bowie was an ‘amateur-sounding vocalist who sings wrong notes and out of tune’.
Penelope’s verdict was equally damning: ‘Full of their own selfimportance, yet frequently proving to be wrong.’ Bravo!