A happy ending – for the upper crust, at least
It’s rare to find a happy ending that’s sincere without being sickly, but the sun-dappled finale of BBC One’s excellent Howards End pulled it off. Last night’s episode opened with one of the many deft scenes that made you root for the unlikely relationship between the bohemian Margaret Schlegel (Hayley Atwell) and buttoned-up, twinkly eyed chauvinist Henry Wilcox (Matthew Macfadyen). In a strained scene at breakfast, Margaret finally convinced Henry that she wasn’t that bothered by a long-ago affair. There was a wonderful moment as he stopped harrumphing and softened his expression and gazed lovingly at his then fiancée over his beard – a piece of facial hair with such absolute conviction it deserves a Bafta in its own right.
For the story to run its course, it wasn’t enough for Mr Wilcox to soften: he had to break. Published in 1910, Howards End captured the tensions between tradition and modernity, at a time when the suffragette movement redefined women’s roles. Rather than bashing us over the head with these themes, they seeped into the background and lent it its colour, glimpsed every time a motor car growled past a horse-drawn carriage, or a well-meaning man insisted on helping the vigorous Margaret to walk on a pavement. It was like Downton Abbey for grown-ups.
If there was one thing to push Henry and his new marriage to breaking point, it was sexual hypocrisy; in this case, his cold reaction to Helen Schlegel’s (Philippa Coulthard) pregnancy with the child of doe-eyed clerk Leonard Bast (Joseph Quinn). Atwell played these climactic scenes superbly, from Margaret’s protectiveness towards her sister Helen that was both vulpine and tender, to the confrontation where she skewered her husband for refusing to give Helen shelter at Howards End. Their fault had been the same, she suggested, but “you have had only pleasure. She may die.” Strong feelings, crisply expressed: this has been a fine and largely faithful homage to EM Forster.
After a cathartic sob on his garden bench, Henry saw sense. The couple were reconciled, and Helen calmed down to raise her child at Howards End, these two strains of upper-crust Englishness softening to meet in the middle. Forster’s optimistic ending only went so far, mind: in his world, it’s all very well to stray if you have a huge income and a bucolic bolthole, but less so if you’re lower middle class like poor Mr Bast, who ended up squashed beneath a bookshelf – a heavy symbol of his doomed aspirations.
There were too many outstanding performances – from Coulthard’s unabashed Helen to Alex Lawther’s deliciously useless Tibby – to do justice to here. Cinema was the natural home for great drama when the last major adaptation was released in 1992, a quaint, distant age before the era of box sets and online streaming binges. The BBC’S series showed yet again how the small screen is now lord of the manor.
Blue Planet II (BBC One, Sunday), the nature documentary about the oceans narrated by David Attenborough, focused on coasts in its sixth and penultimate episode. It was, as ever, an immersive experience. Such is the virtuoso close-up camera work, you felt you were the sea turtle, making your way through the waves onto a Costa Rican beach.
The spell was broken as the camera panned out in a dizzying perspective scene, revealing hundreds and hundreds of turtles doggedly clawing their way up the sand to lay their eggs. It looked like a piece of art: the abstract patterns that the turtles had churned into the dark beach, washed by the sea’s scalloped lace. This episode was yet another chance to bathe in the gorgeousness of the natural world, from the sleek metallic bulk of sea-lions to the hallucinatory mini wonderland of a rock-pool.
Blue Planet is renowned for its film-making coups, and last night didn’t disappoint. With the aid of drone cameras, we saw for the first time sea-lions hunting tuna by working together to drive them into a shallow cove. It raised uncanny questions about animal intelligence and cooperation. Meanwhile, the desperate thrashing struggle – to eat, to escape being eaten – made me feel guilty for every time that I’ve casually wielded a tin-opener.
At the age of 91, Attenborough still narrates with the enthusiasm of a schoolboy. After a startling sequence of a crab leaping away from two foes, an octopus and a moray eel, he gasped “made it”: ever enchanted by the natural world, and delighting us in turn.