A well-built study of the great Victorian lottery
Telling human history through a pile of bricks and mortar is not a new idea. Julie Myerson’s book Home, which told of the previous occupants of her house in Clapham, was published in 2004. A House in Time (BBC Two) is essentially the same concept, and it’s already looking surprisingly spacious with lovely details in the fixtures and fittings.
It would be fascinating to know quite how many addresses were scoped before the producers plumped for an early Victorian four-storey terrace in Liverpool with a basement and handsome sash windows. The house was 62 Falkner Street (formerly number 58). The street got its name from Mr Faulkner (we never found out what happened to the U), through whose fields it was first ploughed. Other secrets were intriguingly disinterred.
To call it a new history of Britain, as was claimed by presenter David Olusoga, may be a stretch, but this was a fresh way of mapping vast social changes onto the ups and downs of a few lucky or unlucky individuals. Already, in two convulsive decades, we’ve had a bachelor who lived beyond his means and a servant who clambered up the greasy pole.
The drama had the alluring flavour of Who Do You Think You Are?, but with a crucial twist. Every time Olusoga met up with yet another tireless rummager through the archives (the unheralded stars of such shows), he was able to put his academic hat on and make knowledgeable historical evaluations.
Perhaps there was a little too much speculative glossing. Olusoga was often forced to say “I think” or “I imagine” for lack of corroborating evidence. The presenter of fine programmes about black British history, Olusoga had an agenda, but an open mind too. He felt no sorrow for Wilfred Steele, who lost everything when the slavedependent cotton market plummeted, but had his expectations upended when Steele popped up in the American Civil War fighting for the Union.
Liverpool’s architectural treasures all had a story to tell, while the past was cleverly animated by computergenerated drawings. The house on Falkner Street was a status symbol for occupants on the way up or down in the great Victorian lottery. It’s nourishing stuff. As a workhouse boy once said, more please, sir.
The species deemed most likely to survive a nuclear holocaust is the cockroach. Some TV dramas have similar properties. Despite the altered habits of audiences, and their rising demand for quality, shows such as BBC One’s Death in Paradise soldier on in a post-schedule landscape, cheerfully, cockroachily. This is the seventh time round for the Caribbean crime caper, and its premise doesn’t get any less baffling.
The current fish-out-of-water cop, back for a second stint after three series each for Ben Miller and Kris Marshall, is Ardal O’hanlon. How did an Irish fella – one Detective Inspector Jack Mooney – fetch up solving crimes on a fictional island whose colonial past is a blend of British and French? It’s a puzzle beyond rational explanation, like a murder in a sealed room.
In this episode, a stepmother-to-be – a nearly non-speaking role which Elizabeth Berrington perhaps took for non-acting reasons – seemingly leapt to her death from a posh hotel window. The culprits – her trio of stepchildrento-be – were exposed in the usual way, the show rigidly adhering to a known formula (think limpets and rocks) while O’hanlon dispensed a carefully calibrated compound of gentle moralising and jaunty quips.
Does the BBC keep it on because it’s an easy way to meet its commitment to diverse casting? Actors of colour deserve better than this parade of Caribbean stereotypes. Don Warrington’s stern commissioner is at one end of a spectrum; at the other are the police department’s rude mechanicals (Danny John-jules and Tobi Bakare). As O’hanlon’s capable female sidekick Florence Cassell, Joséphine Jobert works in very short shorts.
The actual detective work in this episode looked decidedly shabby. Some light dusting for fingerprints would have solved the mystery in half a tick. Denis Lawson’s grieving hotelier was allowed no moment by the script to process the dramatic news that his fiancée had been murdered by his kids. But then the guest actors are walk-on pawns. Crime, comedy, sun, surf – a little bit of everything adds up to a whole lot of not much.
A House in Time Death in Paradise