Six minutes. .. the steamy will grab Downton’s crown
I was hooked. But there can be only one winner in the ‘Phwoar War’
publicly about his behaviour, wrote histrionic letters and set detectives on him.
Also like Sylvia, Violet was driven almost insane by the woman who replaced her in Ford’s affections, the young artist Stella Bowen, who inspired the character of Valentine Wannop.
Where the TV series really diverges from the book is not in its attitude to sex but in the story’s emotional bias.
Novelist Graham Greene described Parade’s End as ‘the terrifying story of a good man tortured, pursued, driven into revolt, and ruined as far as the world is concerned by the clever devices of a jealous and lying wife’.
Stoppard, however, recalibrates the emotional currents of Ford’s story – to make Sylvia sympathetic. TV bosses were so keen to get Hall for the role of Sylvia that they agreed to fit most of the shoot around a seven-week break in her Hollywood schedule.
They believe the actress, who is currently filming Iron Man 3, has managed to portray Sylvia as a ‘desperate and fragile’ woman rather than a twodimensional ‘bitch’.
Sylvia tricks Christopher into marrying her by pretending he made her pregnant, she ‘upstages the corpse’ at his mother’s funeral by parading about in the latest fashions and she abandons Christopher – and her young son – to have a four-month affair with a man called ‘Potty’ Perowne. But Stoppard appears to argue she does it because she is violently in love with her husband and cannot get his attention. ‘Sylvia is completely trapped when she becomes pregnant and she has got no option but to get a husband,’ says White. ‘She is someone who needs a lot of emotional support and love but unfortunately Christopher is not in any sense a new man.’ David Parfitt, who produced the drama, believes that it’s vital that viewers end up ‘falling for’ Sylvia. ‘She is an unsympathetic character who you end up loving because you begin to feel for her,’ he says. ‘I don’t think there are many actresses who carry off what Rebecca does because what she does to Christopher at the beginning is unforgivable.’ For all the challenges that faced the screenwriter, actors and producers of Parade’s End, the triumph is that the author’s classic has finally reached the screen. Devotees of Ford Madox Ford include Booker Prize-winners Julian Barnes and A. S. Byatt, bestselling crime writer Ruth Rendell and actor Bill Nighy.
For the BBC, the adaptation represents a huge financial gamble and a great deal is resting on its success – the chance to once again claim the laurels of top broadcaster of costume drama.
Will viewers be seduced by sexy Sylvia? Or will they rush back into the comforting arms of Lord Grantham – who would never allow such steamy shenanigans to take place under his roof?
Parade’s End is on BBC2 on Friday at 9pm.
ALREADY it’s been called ‘Downton for adults’ and Parade’s End is very adult indeed. Benedict Cumberbatch makes a very good Christopher Tietjens, a man of principle and rigour who excitingly works for the Imperial Department of Statistics, with Rebecca Hall as his wife. Hall’s Sylvia is a ‘damn fine piece’ who’s already pregnant, possibly by her lover, a duffer with a droopy moustache called ‘Potty’ Perowne.
If this sounds silly, it isn’t. There is a seriously talkie script, based on a tetralogy by Ford Madox Ford, and adapted by Tom Stoppard.
So it’s unlike Downton Abbey, where the actors spent most of their time semaphoring to each other silently over teapots: Lady Mary’s mooncalfing at Matthew Crawley, the Earl’s goggling at the post, Bates’s smouldering at Anna like a vulture with a secret sorrow.
The BBC is putting its landaus on ITV’s lawn here: Parade’s End is lavish, beautifully shot, crisply directed, and even covers some of the same period as Downton – we have the Great War, suffragettes, stately homes and sidesaddled strumpets.
So which one will win the ‘Phwoar Wars’ of the autumn TV schedules? Mmm. Downton was sexy because there was hardly any sex at all, just non-stop, girly romance. Julian Fellowes broke this house rule only twice. Firstly, when Lady Mary fell for the handsome Turk, the doomed Mr Pamuk, who died on the job in her bed; and second, the ill-judged scene about the wedding night of a naked Bates and his bride Anna, of which the least said the better.
So Downton used the cheap trick of avoiding adult sex almost entirely, and this failure to consummate kept the whole family riveted to the series for months. I remind you that we all spent 16 precious hours of our short lives watching a deliciously cartoonish costume drama in which the two main characters – Lady Mary and Matthew Crawley – failed to get it on at all
Iuntil the Christmas special (episode 16, 67 minutes long) when their lips finally met.
In contrast, three minutes into Parade’s End, Sylvia has been ravished on the floor by her lover Potty (‘The French understand these things,’ she gasps), and 11 minutes in, there’s a flashback when she is seen straddling her future husband in a railway carriage.
Ten minutes into the next episode, Sylvia has completely disrobed and is reclining in the bath with a cheroot. Her husband enters, only to flinch when he sees his wife’s nakedness. ‘Sorry – I – er,’ he stutters, turning away, which makes Sylvia so cross she gets herself to a nunnery. N DOWNTON, there is no sex, let alone nakedness (Bates doesn’t count), which is a tremendous plus. Nudity on the small screen is like the Third Rail: if a director touches it, the contact can electrocute the whole series. Having said that, the sex in Parade’s End is tasteful and periodappropriate (so far as I know), and the nudity, like Maggie Smith as the Dowager Duchess, never, ever goes downstairs.
I was hooked by episode two. Sylvia has stopped having sex with everyone, and is spending a lot of time on her knees (praying). Meanwhile, Tietjens, who has decided to serve his country, is struggling with his feelings for a young suffragette.
It’s as if after two hours Tom Stoppard has put the fleshly Rebecca Hall away, in favour of turbid glances, unrequited passion, high-necked blouses, and almost continuous trembling on the part of all the main characters, even the beardy Scots.
Parade’s End, then. It’s twice as grown up and three times as brainy as Downton – but probably only half as much fun.