Through a Distant Mirror

A damp cool English summer has meant more evenings indoors than usual, and increased consumption of box sets (whatever did we do without them?). So, as a little 'compare and contrast' exercise, I thought I'd try and run a couple of sets in tandem, their unifying characteristics being that they were both British made and set in England between the wars, although one - Dennis Potter's Pennies from Heaven - details the experiences of a working class couple, and the other - Brideshead Revisted - those of a bunch of toffs. I'd also watched them both when they first came out, a very long time ago, and not seen them since. This meant I could also monitor any changes in my own reactions, because if it's not at least a BIT about me, it's no good at all, right?

I'd estimate that a good 50% of Pennies from Heaven zoomed right over my hennaed head, when I watched it as a schoolgirl in 1978. I'd enjoyed the unexpected dance routines and the semi-comic lip-synching  (and of course Gemma Craven's rouged nipples remain a heavily-parodied legend to this day) but the personal nuances and sense of absolute tragedy that winds itself stealthily around the doomed hero and hapless heroine from Episode One, were largely lost on me. More compassionate and slightly less bitter than a lot of Dennis Potter's stuff, what shines through the whole series like a dirty light bulb in a Kings Cross B&B is the characters' sense of hopeless, thwarted, stunted desire and aimless yearning for escape.

No wonder Bob Hoskins' Arthur Parker takes refuge in the thrilling forbidden world described in 1930s jazz and escapist Hollywood fantasy. A thwarted romantic despite his innate coarseness, all he wants is a girl who loves him and is 'up for a bit', and to be his own boss on the fringes of that glamorous music business. Sadly, his wife Joan is as squeamish about her own desires (until they're jolted awake by a visit from an unfeasibly young Nigel Havers) as she is about Arthur's, so it falls to Cheryl Campbell's innocent libertine schoolma'am to become Arthur's muse, and ultimately his undoing. The whole cast is incredible, but Cheryl Campbell's metamorphosis from wet-lipped innocent to hardened tart really did it for me. Whether she's rolling on the floor of her father's farm kitchen with Arthur or straightening her seams on Hampstead Heath, you never lose sight of her vulnerability and sadness. And though everything has been said about Bob Hoskins performance, I'll add my own two 'best moments', the first being when he and the Accordion Man (who moves through the series like a one-man Greek chorus) suddenly embrace each other, crying, as though they've each recognised the despair of the other, and - at the other end of his emotional repertoire - when Arthur does a little wolfish grin to camera just as he's about to take a local prostitute to the back of his car for a bit of the other. His face is perfect, and that's not something you get to say often about Bob Hoskins.

So, while the English working classes were enduring lives of doomed and constrained misery between the wars, you might just imagine that the toffs were having all the fun. And to a large degree, they were. Brideshead Revisited seduces you like a rampant cad with that first, opulently beautiful episode, laying out like a picnic blanket a world where everyone is so damn gorgeous that you barely begrudge them their appalling behaviour and overprivileged lives, and then, like a cad, it destroys all your illusions over several hours of some of the best TV ever made. When I first saw Brideshead I was between college and University, and by the time I got there the series had influenced everyday life so much that you could easily spot the idiot youths drifting around  my own city campus, pretending to be Sebastian Flyte or Anthony Blanche (a chorus of jeers from the punks in the canteen would usually signal their arrival.). I can admit now to having been so dazzled by Anthony Andrews' beauty that I barely noticed anything significant about the plot themes when it was originally screened, but hey, I was young and very shallow.

It all felt much more coherent and interesting this time around, and though I was still very impressed with  Anthony Andrews' curl-ruffling and sulking, I did manage to look beyond it and see that he - Sebastian - was,  albeit in a far less materially miserable way than Arthur Parker, an equally trapped and doomed character. As the second son of a declining aristo family, he knew he was almost literally useless, that he would never inherit the power and status that would fall to his pious older brother, and that once his beauty had faded he would have no effective value whatsoever. His steep, unstoppable decline was inevitable, a slow suicide. Also interesting now, though dismissed by me at first showing as a ghastly posh tart, was Diana Quick's performance as his sister Julia, who by contrast falls apart in slow-motion, unable (despite her convincing exterior as a hard-headed modern gal) to shake off her deep-rooted Papist certainty that she has doomed herself for eternity by committing adultery. We were all very mean about Diana Quick at the time, because of course we were jealous of her, but watching her now she struck me as dramatically beautiful, and her scene by the fountain where she finally unravels was almost agonising.

Also lost on me in 1981 was the pernicious, passive-aggressive nastiness of their mother Lady Marchmaine, a woman held together with self-perpetuating rage - if there's a villain of the piece it's her, for all her having been wronged by Larry Olivier's dapper, frail Lord. I was pleased that I at least remembered that brilliant comic interplay between Jeremy Irons' Charles Ryder and  his father, played with evident relish by John Geilgud.  At least I did watch the bits without Anthony Andrews. And so many strong supporting performances, my favourite Nickolas Grace as the stuttering glamour-queen Anthony Blanche, and Donald Sinden's son Jeremy, now dead, as the hopeless 'Boy' Mulcaster. Who knew that Nickolas Grace was Alan Bates' long time partner, back in 1981?

Anyway, running these two gems from the Golden Age of British TV drama alongside one another worked a treat, and I'm glad that one of the advantages of getting older is an ability to see the darker, deeper layers and to not just get dazzled by the pretty faces and nice songs. Though pretty faces and nice songs certainly have their place. Here's a nice song to end the week. Let's all foxtrot.