#65 Hons and Rebels
12/05/21 18:42
I did it! I hunted down my TV unicorn! It’s got thundering hooves and a massive horn… can you guess? Why, it’s BBC One’s The Pursuit of Love, of course.
Based on the Nancy Mitford novel, this series started on Sunday night in the Line of Duty slot, so we’ve exchanged bent coppers for pent-up flappers. I’m obsessed with the Mitfords; they’re just so glamorous and sacrilegious, and they write really well. If you’re not familiar with their antics then I suggest you read their letters to each other – gleefully bitchy, gossipy, with an underlying (fraying) thread of affection. Or read Mary S Lovell’s excellent biography of the family and fall in love with them that way. I mean, maybe not Unity, the mad Nazi. Or Diana, who was also pretty dodgy, with some very questionable views. But there are plenty of other sisters who are thoroughly entertaining, and what unites them -apart from family bonds, even with the one who was in love with Hitler - is their chatty irreverence. Nancy is obviously the most famous, Jessica also wrote good stuff, and then you’ve got Debo, who wasn’t even thought of as a writer – the family were pretty scathing about her – but if you read her memoirs then you’ll see she could also string a sentence like a total pro. Pamela preferred chickens.
I’ve always found their flippancy somehow comforting. Making a joke of everything, even awful things, feels to me like an outrageous skill, and Emily Mortimer, who has written and directed this wonderful adaptation, seems to understand that very well. I am a huge fan – she’s not just a fabulous actress but a talented screenwriter too; I really enjoyed her comedy series Doll & Em which also had a healthy dose of anti-earnestness. If anyone was going to make a decent stab at The Pursuit of Love, it’s her - she’s taken Nancy’s acerbic musings by the scruff of the neck, and dragged them through the woods, baying for blood.
The series opens with a gloriously naked and pregnant Lily James as Linda Radlett, being bombed in 1941, then sitting amidst the rubble of her destroyed home with her dog, greeting her predicament with splendid insouciance. She’s picked up by her BF (and narrator) Fanny Logan, and the action then rewinds two decades, to give us their back story.
We’re taken back to the Radlett ancestral pile, a roost ruled by Linda’s ferociously eccentric father, Matthew, Lord Alconleigh, who hunts his children like foxes through his land and doesn’t believe in women’s education – ‘Church, stables and a tennis court’ are all they need. Fanny is a bit of a poor relation, dimly viewed by Matthew since she goes to school, and is a paler presence than her tempestuous cousin Linda, living in her world of superlatives. But Fanny provides a steady, droll summary of events, as both girls yearn to break out of their hemmed-in, unorthodox upbringing, and live life to the full.
Linda is a superb creation, beautifully portrayed by Lily James – sex-mad, OTT, and supremely silly, but engaging with it. Dominic West is having far too much fun playing the draconian patriarch, Linda’s father… I found myself pondering Lily and Dominic’s IRL dalliance and was faintly grossed out all over again, but I digress. Emily Mortimer pops up in front of the camera as Fanny’s disreputable mother, The Bolter, who abandoned her child in favour of her own dalliances. Mortimer plays the part with a rasping nonchalance and lashings of charisma, but there’s something chilling about the casual, vaguely hostile way she and her daughter greet each other unexpectedly at a party. Mitford’s frivolous tone belies a deeper, harsher message, and Mortimer’s smart, saucy script doesn’t shy away. The wedding scene that concludes the first episode is a deft, delicate mix of humour and pathos; a sharp reminder that funny doesn’t equal trivial or insubstantial.
What else? Well, it’s got the hot priest playing Linda’s mentor Lord Merlin, who dyes his pet pigeons so they look pretty for each other, and provides Linda’s entrée to impolite society. Andrew Scott is having a blast, being wildly magnetic, as is Freddie Fox, being wildly vile as Lily’s repellent beau Tony Kroesig – I found it helpful to think of Freddie’s cousin Laurence as I watched him strut around.
The soundtrack is brazenly anachronistic, nicely jarring, and some of the sequences are so odd that I wasn’t sure if they were real or not. Merlin’s entrance for example, to the strains of T Rex’s Dandy in the Underworld, has the air of Diversity hitting the Britain’s Got Talent stage, and I couldn’t work out if it was really happening, or just a figment of Linda’s feverish imagination. Similarly, when Linda and Tony dance to a weird band rendition of ‘D’ye ken John Peel’, I was left puzzled but entranced – ‘stranger than dreams and far, far more disordered.’ In a recent interview, Mortimer said she thought if Nancy Mitford saw the series, she’d be turning in her grave, but I think her foot would be tapping, and her lips twitching, even as she drawled something witty and caustic.
‘Life is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake, and here is one of them.’ The Pursuit of Love is a big, fat juicy morsel, to be savoured and washed down with something equally fruity. I will pursue future instalments as wholeheartedly as Lily chases romance, and rides to hounds.
Tally-ho!
Based on the Nancy Mitford novel, this series started on Sunday night in the Line of Duty slot, so we’ve exchanged bent coppers for pent-up flappers. I’m obsessed with the Mitfords; they’re just so glamorous and sacrilegious, and they write really well. If you’re not familiar with their antics then I suggest you read their letters to each other – gleefully bitchy, gossipy, with an underlying (fraying) thread of affection. Or read Mary S Lovell’s excellent biography of the family and fall in love with them that way. I mean, maybe not Unity, the mad Nazi. Or Diana, who was also pretty dodgy, with some very questionable views. But there are plenty of other sisters who are thoroughly entertaining, and what unites them -apart from family bonds, even with the one who was in love with Hitler - is their chatty irreverence. Nancy is obviously the most famous, Jessica also wrote good stuff, and then you’ve got Debo, who wasn’t even thought of as a writer – the family were pretty scathing about her – but if you read her memoirs then you’ll see she could also string a sentence like a total pro. Pamela preferred chickens.
I’ve always found their flippancy somehow comforting. Making a joke of everything, even awful things, feels to me like an outrageous skill, and Emily Mortimer, who has written and directed this wonderful adaptation, seems to understand that very well. I am a huge fan – she’s not just a fabulous actress but a talented screenwriter too; I really enjoyed her comedy series Doll & Em which also had a healthy dose of anti-earnestness. If anyone was going to make a decent stab at The Pursuit of Love, it’s her - she’s taken Nancy’s acerbic musings by the scruff of the neck, and dragged them through the woods, baying for blood.
The series opens with a gloriously naked and pregnant Lily James as Linda Radlett, being bombed in 1941, then sitting amidst the rubble of her destroyed home with her dog, greeting her predicament with splendid insouciance. She’s picked up by her BF (and narrator) Fanny Logan, and the action then rewinds two decades, to give us their back story.
We’re taken back to the Radlett ancestral pile, a roost ruled by Linda’s ferociously eccentric father, Matthew, Lord Alconleigh, who hunts his children like foxes through his land and doesn’t believe in women’s education – ‘Church, stables and a tennis court’ are all they need. Fanny is a bit of a poor relation, dimly viewed by Matthew since she goes to school, and is a paler presence than her tempestuous cousin Linda, living in her world of superlatives. But Fanny provides a steady, droll summary of events, as both girls yearn to break out of their hemmed-in, unorthodox upbringing, and live life to the full.
Linda is a superb creation, beautifully portrayed by Lily James – sex-mad, OTT, and supremely silly, but engaging with it. Dominic West is having far too much fun playing the draconian patriarch, Linda’s father… I found myself pondering Lily and Dominic’s IRL dalliance and was faintly grossed out all over again, but I digress. Emily Mortimer pops up in front of the camera as Fanny’s disreputable mother, The Bolter, who abandoned her child in favour of her own dalliances. Mortimer plays the part with a rasping nonchalance and lashings of charisma, but there’s something chilling about the casual, vaguely hostile way she and her daughter greet each other unexpectedly at a party. Mitford’s frivolous tone belies a deeper, harsher message, and Mortimer’s smart, saucy script doesn’t shy away. The wedding scene that concludes the first episode is a deft, delicate mix of humour and pathos; a sharp reminder that funny doesn’t equal trivial or insubstantial.
What else? Well, it’s got the hot priest playing Linda’s mentor Lord Merlin, who dyes his pet pigeons so they look pretty for each other, and provides Linda’s entrée to impolite society. Andrew Scott is having a blast, being wildly magnetic, as is Freddie Fox, being wildly vile as Lily’s repellent beau Tony Kroesig – I found it helpful to think of Freddie’s cousin Laurence as I watched him strut around.
The soundtrack is brazenly anachronistic, nicely jarring, and some of the sequences are so odd that I wasn’t sure if they were real or not. Merlin’s entrance for example, to the strains of T Rex’s Dandy in the Underworld, has the air of Diversity hitting the Britain’s Got Talent stage, and I couldn’t work out if it was really happening, or just a figment of Linda’s feverish imagination. Similarly, when Linda and Tony dance to a weird band rendition of ‘D’ye ken John Peel’, I was left puzzled but entranced – ‘stranger than dreams and far, far more disordered.’ In a recent interview, Mortimer said she thought if Nancy Mitford saw the series, she’d be turning in her grave, but I think her foot would be tapping, and her lips twitching, even as she drawled something witty and caustic.
‘Life is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake, and here is one of them.’ The Pursuit of Love is a big, fat juicy morsel, to be savoured and washed down with something equally fruity. I will pursue future instalments as wholeheartedly as Lily chases romance, and rides to hounds.
Tally-ho!
- The Pursuit of Love, 3 episodes, BBC One
