Castaway BBC1
Gentlemen's Relish BBC1
Scandalous Women BBC2
The 1940s House C4
Sword of Honour C4
Frasier C4
The first few days of the purist's new millennium turned out to be a very good week for corsets: as we broached the new frontier, TV boldly went backwards. Indeed, if the casual viewer zapped cleverly enough and managed to avoid all those weeping members of Castaway, it was as if drip-dry fabrics had yet to be invented. Even the Castaways, when asked what they were most looking forward to on their return to civilisation, failed to mention logging onto the internet or popping out to Starbucks for a double-double decaff skinny latte - no, they just wanted a bath. Edited highlights of these (including 'Ben Fogle's First Nice Long Candlelit Soak Back Home in Notting Hill. PG: Includes stiff upper lip, occasional tears and black labrador'), will soon be available on BBC Video priced at £9.99.
The tightly-laced tone was set by Gentlemen's Relish, which had looked like a potentially feisty piece of drama in the trailers, but somehow contrived to make a little light pornography even duller than almost anything to be viewed late night on Channel 5.
Billy Connolly as Swann, an unfashionable painter of classical nudes who turns to photography to kick-start his career, was quite improperly squandered thanks to a lumberingly unfunny script (not even Connolly can be expected to charm and twinkle his way through 90 minutes of alleged comedy without being given a character to play with); Sarah Lancashire, as his devoted housekeeper, fell back on a campy combination of wide eyes and pursed lips, as if Julie Andrews was playing Widow Twankey; while Douglas Henshall, as Swann's sleazy assistant whose dark-room manipulations turned the boss's works of art into under-the-counter sauce, was caught inexplicably impersonating Alfie-era Michael Caine.
I suppose it was meant to be panto-farcical, but I had a bit of a humour bypass - all wide-eyes and pursed lips - because there was something slightly suspect about the amount of corpulent female flesh captured in close-up; a kind of retrograde humour that relied on the viewer colluding with the premise that skinny women's naked bodies are intrinsically, dangerously erotic (so we weren't allowed too many of those in close-up, thank you very much), while goosing fat women's wobbly bits is just so much prime-time snigger-worthy sauce for the ganders - 'Ooh! sir! What a great big BBC budget you've got!' 'Come and sit on m'knee, m'dear, and be sure to get your ratings out for the chaps...'
Meanwhile BBC2's Scandalous Women, part of the channel's Victorian Week, had a more edifying angle on old-fashioned sexual mores, reminding us that sex wasn't invented in the naughty 1990s by Loaded magazine. As a Victorian married woman and therefore 'a legal non-person', Caroline Norton endured her husband (Tory MP) George Norton's regular beatings (perfectly legal to beat your wife, of course - as long as the stick was no thicker than your thumb) and bore him three sons, before sensibly embarking on an affair with the jolly nice (Whig Home Secretary) Lord Melbourne.
After a messy courtroom battle, Caroline was denied access to her children for six years (George handed them over to the care of his mistress) and even when the youngest was fatally injured in a riding accident, Caroline was informed too late to make it to his bedside. However, her fight for custody ensured a change in the law, thus allowing divorced or separated women rights to both property and children for the first time. And aside from the fact that this legislation subsequently resulted in Sarah Lancashire's playing a simpering suffragette in Gentlemen's Relish, clearly more 'scandalous women' should make it on to the National Curriculum, while Caroline Norton should be at the very least a household name and ideally a national holiday, on 2 January.
I was gripped by Channel 4's The 1900 House but revisiting the experiment, in The 1940s House, looked like a less engaging prospect. With electricity, a radio, plenty of lipstick and no Heath Robinsonesque underwear to grapple with every morning, how hard could life really get for the Hymers family, even with a bit of rationing? Happily, however, the Hymers turned out to be made of less robust stuff than their time-travelling predecessors, straightaway admitting to having eaten only convenience foods all their lives ('Our diet is appalling. Nutritionally we're at the bottom end of poor... we're Mr and Mrs Blobby, we're greedy, we drink...'), so now that the rationing has kicked in, their misery is palpable - and it's still only 1940.
On hand to welcome them to their home, Marguerite Patten's expression of wide-eyed, yet politely restrained horror as Lynne Hymers admitted to never having baked a cake, was a treat. And despite Geoffrey Palmer's voiceover informing us that 'beauty will be expected as part of their wartime duty', Lynne and her daughter Kirsty are already looking a bit tonsorially lackadaisical, despite having arrived in the house with spiffy Trevor Sorbie marcel waves and a 'sixpenny singe'. In the real, twenty-first century world it is practically impossible to get an appointment with Trevor so, frankly, they should work harder at keeping up appearances while mincing their rissoles.
Kirsty's two sons are sweet. 'Compared to what we have at home, the rizzles [sic] were really nice... and the blancmange was creamy and light - perfect! I like home-made meals' said 10-year-old Ben, wistfully. Still, that was before rationing, at which point the family resorted to a staple diet of jam sandwiches. 'War is really not a good game,' Ben conceded several days later, after a night in the Anderson shelter and a week without 'rizzles'. They'll regret giving those rabbits to the pet shop, mark my words.
Not a Marceled hair out of place in Sword of Honour, Channel 4's delicious adaptation of the Waugh trilogy, effectively condensed into a two-parter by William Boyd. It would be a fine challenge to write a review of a televised Waugh without invoking Brideshead, but I'm not too proud to fail. Just as beautifully art-directed, sun-dappled and costumed as it's forerunner, but far more dramatically paced (if you've watched Brideshead recently, you'll have noted how it now looks languid to the point of comatose), Sword of Honour wore its predictable comparisons well.
As our hero, Guy Crouchback, a man of boundless decency and infinite idealism, forced to fight his way through a cynical World Waugh 2, craggy Daniel Craig initially looked a little too lived-in to play quite such an emotional naif, though by the end Crouchback's character was perhaps sufficiently disillusioned to suit Craig's face. Around the central character, as every apparently noble action had comically dreadful repercussions, a wonderful cast (including Leslie Phillips, refreshingly cad-free and bounderless as Crouchback Sr and Megan Dodds as the wicked and wilful Virginia) made the potentially cartoonish actions of the blimpish, wimpish and vampish successfully navigate the line between black comedy and pathos. Sword of Honour will, I guess, have had far fewer viewers than Gentlemen's Relish, but deserved far more.
Incidentally, last Thursday I found myself in the rather unlikely but entirely delightful position of being seated for supper between the RAF and the Navy on board HMS Illustrious, and can (I hope) safely report, on the record and without having signed the Official Secrets Act, that some very top brass from those Forces, not to mention the Army on the other side of the table, had all loved Sword of Honour - even though the Captain of Illustrious had opted to watch ITV's repeat of A Touch of Frost instead. I hope Channel 4 won't mind me sending my review tapes to save the Captain's wife the trouble of buying it on video - both of them, will, I'm sure, enjoy the numerous references to 'the bloody, bloody Navy...'
Finally, I allowed myself to hurtle back into the twenty-first century with the new series of Frasier. At the end of the last we left Daphne and Niles in a recreational vehicle escaping both Daphne's impending nuptials to the hapless Donny and Niles's three-day-old marriage to the ghastly Mel. But five minutes later, Jane Leeves's Daphne is suddenly wearing baggy tops and attempting to hide what looks - unless she nervously OD'd on pre-wedding canapes - suspiciously like a pregnancy. This presumably unscheduled bump of a plot development should make the series worth watching even if, for the first time in the show's history, the writing felt a little bit flabby around its midriff, too.
