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New
Statesman
Monday
July 2, 2001
Television
- With actors of this calibre, the cliches pale, writes Andrew Billen
You
are much more likely to have seen the trailers for The Cazalets
than to have seen The Cazalets. In them, no expense has been spared
to put us off the show itself. Here it is, they seem to say, and you have
seen it all before: the steam trains, the black-tie dinner parties, the
frumpy wife wittering about her husband's business meeting, the quick cut
to his rumpy-pumpy back in town, the hilarious near-miss of vintage car
with vintage car on the road back to the big house. But war clouds loom,
and soon there will be rain on the whole parade of silly period hats. Only
one thought remains on a viewer's lips: "Who'll be evicted from Big
Brother this week?"
Yet two episodes in, The Cazalets (Fridays, 9pm, BBC1) is proving
to be involving, as television used to be before production values took
over. This six-part serialisation of Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet
Chronicles novels has production values coming out of its ears, but
its adaptor, Douglas Livingstone, has written a screenplay that makes you
concentrate on character, not costume. Such is his skill at gentle
signalling that you may not even notice how the complex tangle of plots
adds up to a larger, more serious theme of thwarted love and ambition.
The setting is middle-class Britain in 1937. The most remarkable thing
about this other country is not the Bakelite telephones, the formal table
manners or the stroppy servants, but the way that family still dominates
British life. And what large families they were, and what large houses. We
are asked to be concerned about 14 Cazalets - and yet they all fit so
easily in the Cazalet HQ in Sussex that Brig, the gentle
businessman-patriarch, plans to billet half of London in the outbuildings
once the war arrives.
The Cazalets are not, collectively, an unhappy family, merely individually
dysfunctional. There is something literally wrong in the head about the
oldest son, Hugh. The X-rays say it is shrapnel, but it may be a morbid
fear of war. His wife, Sybil, is his counterpart. She is physically frail.
Hugh Bonneville and Anastasia Hille do their suppressed dread well, but
most scenes are stolen by Stephen
Dillane as the womanising second
brother, Edward. Dillane
gives him the most deliciously self-satisfied laugh and pulls off the
extraordinary feat of making his anti-Semitism pass for joie de vivre.
His wife, Villy, played by Lesley Manville, is a portrait in dowdy
domestic frustration. She would prefer her oversexed husband to have
affairs rather than land her with another child. He does both.
Rupert, meanwhile, the bohemian youngest brother, is not interested in the
family timber business, but not quite interested enough in his art,
either.
Paul Rhys makes him simultaneously weak and unlucky, a man doubly punished
in love, first by his original wife dying and then by remarrying an
airhead called Zoe (Joanna Page), so jealous of her child-bride status
that she wishes her own baby dead. The fourth of the generation is Rachel,
a wide-hipped portrait in poignancy from Catherine Russell. Rachel is a
lesbian so deeply in love with her best friend that she does not see her
attraction is sexual.
One of the symptoms of the rottenness in the House of Cazalets is the
difficulty the women have in producing offspring for it. They spend too
much time being ill in locked bathrooms and calling on doctors. The most
shocking symptom, however, is Edward's attempt to seduce his own daughter,
Louise. When she rushes upstairs to safety, the direction, hitherto
sedate, becomes emphatic, and her bedroom door slams thrice in slo-mo as
if it belongs to a cell. Emma Griffiths Malin plays brilliantly Louise's
transformation from snobby, sophisticated teenager to frightened child.
The greatest threat to everyone's hopes, however, is going to be the war.
By starting the saga in 1937, rather than 1939, Howard allows the war to
come at the faltering pace with which it really arrived. Chamberlain's
radio broadcasts, which in folk memory have amalgamated into one, are
separated and given in instalments, and the Cazalets listen to them with
the deference they might accord the physical appearance of the Prime
Minister at the front door. To prepare, Brig scrutinises the exact
position of the wireless dial with a magnifying glass. This is what I love
about The Cazalets: not the attention to detail, but the attention
to the unexpected detail (note, please, the recurring motif of the
distribution of bedpans in episodes one and two).
Yes, this show is middlebrow to the centre of its cranium. Characters are
drawn so clearly that they are forever running up against their own
cliches. You don't get just lesbians, you get tweedy lesbians. But the
cliches are merely the badges the actors wear to identify themselves; and
when the actors are of this calibre, the cliches pale. This series proves
the old rule - more often demonstrated by the reverse of itself - that
second-rate books make first-class television. The trailer people don't
know what they are doing, and nor do the schedulers who have thrown away
this autumnal, Sunday-night hit on a series of summer Fridays when all we
want to know is when Big Brother's Brian will get his marching
orders.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard |
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