söndag 30 december 2012

Matthewgate – the fallout

Well. So he did it after all – Dan Stevens opted out of Downton Abbey. Leaving Fellowes no choice but to kill Matthew off, in an unexotic car accident, and in the Christmas special too. This was almost the unkindest cut of all: couldn’t the blasted man have agreed to be bumped off in episode one of the new series at least, so the otherwise peace-and-goodwill-full special didn’t have to end on a tragic note?

So, one of my wishes for the new year is blown already. I am still concerned how the series will go on without the hero, but the rest of the Downton crew used the special to persuade us that they will do their level best to keep the show on the road, and I’m more hopeful than I was that the hero vacuum will  be filled somehow (probably by Branson, tamest revolutionary on the planet). And at least an heir is born, so there will be no Heir from Outside Mk II coming in – this, I believe, the fans would not have stood for. As for Stevens, I do understand why he may have a yearning to play something else than the decent, somewhat priggish Matthew. But I wonder if it was a wise career move. It’s not as if he was a household name before Downton, so his fans will for the most part be Downton fans, and they will be put out with him for some time to come for jumping ship.

I’m almost starting to feel that there’s a jinx on my Downton blogs. I praise the villain alliance between Miss O’Brien and Thomas – and they fall out. I dare to hope that Matthew won’t be written out – and he is written out. On the upside, it works in a positive way as well. Thomas has braved the Errol Flynn curse and came out of his latest misadventure surprisingly well at the end of series three. In my opinion, Rob James-Collier would have deserved a Golden Globe nod for so believably making the transition from arrogant prat to poor little black baa-lamb. Taking full responsibility  for his latest disaster with quiet dignity; sobbing vulnerably in the rain; in a word, Thomas  completely floored me, and I’m now more than ready to give this particular baddie a dispensation for his lack of brains. At least the ridiculously easily-suggestible darling isn’t thick the way Alfred is: you couldn’t suggest anything to Alfred, as he wouldn’t be able to take the hint.

As for Miss O’Brien, her plots achieved a black grandeur far from petty shirt-pilfering, so we can expect more high-quality villainy in the future. There was a suggestion in the Christmas special that she was longing for a change: well, she can keep on longing. Her talents are needed in Downton. Her nephew, though, should feel free to pursue his dreamed-of career in food.

Scripting a hit show like this must be frustrating, as the characters who leave are not necessarily the ones who would, normally, be the most likely to. Not only the actors, but also the (real or perceived) wishes of the viewers, are far more important than the characters’ own wants. Why Thomas would choose to stay, even as under-butler, in a house where his relationship to just about all the male staff is problematic to say the least is a mystery. Also, you’d expect Daisy to jump at the chance of taking over her father-in-law’s farm rather than stay on slaving in the castle kitchen. Branson wanted to get away, but was hauled back (even at the price of killing off Sybil rather than keeping her on as an invisible off-shore family member). I suspect (though I hesitate to say it and jinx it) these characters are not going anywhere. As long as the actors don’t quit, Downton fans will keep them exactly where they are.          

torsdag 20 december 2012

Wishes for the new year

Today, anything too tiring blog-wise is right out. It's December and my holiday starts tomorrow, which means I'm in my all-too-usual, pre-Christmas, I-don't-want-to-work-anymore grump. But a wish list is fairly easy. All I want (or some of them anyway) for the new year cultural-consumption-wise is:

A new villain (or several) Obviously, always. I'm not complaining, mind. It's not exactly been a villain-free year, though I have sometimes felt like the protagonist in some fin-de-siècle cautionary tale, in search of ever more depraved kicks. I comfort myself with the fact that however far I fall, the low point was already reached years and years ago with Monsieur Lheureux in Madame Bovary (though he was admirably mean to the ghastly Madame, no-one can call him glamorous). The main reason I'm always on the lookout for new villains is I want to be reassured that there are still new ones to discover out there. I can't quite get over  the unhappy suspicion that there will never be another villain-writer like Dickens. Which leads me to point two:

A new Dickens TV adaptation I know, that is never going to happen. They did Great Expectations and The Mystery of Edwin Drood this year and there was all the extra Dickens publicity about the bicentenary, which means the Beeb will probably want to, in the charming phrase of a few years' back, "take a rest from Dickens". There's always ITV, but they'll never risk adapting any of the lesser-known novels. And it's the lesser-known novels I would really like done: Dombey and Son, above all, but also Barnaby Rudge. Imagine what a great Sir John Charles Dance would be! And then he'd have a hat trick in Dickens villains: Tulkinghorn, Ralph Nickleby and Sir John Chester. Ah, what a trio.

If not Dickens, then at least lots and lots of new costume dramas I very much hope that the BBC has learnt its lesson by now, after that disastrous period when they consciously avoided "bonnet dramas". Then ITV's Downton Abbey happened and became a smash hit, and the BBC was left looking rather silly. I see signs that they've thrown in the towel and are now desperately trying to catch up with their commercial rival. There was Parade's End which the critics loved, and The Paradise which they hated. I look forward to watching both and am wishing for more try-to-catch-the-Downton-crowd dramas. And while on this subject:

Dan Stevens signing up for a fourth series of Downton All right, I promised not to Downton-blog until after Christmas, but just a teeny-weeny bit, without giving anything away? And yes, I know Stevens is the one playing Matthew. So, do I suddenly have a thing for Matthew now? Ha, no fear!

The reason for this wish is that I've heard the rumour that Stevens hasn't signed up for series four of Downton Abbey yet, and I'm worried about what this will mean for the future of the series. I can understand if he hesitates. There was only ever talk of three series at the start: I remember it well. But now a fourth series is on the way, and it looks like Downton could run and run, but only if it keeps its act together. And the centre of this act is the main plotline, what could be called The Heir's Tale.

Matthew may not have turned out to be the middle-class champion I'd hoped for when he first came on the scene in series one. The Downton set had him house-trained in a trice. There was much caustic talk among TV reviewers about how little time he spent in the trenches, but at least he's spent more time there than in his lawyer's office - now, the estate appears to be his full-time job, and he is as gentrified as anything, even to the point of being snooty to Sir Richard Carlisle. Having said that, the main plot of Downton, the one all the other plots are latched on to, is how Matthew faces up to his inheritance, and how his romance - now marriage - to the present Earl's daughter Lady Mary will work out. Just because I (normally) don't fall in love with heroes doesn't mean I don't appreciate the way they keep things together. After all, you can't have David Copperfield without David Copperfield. No, you really can't.

New novels by favourite authors This is the up-side of having authors like Morgan and Fforde on one-book-a-year-contracts (well, I assume they are, anyway). From Fforde, what I wish for most - as always - is another Thursday Next novel. It is greedy of me, because we had one this year - The Woman who Died a Lot. Wonderful read as always, but sadly there were no BookWorld outings this time. Not even a visit from the Emperor Zhark. So, next time, some fiction-fun please, preferably not all relating to the Dark Reading Matter - I'd like adventures in/about books that are actually read. I want some more!

More Doctor Who Of course. And stop splitting the series up - send it in one go, so I can get proper whole-series box sets.

Sweden doing really well in the Eurovision Song Contest but not necessarily winning again - I don't think we can afford it. And, naturally, I hope that we put on "a fantastic show".
  
            

torsdag 6 december 2012

And now for the Dark Side - Gashford and Sir John

"[T]his man, who has crawled and crept through life, wounding the hands he licked and biting those he fawned upon"...

Oooh. He licks hands. And then wounds them. Only methaphorically, but even so! What promising representative of the villain fraternity is this? Answer: Mr Gashford (we never learn his first name), the oily and entirely fictional secretary of Lord George Gordon in Barnaby Rudge. As the quote above suggests, he's a great fawner and manipulates his naive employer effortlessly: one of his  tricks is to be "caught out" praising Lord George to himself while supposedly under the impression that the lord was sleeping. He is a hypocrite, who affects mildness while egging the Gordon rioters on, especially his own little band of trusted helpers. Even Maypole Hugh, who is no fool, is taken in by such strategies as Gashford's "nothing" speech, containing gems such as "When one of them was struck down by a daring hand, and I saw confusion and dismay in all their faces, I would have had you do nothing - just what you did, in short". His manner is described by one of his minions as "so awful sly". He foreshadows other Dickensian villains of the same embittered, upwardly-mobile type. Like Carker, he "smiles as if for practice". Like Uriah, he is "angularly made, high-shouldered, bony, and ungraceful". According to his enemy Geoffrey Haredale's account (from which the quote about the hand-licking is taken), Gashford seduced his benefactor's daughter, married her, and then broke her heart "with cruelty and stripes". This is the kind of proceeding both Uriah and Carker would heartily approve of (except for the stripes bit, which is a bit unsubtle when there are more cunning ways of making a girl miserable).

Gashford should, in short, be close to being my ideal baddie. And yet, and yet... He doesn't really come alive. He's more a collection of admirably villainous characteristics than a real character. We never really learn what makes him tick. He's not quite as much of a join-the-dots-villain as Bitzer in Hard Times - once you've made up answers to all the open questions about Bitzer's motivation, chances are you'll have ended up with a completely new character - but all the same, there are mysteries about the way Gashford acts, and not because Dickens means him to be mysterious (like Tulkinghorn), but more, one feels, because Dickens didn't really care that much about him as a human being. Why does Gashford encourage the riots? What has he to gain from them? Why does he hate Haredale so much - is it merely because Haredale humiliates him publicly by denouncing him and striking him down, or has Haredale crossed him in his past (of which he knows so much) as well? Why would Gashford go so far as to try and abduct Haredale's niece Emma, a girl he's most likely never set eyes upon? The author's answer would perhaps be an irritated "Why? Why? Because he's a total bastard!" But that just isn't good enough.

And so, for once, the most enjoyable villain in a Dickens novel is the dandy rather than the social climber. Sir John Chester (Mr Chester until about half-way through the book, but the title suits him) is marvellous fun, and somehow completely different from other Dickensian dandy villains such as Steerforth, Henry Gowan and Harthouse. Yes, Sir John is of high birth, disdainful of those more plebeian than he is and physically lazy, but unlike the often listless gentlemen mentioned above, he keeps his mind active. He has two goals: his own comfort, to be brought about by pimping his son to an heiress, and revenge on Haredale, whom he dislikes (plausibly enough) because he, Sir John, has done Haredale wrong in the past. Sir John pursues these goals with a single-mindedness and cunning that would honour the most diligent bourgeois villain in the Carker mould. And he has great style. Because of the nature of the good characters in Barnaby Rudge and their weakness for moral platitudes, Sir Johns runs rings around them without breaking into a sweat. Haredale's boorishness, Edward Chester's honourable speeches, Gabriel Varden's uprightness - they are all made to look sligthly ridiculous by the worldly and sham-amiable Sir John. When Haredale thunders: "Mark me [...] If any man believes [...] that I , in word or deed, or in the wildest dream, ever entertained remotely the idea of Emma Haredale's favouring the suit of anyone who was akin to you [...] he lies", Sir John responds blithely: "it's extremely manly, and really very generous in you, to meet me in this unreserved and handsome way. Upon my word, those are exactly my sentiments, only expressed with much more force and power than I could use". Try beating the wits of a man who can dress an insult up as praise as well as that. It can't be done - Sir John has to be brought down with violence at the end.

I was going to dwell a little on the likeability of Maypole Hugh - the most sensible rioter you are ever likely to meet, and fond of Barnaby, too - but I see I've already gone on at some length about the Barnaby baddies. Time, I think, for a little lie-down Sir John-style, maybe with a mug of hot chocolate. Too bad I don't have Lord Chesterfield's letters in the house for perusal.