torsdag 31 januari 2013

Predictions (i.e. wild guesses) for Downton Abbey series four

Yes, I know, there's been a great deal of Downton-blogging lately. But as they are starting to film the new series soon, I thought I might as well air my predictions before there are any leaks about what actually will happen in it. Well, that is my excuse, anyway. After this, I'll try to save the Downton topic - barring the odd coy reference - until the series starts again, but I can't promise success.

So here are some possible plot lines which might lie in wait for us in series four:

Close but no cigar for Lady Mary and Branson: They are both bereaved, both single parents, both have a vested interest in modernising Downton and both have fond memories of Matthew. It would seem a perfect match and nicely ironic, considering how Mary tried to dissuade Sybil from having anything to do with "the chauffeur". And yet... Emergency update: I originally claimed that Branson and Mary wouldn't get together because it was forbidden by law to marry your dead wife's sister, but I've since checked, and it appears this law was repealed in 1906. Nevertheless, I don't believe they'll become an item: it would be too much frowned upon by the family. However, they will grow closer and become firm friends.

Thoroughly modern Edith: It was made pretty clear in the Christmas special that Lady Edith will become her newspaper editor's mistress. Unlike Mary, she has no reason to harbour any warm feelings for the institution of marriage. The affair will probably be conducted from the Crawley family's London residence, and possibly Edith will become pally with the bohemian crowd, like Elizabeth in the original Upstairs Downstairs. A Bloomsbury connection could come in handy for later plot developments. I'm not sure the newspaper editor will turn out to be Edith's one true love, though: she'd better double-check that "mad wife" story.

Jimmy gets entangled with Lady Rose: There's nothing inevitable about heartbreaker Jimmy ending up crossed in love himself: one of the refreshing things about Downton is that it's no cautionary tale. Surely, though, this storyline is too good to miss, what with a ditzy young well-born woman looking for adventure in the house. I doubt if Jimmy would fall in love with Rose in earnest, but he might fancy himself as the new Branson, and be severely shaken when she lets him drop. She's no Sybil, and will not sacrifice her future for a cute manservant. Callous Jimmy-handling will lead her into more manservant-trouble, though, as the jealous and protective Thomas is bound to launch a nasty anti-Rose campaign. He may find a surprising ally in Ivy.

Rose's suitors generate drama:  The Earl and his lady will do their best to get Lady Rose married, as they have more or less promised her parents. Consequently, Downton will be teeming with her suitors. At least one of them will most likely end up falling for Mary. Also, I shouldn't be surprised if one of the suitors turned out to be a really bad lot: it's been a while since we had an upstairs Downton villain.

Anna and Bates start a family and this time there will be no birth trauma. Downton viewers are in dire need of some family bliss, so Anna will deliver a baby without anything bad happening to the child, the mother or for that matter the father. But there will be some smaller problems: she will have to stop working, and the family must live on Bates's pay alone. Will they leave Downton and buy a small hotel, as Bates imagined so lyrically they would in series two? Will they heck. This couple will only leave Downton feet first and are, let's face it, a shoo-in for the positions of butler and housekeeper once Carson and Mrs Hughes retire (if Anna can find help with the children). But let's not get ahead of ourselves: this won't happen until the very last Downton series, which hopefully is a long way off.

Alfred leaves - but may possibly fall for Daisy first There's a Swedish schoolgirl rhyme that goes "I'm in love with a guy who's in love with a girl who's in love with a guy who loves me" (it rhymes in Swedish, but that doesn't make it poetic). The footman-kitchen maid crushes of series three roughly followed this pattern, except Jimmy didn't fall in love with Daisy (that would really have brought things full circle, considering her infatuation with Thomas in series one). These love intrigues came across as a little tepid compared to Thomas's doomed passion for Jimmy, and possibly nothing will come of any of them. Then again, if Daisy hangs in there, even thick Alfred might realise she's a better catch than feather-brained Ivy. For one thing, she will eventually take over her father-in-law's farm. That's a "career in food" waiting right there, and if Alfred himself can't see it, his loving auntie will and may push him in the right direction.

A housemaid and/or a nursery maid make their mark: Since Anna became a lady's maid, we haven't seen a lot of the Downton housemaids, excepting bolshie Edna in the Christmas special. It's time one of them moved to the foreground again. Also, with two babies in the house, it would be surprising if we were to see nothing of what goes on in the nursery. The nanny might emerge as a new lead character among the servants, but my money's on the nursery maid.

Thomas and Miss O'Brien are reconciled and once again become the perfect double act: Well, a girl can dream, can't she? With bone of contention Alfred leaving, why should they go on fighting? Neither is very "popular downstairs", and they need every ally they can get. Besides, they wrote to each other during the war, for pity's sake. Surely a friendship like that can't just die? I realise, though, that everything hinges on how Miss O'Brien tackles any danger that might be heading Jimmy's way. If she harms Thomas's precious Goldilocks, then the bridges are truly burned.

onsdag 23 januari 2013

Don't let's be nasty to the Victorians (part three, approximately)

Is it all right to give up on a book that is actually well-written and cannot be accused of being boring? I've asked myself the question since laying aside Sleep, Pale Sister by Joanne Harris after 70 pages, and not feeling any great urge to pick it up again. Joanne Harris is a good writer, no doubt about it, and she can draw you into a plot with great skill. I enjoyed both Gentlemen and Players and the historical yarn Holy Fools, which came with the added bonus of a charismatic villain. In Sleep, Pale Sister, Harris sets her story in Victorian England, which should be a great match. Or maybe not, because Harris doesn't seem to "get" the Victorian mindset, or want to. Her male protagonist is full of complexes of - you guessed it - a sexual kind which he has picked up during a - you guessed it again - cold and loveless childhood as the son of a clergyman. He is a painter of fierce tigers in the jungle and a forerunner of impressionism. No, I jest. He is a painter of sentimental pictures of fair maidens, likes to be compared to the Pre-Raphaelites and is a member of the Royal Academy, and consequently, it is hinted, is Not Much Good. He marries one of his models, whom he has watched over and groomed since her childhood to be the perfect woman, but shrinks when she shows a streak of sensuality and fails to make her happy. And for this he must needs be punished.

So, that is quite a lot of prejudices about Victorian gentlemen rolled into one, then. As with Mr Timothy, I hesitated to buy Sleep, Pale Sister because of the blurb text, which this time states that the heroine (called Effie, just like Ruskin's wife - hmmm) "must finally plan her revenge". Why? Why must she? Isn't hubbles wretched enough as it is, without his wife going all vindictive on him? In the circumstances, you could understand  an elopement. But revenge, as if the poor sap had wilfully done her wrong and had to be paid in kind? The pursuit of happiness is one thing, malevolence surely another.

I realise that I've become far too sensitive to anything close to Victorian-bashing after reading too many boo-those-uptight-but-secretly-perverse-Victorians novels. Here, again, is why we should be less sanctimonious about the poor Victorians:

They weren't half as uptight as we think: Yes, their sexual morals were stricter. And there were Victorians with strange hang-ups: Dickens was obsessed with virtuous young maidens; Gladstone became somewhat over-enthusiastic about saving prostitutes; poor old Ruskin was freaked out by the whole marriage-consummation thing. But they were not representative of the whole age: their quirks were their own, and no worse than individual neuroses and obsessions which we encounter today. We need go no further than to Queen Victoria herself to see another side of the Victorians' supposedly "inhibited" love life. She and Prince Albert were not the world's greatest parents, but as for marriage consummation? Not a problem.

We're no better: The main accusation against Victorians is that they were killjoys who put a ban on innocent pleasures and, as a consequence, got hooked on less innocent ones. Well, we're nice ones to talk. Self-abnegation in the name of virtue may be out, but other reasons for hankering after a hair shirt have popped up in its place: health, environment, good parenting, even (bizarrely) political causes. The simple truth is that no-one is likely to be better off just because you deny yourself a little, or even a lot, of what you fancy. But mankind is strangely reluctant to get its head round this. Remember those boycotts of French wine because of France's nuclear tests somewhere in the Pacific? I recall meeting someone who still boycotted French wine a long time after the tests had stopped and who expected us to be impressed by her steadfastness. When it comes to pointless self-denial, we offer the Victorians a pretty good match.

Sensualism can be tyrannical too: I admit it reluctantly, I who often find myself warbling "I belong to the earth, I belong to the wind, and the rain, and the hills, and the heeeatheeer". Indulging one's creature comforts is one of life's great pleasures, but it is not all of life. The wish to find a spiritual side of life as well is part of what makes us human, and not to be dismissed out of hand. Harris is clearly an advocate of sensual pleasures: good for her. But the heroine in Holy Fools couldn't understand why anyone would wish for more from a convent life than companionship and planting potatoes, or why it mattered if the convent saint never existed as long as she constituted a suitably life-affirming figurehead. It is this blank incomprehension of non-earthbound matters that makes me feel ill at ease and less than hopeful that Sleep, Pale Sister will give its neurotic anti-hero a fair shake. Enjoy the good things in life, by all means, but let's not force French wine down anyone's throat.

Perhaps I'm being colossally unfair. I've not even read a hundred pages of Sleep, Pale Sister. It may turn out to be a subversion of all the usual stereotypes belonging to novels set in Victorian times: maybe the wife will get the comeuppance she deserves, maybe there will be mercy for the husband. But somehow, I think not, and I'm not wild about finding out.          

onsdag 9 januari 2013

All that glitters is not high-quality costume drama

I know it is unfair to pour sarcasm over a series after only having watched the first episode. Firstly, few series get in their stride until the second episode at least - anything can happen. Secondly, the series in question - the BBC's The Paradise - is so clearly made with an audience like myself in mind. This is not one of those period dramas - unlike The Bletchley Circle, another BBC drama I trudged through recently courtesy of Swedish Television - which carries a whiff of disdain with it for what the genre usually has on offer. Instead, like the eager sellers of its department store, The Paradise really wants to give the customers what they want. Glitter, dresses, romance, a large cast of characters involved in more or less epic plots, a hero and heroine who have to overcome obstacles to end up together, that is if we really want them to? Oh, yes, Madam, I'm sure we can manage that. In view of this unashamed courting of the costume drama vote, I really should let the series find its feet before commenting on it.

Except commenting is irresistible. Partly, it's because I have very little else to blog about. I started the new year with repeats, rereading a Jude Morgan novel, which was faintly self-indulgent, and rewatching Downton Abbey from the very beginning of series one, which was and is downright unhealthy in my current frame of mind. (Is the gobbiness of Bates just a tiny bit annoying, or is it just me? It's just me, isn't it?) The only other alternative I could see would have been to have a good grumble about the aforementioned dreary Bletchley Circle, which looked from the description as if it could have been a sort of combination of Sherlock and Call the Midwife with a bit of Foyle's War thrown in - Fifties setting, clever women with lipstick solving crime by being incredibly brainy - but which turned out to be a gloomy tale of a serial killer of the worst kind.  It didn't really seem tempting. Another reason for blogging about The Paradise - and the main one - is that it promises to be such complete codswallop.

Where to begin? Maybe with the hero, or main male protagonist or whatever one should call him. The story is set in late-Victorian London, and a lot of the plot hinges on the supposed charisma of the owner of the department store where the fresh-faced heroine, newly arrived from Scotland, finds employment. The department store is the eponymous The Paradise, the owner is called Mr Moray, and just about every woman in the series lusts after him. "If there is a more attractive man within a hundred miles, I'll kiss my husband", coos the friend of the conniving heiress who wants to bag him. Well, sweetheart, you can start kissing your hubby right now. It was always going to be tricky to convince contrary viewers like myself that a man over whom such a fuss is made is really that attractive. And, true enough, I don't understand Mr Moray's charm at all. He seems to me to be an oily, self-fancying mountebank with a ghastly beard. Not that I always disapprove of oiliness, or mountebanks, or self-fancying for that matter. Maybe it's the beard that clinches it. I wouldn't buy so much as a handkerchief from him. His worried partner is somewhat cuter, but then he doesn't have much competition: menfolk are, understandably considering the setting, thin on the ground.

As to the other characters, I wonder if one can even call them that. Yes, here things may improve. There is not much room for in-depth characterisation in a first episode. Still, the worrying thing is not only that there seem to be only function characters about, but that they fulfil their functions so badly. The Ladieswear department in the store is run by a Miss Audrey, who is meant to be the Dragon of the piece. But she is not given any withering put-downs, nor any real authority. All she does is witter on about this and that being "a sin", reminding one of Miss Lane in Lark Rise and her "one weakness". I felt tempted to tell her, in my best Downton-baddie accent, "give it a rest, luv, you're clearly not up to this kind of thing". The Jealous Rival is little better, and as for the Pampered Heiress - good gracious. Patrick Malahide, as always, raises the tone as the doting heiress-dad, and there is a perfectly serviceable minor villain in the form of a snooping old employee on the sidelines, but otherwise it is a stilted and unconvincing affair. I'll not dwell on how it's not a patch on Downton - who would have thought otherwise? But The Paradise also suffers by comparison to the BBC's own costume dramas. For instance, the new Upstairs Downstairs, though not as good as the old one, was still a very good effort and a great deal better than this tripe. I must say this much for The Paradise, though: the settings are sumptuous. I'll keep watching, just for the pleasure of being sarky about it. At the end, though, I'll be very surprised if there is one single character I will care a smidgen for.