Is it really sisterly to defend Rebecca de Winter?

On my latest trip to London, I fell for the temptation of buying Sally Beauman’s Rebecca’s Tale in a second-hand bookshop, though I had doubts about the supposed purpose of the novel as I’ll later explain. It’s a combined sequel/prequel of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Most of it takes place long after du Maurier’s novel, where the protagonists – who are either new characters or played a secondary part in the original novel  – try to piece together what really happened to Maxim de Winter’s first wife, the glamorous Rebecca, whose body was found in a sabotaged sailing-boat twenty years previously. Did she commit suicide or was she murdered? More importantly, they try to find out who Rebecca really was. Was she a slut or a victim, or a bit of both?

For those who have read du Maurier’s novel  (and be warned if you haven’t, because I’m going to give most of the original plot away) there are few surprises as to how Rebecca died. What’s more interesting is the back story that Beauman has invented for the first Mrs de Winter, who finally – through an old notebook – gets to tell a chunk of her own tale. The book is a gripping read: du Maurier’s plot was good drama to begin with, and Beauman spins it out in an intriguing way, taking good care of the original characters (except the second Mrs de Winter, who makes a cameo appearance: Beauman’s description of her is ungenerous and unbelievable considering the development of her character in Rebecca). The new ones past muster too: the historian Grey, who narrates part of the book, is quietly likeable.  But in one way, my initial doubts remained, which were: do we really want to hear Rebecca’s side of the story?

The main twist in the original novel is that the famous Rebecca – so beautiful, so admired, who did everything well from entertaining to gardening to interior decorating  –  was really a piece of work who made her husband, moody aristo Maxim de Winter, miserable. And a very satisfying twist it is. The novel  is narrated by Maxim’s second wife, whom he marries shortly after Rebecca’s death. She is taken to Manderley, his country seat, and is there confronted with Rebecca’s ghost at every turn. Everyone more or less tactfully makes clear to the poor girl that she is very much second best and that they can’t really see what Maxim sees in her. He must have married her in haste, on the rebound, and is probably already regretting his choice. The housekeeper Mrs Danvers – devoted to the late Rebecca – is a particular thorn in the heroine’s flesh. Then the truth is revealed: when Rebecca’s body is discovered, Maxim confesses to his wife that he killed her – after extreme provocation – and that far from being fathoms deep in love, he hated his cheating, taunting wife. Mrs de Winter’s reaction is triumph. “Rebecca had not won. Rebecca had lost.” She helps with trying to cover up her husband’s crime. They succeed, but at a price.

It’s been a while since I read du Maurier’s novel, but I remember feeling so deeply for the poor heroine that I, like her, was relieved instead of shocked when it was revealed that Maxim was a killer. What du Maurier so skilfully does in Rebecca is to paint a picture of the nightmare ex-wife – from a woman’s point of view. Rebecca is most things you would not want your loved one’s ex to be. Her beauty and accomplishments are just of the kind that fuels one’s own insecurities. And, to top it all, she’s cruel, teasing and a thoroughly bad lot. Do I feel any sisterly need to rescue her from Maxim’s patriarchal narrative? I do not. 

I don’t really understand the fascination some women seem to have with characters that are especially designed not to appeal to other women. The wish to redress Rebecca’s reputation resembles the ongoing obsession with the first Mrs Rochester. In both cases, I suspect that the husband’s role plays a part: we hear most of the story of the first wife through the husband, who is of course deeply partisan. What’s more, both Maxim de Winter and Mr Rochester are somewhat problematic heroes to begin with (though Rochester is vastly preferable in my opinion, and no murderer). They have not treated their new love very well: should we really trust them?

However, in both cases, what the husband claims is backed up by the facts and by other witnesses. The first Mrs Rochester first tries to set fire to Rochester’s bedroom, then she attacks her brother and sucks his blood, then she sets fire to the whole building. What else does she have to do to convince readers she’s off her trolley? As for Rebecca, the glimpses we get of her character from others than her husband – including people who loved and admired her – are also sinister. Beauman manages to cast doubt on some of the things said, especially by Rebecca’s no-good cousin Favell, and I admit that her scepticism against Maxim – long dead in Rebecca’s Tale – is understandable. Whatever the provocation, shooting a woman you believe is pregnant is not what the Germans would call “the fine English way”. But her Rebecca failed to raise my sympathy. I’m still on the second Mrs de Winter’s team – Rebecca is, and remains, a piece of work. 

2013 in retrospect: little new, but more of the same

When looking back at the wish list I made at about this time last year, I must confess that few of the wishes have come true, at least not completely. Still, I'm not that disappointed. 2013 proved to be the year when there weren't many brand new delights forthcoming within my sphere of interest: there were few new costume dramas; no new TV adaptations of Dickens, though there was one film (I'm afraid I haven't watched it yet - what, Great Expectations again!?); and not a whisker of a new villain. However, the old favourites kept delivering.

Who needs new costume dramas - or for that matter a new villain - as long as I have Downton, which triumphantly survived Dan Stevens's defection and will be back (hooray!) with a fifth series in 2014? I'll Downton-obsess more next year (ideally, I'll be able to hold off until the US has had a chance to view series four) with a follow-up of my predictions for the series and some new speculations. Suffice to say, for now, that the demise of the heir did not, as I had feared, lead to any loss of focus for the series or turn it into a spin-off of itself. In fact, the estate's future was more in the forefront than ever, and I for my part thought that Miss O'Brien's disappearance left more of a void in the story than Matthew's death. But then I would.

Downton hasn't started a trend for similar costume dramas as I hoped - Mr Selfridge was the drama that came closest to using the same winning formula - but it does illustrate how costume dramas are taking a leaf out of the book of other series. Instead of mini-series adaptations of classic works, we get long-running affairs, where the story is based on an original script and is made up as the series goes along (yes, The Paradise and Call The Midwife are nominally based on books, but I suspect not that strictly, or surely they would have run out of material by now). I suppose this is partly what people mean when they talk about the TV series as "the new novel" and draw parallels to the serial publication of the old Victorian three-deckers. As long as a TV series is running, there is hope that the plot will turn out the way we wish, and that the script-writer/s will hear our pleas for our favourite characters. After all, Dickens was sometimes influenced by the reactions of his readers. Whereas if there was finally a new TV adaptation of Dombey and Son, no amount of Facebook likes would save Carker from the chop, and there would never be a series two were he returns to wreak havoc once again on the lives of Mr. Dombey and Co.

On the other hand, gripping new stories which can be spun out for a number of seasons aren't as easy to come up with as all that. The big advantage with an adaptation of a classic is you've already got a winning story. When it's over, it's over, but while it's running it will deliver. I wasn't too impressed by The Paradise, and am well able to wait until Swedish Television chooses to air the next series. As for The Village, I will keep avoiding it as long as possible. I'm not even sure how long Mr Selfridge will last - it all depends on series two. It's time for the characters to stop being enigmatic and start engaging out attention and sympathy in earnest. Now Dombey, if it were ever made, would only last for one series, but for that one, if handled with Davies-like efficiency, it could become a real hit. And Carker - good-looking in his feline way - fits into the current conventionally-handsome-villain trend (did you see Morse's envious rival in Endeavour? Phwoar!) admirably.

Ah well, let's leave the depressing subject of The Costume Drama Adaptation That Never Was. When it comes to the year's novels, I really was disappointed. Nothing new from Jasper Fforde - not even a Dragonslayer book, let alone a new Thursday Next - nor from Jude Morgan. Joanne Harris let me down with her take on the weren't-the-Victorians-awful genre, and even Wilkie Collins's Hide and Seek failed to thrill. I had to go out and hunt for new authors who could deliver yarns, and sometimes I got lucky. Sadie Jones's The Uninvited Guests, Sarah Waters's Fingersmith and Jane Harris's The Observations, all of which I discovered this year (though only The Uninvited Guests is reasonably new - the others are fairly recently reissued reader favourites), were great reads. But there were many misses to: Park Lane and The Chatelaine, for instance, both of which looked so promising and Downton-y, were novels I failed to warm to. I hope 2014 has better things in store.                            

Flashman: A guy thing?

It is always irritating when you live up to a female stereotype. I'm an enemy to theories about Typically Female Behaviour, mostly because they mention so many characteristics that don't fit me at all (caring, maternal, home-building etc.). But in one respect, I have come to realise that I'm girly in the most maddening, cliché-ridden way. It's sad, but I have to face it: in the same way that I don't fancy war documentaries, or programmes about fast cars, or sports - my tepid and ignorant football interest whenever there's a World or European Championship going on is almost worse than nothing to the real football fan - I really am not that into derring-do.

It was the first volume in George MacDonald Fraser's acclaimed Flashman series, called simply Flashman, that made me realise this sad fact. It was impossible to fault in any other way. It was pacy, well-written, and often funny. I liked the dastardly protagonist, who rises to fame in the army in spite of being a blackguard and a a coward (in fact, mostly because of it). This was more than I expected, as cads aren't really my kind of thing villain-wise, and Flashman certainly belongs to that category. True, he's far from being in danger of becoming my New Crush, but I approved of his common sense and his way of admitting his ignoble deeds without bragging about them. Add to this the fact that the book was obviously well researched but wore its learning lightly - the English troops' misfortunes in Afghanistan in the 1840s is deftly woven into the plot, so it doesn't feel too much like empty exposition. Nevertheless, there is derring-do, and there's military history, and it's just not my kind of thing.

Even if Flashman subverts the premises of the typical Boys' Own Adventure, the market is still the same as for the more po-faced, straightforward books about granite-jawed, highly-principled men who love honour and their country. Flashman is the opposite of all that, but he gets up to much the same things: fighting and sleeping with beautiful women (I don't mean he fights the beautiful women: well, not always). He reaps the rewards of an adventurous life, without actually having to display any bothersome virtues. I can see how that must seem vastly appealing to day-dreaming male reader, and I would heartily recommend the Flashman books to derring-do lovers: the way downright silly "honourable behaviour" is lampooned is rather healthy. But, still. If fights and beautiful women are not something you day-dream about, then where are you?

In my predictably womanly way, I like relationships - or, to put it bluntly, gossip - and so the tales of Flashman's conquests were for the most part amusing reading (he's pretty nonchalant about them, though: don't expect any carefully constructed Regency Romance-style sex scenes designed to make you hot under the collar). What I remember best from the Afghanistan disaster is the scene where an up till then irrepressively dignified English bigwig desperately tries to save his younger brother's skin: "Run, baby, please! Run!" become his last words before he's hacked to pieces. The brother didn't make it either.

That will stay with me long after I've forgotten the name of the Afghan pretender who was trying to seize the throne from the English puppet monarch (wait, it was Something Khan. Akbar?). Women, eh?

Tyringham Park or a series of unfortunate events

Aaah. I got my Downton DVD fairly early and have now gobbled up the whole of series four (except the Christmas special, which hasn't aired yet and is not on the DVD). But I'll hold off any further extensive Downton blogging for a while - suffice to say that, although the series didn't quite fulfil the promise of the first episode in every way, it's still superlative viewing. I only have to think "If we're playing the Truth game..." to feel in a better mood. Not that all the storylines are mood-enhancing, mind you.

Even when Downton is at its most harrowing, though - and it can be - you have the feeling that gloom and doom won't last forever. As they say in Shakespeare in Love, things will work out well in the end. How? I don't know - it's a mystery.

There's no such consolation in Tyringham Park, Rosemary McLoughlin's historical novel which I finished reading a week or so back. Here, on the contrary, you have the feeling every time things seem to be going tolerably well that a new calamity will soon befall the novel's luckless heroine Charlotte. I felt severely cheated by what I imagined would be a fairly light-hearted romance cum family saga. The problem is, I'm not sure that I had any legitimate cause.

True, the cover sports a pensive woman in period costume (early 20th century) standing in front of a grand landed estate. Who wouldn't think "romantic family saga"? On the other hand, it also displays the puff quote "The Thorn Birds with a dash of Du Maurier's Rebecca" - a reminder that not every sweeping tale necessarily has to be upbeat. Du Maurier does come to mind when you're reading Tyringham Park: there's romance and melodrama, all right, but with a good dose of melancholy thrown in, and the non-pluckiness of the heroine recalls the insecure narrator of Rebecca. And yet, and yet... Du Maurier's books have covers showing dark, wind-swept landscapes, with maybe the odd ominous, pensive-woman-free building peeping through. They don't feel like false marketing in the same way.

What bugs me the most, I think, is the enjoyably easy style of the Tyringham Park. It's much more well-written than a lot of offerings in the same genre - and then it spoils it all by being so depressing. At least, if it had been turgid, I would have had the sense to stop reading it in time. As it was, I followed the gloomy Charlotte - and she has a great deal to be gloomy about - from one sorrowful scenario to the next. I confess I haven't read the children's books series A Series of Unfortunate Events, but the title easily came to find when reading about Charlotte's lives and loves. People who think that sad and horrible events are "truer to life" than their opposites should read this book and take its lesson to heart: the disasters that befall Charlotte ar as unlikely and far-fetched as the most sugary ending to the most romantic fairy-tale (if not more, in the case of her marriage and how it comes about). In a life containing far too few ladders and far too many snakes, Charlotte looks like ending up just a touch higher up on the board than when she started, and to be fair, she has her "I'm Mrs de Winter now" moment. But then, she droops again. The book is set in Ireland, and it called to mind to the postcard where all the world's great religions are summed up by variations on the phrase "Shit happens". The summing-up for Catholicism is: "Shit happens because you deserve it". You have a sense that Charlotte would agree.

I do wonder what readership the novel is meant for. Don't fans of depressing stories like them to be set in, say, a grim council house block at the edge of an industrial town in the Eighties? However, no genre should be a prison, and if the combination of landed-estate goings-on, the secrets of an upper-crust interwar Anglo-Irish family and abject misery seems appealing, by all means give Tyringham Park a go. It's pacy and the prose is easily digestible. Just don't expect it to end with a sun-dappled cricket match.      

High on Downton

"I know a girl, a girl with so much luck/She could get run over by a two-tonne truck/Then brush herself off and walk away/How she does it - couldn't say"

The song "I know a girl" from Chicago wasn't written in 1922, of course. Even so, you could have sworn from Mr Bates's expression at the end of episode one that its lyrics, amended to "I know a guy" etc., were going through his mind. His disgruntled face alone would have been enough to buoy me up for the whole week. And then there was so much more!

Yes - finally, series four of Downton Abbey has started airing in Sweden, and has had such an uplifting effect on my mood it is almost ridiculous. Honestly, what's their secret? Subliminal messages? A drugging effect transmitted through airwaves? All I know is that I'd been feeling rather listless for a while, not caring to read anything too taxing or to watch anything much. But now, post-Downton, I feel full of beans, ready to start watching those 50-minute shows for ordinary workdays again - Charlie's Angels, Fame, you name it - and to get to grips with some of my Ambitious Book Projects, not to mention those impulse buys of historical novels set in Ancient Rome, Renaissance Italy etc. Life is lovely, life is sweet - and in two weeks' time approximately, I will get a whole box of  Downton series four. As long as this addiction lasts, November is in danger of becoming one of my favourite months.

In my defence, it is a very good show, and series four started highly satisfactory, with all the ordinary Downton juiciness. So what was so great about it? Let me count the ways. The show didn't close its eyes and pretend Matthew never existed: instead, the late heir was treated with the respect he deserved. His death was seen to have serious consequences, quite rightly, and both Mary and Mrs Crawley were suitably eaten up by grief. This being six months after Matthew's demise, attempts were made to snap them out of stalking around in black in a dazed fashion, but the snapping proved far from easy. Granted, I would have expected Lord Grantham to have been a bit more down in the mouth still - after all, he had come to look on Matthew as a son - but all in all, this was a write-out which was handled well and not unduly hurried, which is not something you can take for granted when vanishing series characters are concerned. There was even a bit of self-irony concerning the unceremonious way in which Matthew was dispatched. Mary pointed out how terrible that it was that her husband, "after all he went through in the war", should die "in a ridiculous car accident". Yeah, Julian, we see, and we forgive you - leastways, I do. There was never going to be a good way of getting rid of Matthew.

The write-out of Miss O'Brien I was less convinced by. After all, one of her humanising traits was her loyalty to Lady Grantham following the by her much-regretted Soap Incident. I couldn't quite believe that she would up and leave in the middle of the night, leaving a only a note behind and her ladyship in a fix. If she was sick of Downton - and, after the events of series three, you could see why that would be - I'd imagine that she would be above board about having found a job elsewhere and serve out her month. Still, her hurried departure (to Lady Flintshire aka Mrs Shrimpie in India, which made every kind of sense after the Christmas Special) ushered in a promising storyline as the oblivious Lady Grantham ended up hiring a very unsuitable lady's maid indeed.

Elsewhere, the characters remained consistent but not congealed. Edith, say, has come a long way since her embittered spinster tactics in series one, but her development is a credible one. Thomas, bless his villainous socks, still picks a quarrel with everyone he imagines even remotely challenges his position, but he's become better at it. The delicious hypocrisy with which he bad-mouthed the unwisely bossy Nanny West ("I wouldn't have spoken out only... with a little girl and a baby boy put at risk...") would have done even Miss O'Brien proud. Clearly, the otherwise meaningless dust-up with O'Brien in series three had the fortunate effect of sharpening his claws, besides giving him oodles of leader of the pack appeal. I don't think that black-marketeer in a pub would be able to fool him now.

The Downton Old Guard generally are doing great, Mrs Hughes being a special boon as always. The real challenge for this series will be in how it handles the relatively new characters who joined the show last series: Lady Rose upstairs, and Ivy, Jimmy and Alfred downstairs. They are at a marked disadvantage compared to the characters we've got to know and (in most cases) love through three whole series. The downstairs newbies aren't helped by being locked in a storyline that does them little favours, i.e. the footman-kitchen maid daisy-chain of attraction (though strictly speaking, Daisy is an assistant cook now, not a maid). What Daisy sees in lumpen Alfred is still a mystery. I can understand, given her past experiences, that man-wise she would want to forego the dashing in favour of someone sweet and kind to whom she could be special - a William surrogate with whom she could get things right. But Alfred is neither dashing nor sweet and kind. Ivy, for her part, though essentially goodhearted (which is more than you can say for the footmen), seems a bit of a flighty piece who is not too unhappy to have Alfred as a back-up beau in case she has to admit defeat with Jimmy. As for Jimmy, he comes across as a prize brat; so what else is new? 

Still, who knows, these characters may well mature and develop like the Old Guard did before them and, with time, command our sympathy. When it comes to Alfred, though, I really can't imagine a storyline which would make sense of him. But maybe Fellowes will?               

From Time to Time - Not quite Downton for kids (but very nice)

When you see there's a film around starring Maggie Smith and Hugh Bonneville, scripted by Julian Fellowes and obviously taking place in historical times, you could be forgiven for thinking that its main market is meant to be the Downton crowd. And superficially, there are similarities between Downton and the time-travelling tale slash cosy ghost story From Time to Time. After all, it contains these elements:

• A matriarch with a touch of steel and a heart of gold (Maggie Smith)
• A benevolent but somewhat clueless patriarch (Hugh Bonneville)
• An atmospheric country house that's belonged to the same family for centuries
• A wise housekeeper
• A romance between a morally upstanding servant (gardener, in this case) and a loyal maid who stands by him in times of distress
• A handsome, unreliable manservant

Apart from Smith and Bonneville, there are other familiar Downton faces. Allen Leech (Branson) plays the righteous gardener, and I'm sure I glimpsed Mrs Bird in the kitchens. But what a Downton fan suffering from withdrawal symptoms must bear in mind when watching this film is that it's really in another genre entirely. From Time to Time is a classical children's story, and the adults above serve mostly as a backdrop for the adventures of the child protagonists. It is big on atmosphere, negligible on character development. It contains tales of fires, hidden passages and lost treasure and has more in common with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe than with any costume drama featuring grown-up concerns such as marriage, inheritance, thwarted desire, work rivalry and, er, cricket.

The central character, a boy called Tolly, is sent to stay a while at his paternal grandmother's house, a grand place called Green Knowe. It is the end of the second world war, and Tolly's mother is trying to trace his father, who is missing in action. Tolly refuses to admit that his father might be dead and is initially suspicious of his grandmother, who didn't think his mum was good enough for his dad (and still doesn't). However, grandmother and grandson bond over an exciting story from Green Knowe's history, especially after Tolly starts to see ghosts of the Regency folk that his grandmother's told him about. He is even catapulted back in time and witnesses key scenes of the drama. He befriends the then family's youngest child, a blind girl called Susan, and her companion, the plucky runaway slave boy Jacob, and is able to be of use to the goodies generally. Will he be able to find the lost jewels that could save his grandmother from selling the family home?

Yup, it's that kind of story - sweet, morally straightforward, and conveying the sense of magic when another world (this time, the past rather than a land containing witches and somewhat pompous lions) opens up before a weary child hero. It's adapted from the book The Chimneys of Green Knowe, apparently one in a series of well-loved children's books about the house in question. I love children's adventures like this, but sometimes the clear-cut Little-Lord-Fauntleroy morals of the piece riled me, rather. I mean, a blind girl and a plucky runaway slave boy? Get away - could the dice be more loaded? Needless to say, I felt some defiant sympathy for Susan's bad big brother Sefton because 1) his Hindley-like jealousy of Jacob is not entirely unfounded (and I think that spur-nicking was jolly mean) 2) he is played by Douglas Booth who really, truly, is a looker 3) the odds are so ludicrously stacked against him 4) he's called Sefton. Gettit? As in Uncle Sefton in A Family at War? Bonneville's character's shrewish wife has a case too, in my view: she is stuck in a country house with neighbours who despise her (she's a Dutch diamond merchant's daughter) while her husband is away most of the time. The moment hubby comes home, he undermines her authority and foists a nobly saved foundling on her. No wonder she feels like bitching - and she bitches a lot (do unhappily married couples really bicker as much as they do in films and on telly? It sounds exhausting).

For all my reflex-like defence of the baddies, though, I must admit that they are paper-thin characters, and this applies even more to the villainous butler Caxton. He doesn't have a character at all. The only unexpected thing about him is that he is played by Dominic West - not my type, but admittedly a far cry from the eye-patched, livid-scarred Bad Servants you otherwise come across in tales like this. But he has no inner life, no motivation - except primitive greed and, at the end, an even more primitive vindictive streak - and no sliver of a back story. How did he become a butler in such comparatively young years? Why does he pal up with bad boy Sefton? Is he really the lover of the lady of the house, or is that just gossip? This and many other questions remain unanswered. You could argue that this is supposed to make Caxton cooly mysterious, but my guess is we're just not meant to care. Here, the film's roots in a children's book become apparent. Caxton is the bad guy, and that's all we need to know. Still, better an empty husk of a sinister manservant than no sinister manservant at all.

I really enjoyed From Time to Time, as will those who like stories in the style of the above-mentioned Lion, Witch, A Little Princess and Little Lord Fauntleroy. But Downton it ain't.

Sweet and sour

'Tis the season when every pair of jeans you put on feels like a corset. It's quite simply not possible to stint on anything that makes life more comfortable when it's cold, wet and grey outside and the work inbox is continually full. Like food and chocolate. Merely the thought of cutting down on these delights instantly makes me hungry. Reading a book called The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris doesn't help.

First things first, though. I finished Gillespie and I last weekend and, though I was still very impressed by the author's story-telling, Harriet's personality doesn't become less of a problem as the stakes are raised and the reader starts to realise all she might - or might not - have done. On the contrary. She's a character who sticks in the mind, all right, but not in a pleasant way, and I'm not sure I found her altogether convincing. Because she faithfully produces damning testimonials against herself, then adds blustering and lame self-defences, you are inclined to believe that she has done most (if not all) the terrible things she's accused of. But if she has, that means she has at times been both clever and manipulative. The narrator of the "memoirs" and diary that make out the contents of Gillespie and I, though, appears both aggravating (so it's hard to imagine her successfully ingratiating herself left and right) and more than a little stupid. All right, you could argue that delusional people - and Harriet clearly is - can still be cunning in their own way. But I didn't quite buy it. Still, nothing wrong with the writing, and the climax of the story is pacy and gripping. I'll watch out for Jane Harris's next novel, but I hope it will be about something else than one-sided devotion bordering on - or striding across the border of - obsession. Both The Observations and Gillespie and I contain the neat twist that it's the object of devotion, rather than the smitten protagonist, who gets clobbered. It makes a change as fictional characters who are infatuated are mostly the ones who suffer most from their vain hopes, while the person who lets him/herself be loved remains pretty much unscathed. Nevertheless, another, less depressing theme would be nice.

And so on to Jenny Colgan's The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris, which isn't quite so carefree and frothy as it sounds (that would be hard), but still a satisfyingly feel-good read. There is romance in it, of course, but its main focus is on Having An Adventure and Broadening Your Horizons. Both the book's main character Anna and - forty years earlier - her French teacher Claire go to Paris for the mentioned adventure-having and horizon-broadening. What I like about Anna's storyline is that it doesn't make her exciting new life in Paris seem easy-peasy. It doesn't turn a blind eye to the fact that moving outside your comfort zone can be - well - uncomfortable. Anna's mostly work-related stresses, humorously told, are more engaging than Claire's traditional Paris love story in the Seventies. Learning to make great chocolate somehow seems more important than finding the perfect fella, which is rather unusual in a chick-lit novel. Another good book-soufflé maker, then, to be remembered when I look for light and airy travel fare - or just a pick-me-up after some overly serious Ambitious Book Project. But now I really must go and have some non-gourmet, industrially-made standard milk chocolate which would have the characters in Loveliest Chocolate Shop shake their heads in disgust.                           

Time to make peace with cosy Cranford

I have ambivalent feelings towards the BBC's acclaimed Cranford adaptation. As I remember, it was made at roughly the same time as the magnificent Little Dorrit adaptation by Andrew Davies. Little Dorrit was a disappointment to the BBC ratings-wise: Cranford, on the other hand, was a big hit. The powers at be at the Beeb supposedly thought "Aha, so this is what the costume-drama lovers want now", and started churning out similar stuff: From Lark Rise to Candleford - a poor man's Cranford - and of course Return to Cranford. At the same time, other kinds of costume drama seemed to go into a decline. Such adaptations of other 19th-century classics than Cranford as there were were only of the most well-known books, which had been adapted a zillion times before, and the new versions weren't that remarkable. There was a conscious move away from "bonnet dramas". With the exception of a woeful Oliver Twist, Dickens was avoided like box-office poison up until the bicentenary, when he couldn't be ignored any longer. Adaptations of Dickens and Trollope that Andrew Davies had been working on were axed (yes, we're back to the old Dombey trauma). But hey, we costume-drama lovers were served a lot of small-town shenanigans with quirky characters, so that should keep us happy, right? Wrong.

Somewhere, I've been carrying a grudge towards Cranford ever since it did better than Little Dorrit. I partly blame it for the direction BBC costume drama took during the years that followed. Now, I'm starting to realise I've been unfair. Judging by the "bonnet drama"-hostile comments at the time, the Beeb would probably have moved away from 19th-century epics in any case, and without Cranford we wouldn't even have had the consolation prize of gentle (bonnet-filled) comedy set in rural England.

Because it is quite watchable. I've been rewatching Cranford the past weeks and was at first disgusted by its tameness. Right now, UK viewers are enjoying new Downton episodes, and what do I get? Cats swallowing lace. Old biddies helping the doctor out with candles for a surgery. And all this in a hole somewhere where the railway is seen as a great threat! Really. Then the quiet drama started to grow on me. It is, after all, very comfortable autumn viewing, and not entirely devoid of dramatic incident - there are even a few more deaths than I care for (seriously, the kid - was that necessary?). The acting is universally superb. Judi Dench is great, of course, but well matched in the acting stakes by the likes of Eileen Atkins, Imelda Staunton (clearly having a ball as Miss Pole) and Julia MacKenzie. There is some romance, even if there's a decided lack of menfolk. The new doctor and the local carpenter seem to be the only bachelors around the place (no wonder the gossips manage to come up with three prospective fiancées for the doctor): otherwise, widowers provide the best hope for some suitably autumnal love scenarios. As for villains, though, there are absolutely none. I remember judging Return to Cranford more favourably than I otherwise would have done (I've not had time to rewatch it yet) because it included the at least marginally beastly Lord Septimus. In the original, though, everyone is pally in a close-knit, rural way. Wicked intrigues are for Londoners, and quite beneath the residents of Cranford.

But I'm not so shallow that I can't enjoy a drama without a villain in it. Am I? Roll along Return to Cranford. But don't think it will stop me longing for the second of November (when, at last, Downton season four starts here in Sweden) with, as the Earl would say, every fibre of my being.                                

Wanted - a likeable and reliable narrator

Autumn is a tough time. There's a lot of work to be done and little excuse not to get on with doing it. Therefore, you long to spend your free time as cosily as possible, curled up on a bed or sofa with oceans of tea and a book - or TV programme - that gives you a warm, glowing feeling. Easier said than done.

I was longing for a safe bet reading-wise after Tigers in Red Weather, which was accomplished but not my thing, and so I started on the second novel by Jane Harris, whose Observations I liked so much. Only, sadly, with her new book Gillespie and I she has decided to do Something Completely Different. All right, so not completely. We're still in 19th-century Scotland. One of the themes is still deep, largely unrequited affection. But whereas Bessy - though a self-confessed liar - was an engaging heroine and frank in her own way, the narrator of Gillespie and I, Harriet Baxter, is both unreliable and hard to like.

This is intentional, of course. For the last century or so, there has been a craze for The Unreliable Narrator. And like so many ideas, it sounds brilliant on paper. It is pleasant for the reader to have the rug pulled out from under his/her feet now and then. That's one of the enjoyable things about Christie whodunnits with their clever, surprising but seldom cheating solutions. And who should be in a better position to fool the reader than the narrator his- or herself?

Only, unreliable narrators aren't always such a treat. For one thing, we want to know what actually did happen, and that's hard to achieve when you can't believe in your one source of information. And then, for another, unreliable narrators tend to have one problem. Like Harriet Baxter, they are, quite often, not very nice.

It may be unsophisticated, but the prospect of spending 600 pages in the company of someone I'm not remotely fond of is not something to gladden my heart. Of course, I could do what I normally do - ignore the author's supposed intention and determinedly root for a character I'm supposed to despise. But with Harriet, it's plumb impossible. Even though I'm disposed to feel kindly towards spinsters in their mid-thirties who have strange crushes, women called Harriet (I like the name Harriet, mainly for Middlemarch- and Doctor Who-related reasons - remember Harriet Jones, Prime Minister?), and for that matter, people called Baxter (as in the Efficient Baxter in the Blandings books), I cannot appreciate her. She is officious, irritating, ponderously ironic instead of witty, and so unlike the forthright Bessy as it is possible to be. At most, I can feel sorry for her in her neediness - her childhood, if her horrid stepfather is anything to go by, was plainly a love-starved affair, and her (by herself unacknowledged) love for the oblivious and already happily married artist Ned Gillespie is going nowhere fast.

What makes matters worse is that the other characters are also hard to sympathise with. Ned's wife Annie is all right, but the rest of the Gillespie family is trying in the extreme, and Annie herself doesn't help matters by not being able to control her daughters (troublesome Sibyl and whiny Rose). It is quite a while before Harriet gets to know her admired Ned properly: his family tends to get in the way of both the conversations about art she longs to have with him and the production and promotion of his pictures. As for Ned Gillespie himself, he remains rather a shadowy figure. Good-humoured, yes, but not so remarkable that you can understand why anyone should be spending time with his hopeless family for his sake.

It's a frustrating read, and on top of it all, you know from the start that the whole thing is going to end badly. Harris can still spin a plot all right, but without a single truly attractive character, I'm not sure I want to know how it all unravels. As for the unreliableness, I get irritated rather than feel clever when I catch Harriet out with deceiving the reader (and herself). With a truly unashamed liar as narrator, we wouldn't know if he or she was lying through his/her teeth, and then the whole conceit would be no good. Instead we get scenes like the one where Harriet claims that she doesn't remember the first minutes of conversation she has with her stepfather when they see each other after a long while. There are two possibilites: either she truly doesn't remember, or she does but found the experience too unpleasant to relate for some reason. In both cases, you wonder why she mentions the forgotten minutes of conversation at all. It is merely a device to make the reader think "Aha, there's something going on here that we don't know about".

Maybe it's time for the honest, reliable narrator to have a renaissance? And maybe he or she could be likeable too, while we're about it?  

The abandoning of core viewers, or film/TV triangulation

Apparently, viewers who really like Westerns despise the "hero's romance with hard-bitten saloon girl" plot. Earnest female teachers don't go down so well either. In fact, I've heard it said that the more women there are in a Western (I suppose we are talking women as love interests here, not Calamity Jane), the more rubbish it is. I've always found this view a little harsh, but I'm starting to understand it. I like romance. But I'm not the right audience for Westerns - in fact I find them mind-numbingly boring. By forcing in a bit of romance in between shoot-outs, face-offs and bar fights, the film-makers are trying to ingratiate themselves with viewers that don't really like Westerns much to the detriment of real Western fans who want tough-guy action, not a lot of sissy cooing. The reason I'm beginning to see their plight is because now it's happening to us rom-com and costume-drama lovers.

It started with the rom-coms. I've not seen a decent one in ages, and that's because so many of the rom-coms who are released now have an ingredient I just can't abide - "gross-out" comedy. This basically means toilet humour, plus jokes about all other kinds of disgusting bodily functions and body fluids you can think of. How did jokes that are primarily enjoyed by teenage boys end up in films primarily aimed at girls of all ages? There's a political concept called "triangulation", which officially means you position yourself between or above notions of left and right, but in practice tends to mean that you ditch your party's principles in order to poach voters from your opponent. "Triangulation" is great when your political enemies do it - sure, your side loses some votes, but it's worth it to hear your opponents recant on nearly every single thing they've championed for decades, if not centuries. And then, it starts to happen with your crowd, and suddenly it's not so fun anymore. The gross-out takeover of rom-coms is the film equivalent of political triangulation, and not a million miles away from the saloon girl strategy. As saloon girl romances are meant to draw in the wives and girlfriends of Western-loving men, so "gross-out" gags are meant to keep the boyfriends of chick-flick lovers happy and make those cinema outings with their gel less of an ordeal for them. The problem is, by courting the laddish vote, the cinema-goers are ruining rom-coms for those who really enjoy them and have always enjoyed them. I still haven't seen the hysterically praised Bridesmaids because there's reportedly a food-poisoning scene involving vomiting and diarrhoea in it. Seriously? They put a scene like that in a film about bridesmaids? And I haven't even mentioned the trend of letting the hero in these kind of films be a slacker or man-child with limited appeal to a female audience. OK, now I have.

This sort of strategy shouldn't work, really. Why should lads who enjoy gross-out jokes watch rom-coms when they can watch a similar comedy without too much silly love stuff in it? And why should real rom-com fans watch this kind of ghastly hybrid at all? The problem is, as in politics, giving your faithful followers a kick in the pants and pursuing their complete opposites seems to pay. Don't ask me why. Perhaps core viewers, like core voters, are loath to wander off: you'd rather vote for a party that is nominally or historically on your side rather than for one that has always considered you to be a first-class twit, and maybe the same applies to films. For my part, I'm boycotting gross-out rom-coms, and hoping enough rom-com lovers have the same idea until this awful trend finally stops.

Maybe it's paranoid of me to see a similar movement in the costume drama field. But consider the BBC's newest brain-child: Peaky Blinders, about British gangsters in the interwar years. Apparently, they had razors sewn into their flat-caps and could quite literally blind people with them. Now, I'm not saying that costume dramas are necessarily as much of a chick thing as rom-coms, but what with these gangsters, sooty mills and muddy villages, it does seem as if the current trend is for everything that does not appeal to the average fan of Jane Austen dramatisations and Andrew Davies's adaptations of Bleak House and Little Dorrit.

Is it any wonder that I - and many with me - obsess about Downton? That we're waiting impatiently for the new series for the same amount of time than it takes to have a baby,or even longer (in Sweden, we won't get it until November at the earliest, and the poor Americans don't get to see it until January)? Just what or who is going to replace it in our affections? Some bleedin' geezer with a razor in his cap?               

(Human) tigers vs rom-coms: result 0-1

For once, an Ambitious Book Project has disappointed me. I remember the enthusiastic reviews for Tigers in Red Weather. They made it sound like one of those novels which you start fearing it will be faintly worthy, and then find out is a really exciting read. In these cases, you can almost feel the reviewers in question (who have to finish the books they're writing about, let's not forget) heaving a sigh of relief. They've actually been allowed to read something they enjoy - and still get paid for it. The puff quotes on the cover reinforce the impression that this is a ripping yarn with literary merits. "A delicious pleasure" (The Sunday Telegraph) and "Immensely gripping" (The Guardian) are only two of them. So when I spotted a second-hand copy costing only 4 pounds on my latest London trip, I bought it, thinking I'd made a bargain. The word "tigers" was in the title too - always a bonus.

Well. It's not bad, exactly. The annoying thing is that it's interesting enough to keep you reading - just. But it's not that enjoyable. While you don't hate the characters, you don't care that much for them either. The narrative is in third person but from different characters' point of view. The narrative voice remains more or less the same, though: detached and careful of detail. I grow impatient with it, as the characters grow impatient with each other. There is an atmosphere of tetchiness which is catching. Yes, the book's got something. But "a delicious pleasure"? Nah.

In contrast, one of my self-indulgence reads came up trumps. It's just a soufflé-light chic lit novel, true, but this isn't as easy to get right as people imagine. I know, because I've read some dire chic lit in my day. Ali McNamara's From Notting Hill with Love... Actually, about a (you guessed it) rom-com-obsessed heroine who's trying to figure out what love and life is all about, does exactly what it sets out to do: this is reading as comforting as creamy milk chocolate without too much healthy cocoa in it. I felt a bit guilty buying a book with such an unashamedly chic-ingratiating title, but I've no regrets. The trouble is, now I've finished it, it's back to the tigers (who are only tigerish women anyway).

What do you do with books that are just that little bit too good to give up on? Reading time is precious, and I feel as if I'm wasting it - at the same time, I can't ditch every novel that isn't a hundred per cent perfect, can I? I'd end up with an apartment full of one-third-read novels. In any case, I blame The Sunday Telegraph and The Guardian. Oh, and Metro: Where's that "intoxicating cocktail of money, sex, heat, boredom and beauty" you promised me?              

Behind-the-scenes dramas are great - but there are limits

Yesterday, I watched the - by now - no longer brand-new film Topsy Turvy (made 1999) about Gilbert and Sullivan and their creation of The Mikado. It was too inert for my taste and far too long, but I still enjoyed parts of it. I've never actually seen The Mikado, but I know some of the tunes pretty well: I've grown up with flowers that bloom in the spring - trala - and have nothing to do with the case and with people who shake hands with you, shake hands with you like that. More importantly, though, I've been stage-struck since as far as I can remember. When I was a girl, I wanted to be an actress (that or a lawyer - don't ask me why, this was before Tulkinghorn and Co.), and the dream stayed with me until I was finally convinced of its impracticability by a combination of lack of talent and other, more fruitful creative interests. But I have always been and always will be a sucker for anything connected to acting and the stage.

This makes me the ideal audience for behind-the-scenes dramas. I'm an avid viewer of those making-of featurettes that are now blissfully standard on most DVDs. True, they are a bit tame. You don't get people involved in a film or prestigious TV series rubbishing each other or admitting to tiffs on set - understandably, as that would make them look pretty shabby. But still, it's fascinating stuff. I must admit to a shamefully one-sided interest in the writing and acting part of things. When you think of all the people involved with making successful films and TV series and all the effort they've put in to make your experience as enjoyable as possible in unobtrusive ways - cameramen, the costume department, composers and sound mixers, the special effects department, those who cut the whole thing into shape and what have you - it really is too bad of me, but there it is. What I want to see is the director, producer and/or script-writer discussing the story and characters, the casting and the actors, plus the actors in their turn discussing much the same thing (and ideally displaying suitable Character Loyalty by talking about their particular character as if he/she were their best pal on earth). My interest is not wholly character-based: I also enjoy "deleted scenes" features, but only if there is a commentary by the director or similar explaining, firstly, why the scene was deleted and, secondly, why it is included in the DVD feature. It's the mechanism of storytelling that's the appeal in this case, and you get a healthy respect for those involved - I have seldom seen a deleted scene which I felt would have made the film/TV feature better if it had been included.

But, as I said, as to juicy gossip, there is none. Curious Georges like me are reduced to over-interpreting anything the least bit out of the ordinary in the friendly, gushing speeches of cast and crew. We have no way of knowing if our fantasies are correct, though. And here's where the fictional behind-the-scenes drama comes in. Here we get loads of gossip, and we can at least imagine that some of the backstage gripes and romances may have real-life counterparts. I just love the in-jokes about endearingly vain actors and writers, and the characters' commitment to putting on a good show despite all squabbling. Shakespeare in Love is an example of a behind-the-scenes drama that works beautifully. I still giggle every time I see Ned Alleyn taking it upon himself to criticise the performance of the actor who plays Tybalt ("Are you going to do it like that?"). What's more, he's absolutely right.

Topsy Turvy is no Shakespeare in Love, though. There are quirky characters and mildly interesting anecdote, but no real drama. You realise why the makers of Shakespeare in Love had to invent a completely fictional love story for its hero. And even then, that story still risked being upstaged by what is actually performed - Shakespeare and his Viola aren't a patch on Romeo and Juliet. In Topsy Turvy - though it's fun to see how Gilbert must have tailored the comic opera's parts to the talents of the actors of an existing troup - you sometimes wonder why they didn't just do a film version of The Mikado instead.

Some expressions from a villain-lover's glossary

While waiting for the next villain crush to hit me (and to be perfectly honest, I'm not looking ultra-hard for a new one at the moment), I can while away the time by defining some expressions -  related to the theme of villains and villain-loving - which I will probably use in my blog posts sooner or later (some have already had an airing or two):

Villain in distress: formed on the template of "damsel in distress". Describes a villain at bay, showing a surprising vulnerability which goes to the heart of seasoned villain-lovers like myself. While it's annoying, in a way, that bad guys so often land in deep trouble, it is a win-win situation for them when it comes to impressing the fans. If they fight back until the last, like Uriah Heep, they come across as plucky. If, on the other hand, they break down completely, the supporter reaction is "Aaah, poor baby". Either way, the hero will end up not looking his best if he insists on gloating over his enemy's downfall. The villain in distress particularly might actually gain support from readers/audiences who would not normally root for him, so a canny hero treads carefully. The classic example of a villain in distress is Bulstrode in Middlemarch, and Eliot is wise enough not to pit her hero Lydgate against him but rather to tie their fates together. The novel's other hero Will Ladislaw is foolish enough to make Bulstrode cry at one point (unforgivable!), but he is noticeably absent from town when the banker's world really starts to fall apart.

Leader of the pack appeal: As in the line - full of profound truth - from the hit by the Shangri-Las: "They told me he was ba-ad, but I knew he-e was sa-ad, that's why I fell for - the leader of the pack". This expression is of course similar to the previous one, and a villain in distress always has leader of the pack appeal in droves. But there is a subtle difference: leader of the pack appeal is not dependent on a certain situation, it is a state of mind. There are bad guys, and plenty of them, who are unhappy all the time, even when they're apparently successful. Triumphs are enjoyed so feverishly there is little real happiness in it. The leader of the pack villains carry a secret sadness with them wherever they go. If only we, their trusted admirers, could be there and nurse their wounded souls! Then things would have been quite different - or not. Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Ralph Nickleby in Nicholas Nickleby are good examples of villains with leader of the pack appeal.

Beagle boy appeal: As in the quote from an Uncle Scrooge adventure by Don Rosa which goes roughly like this (always allowing for that it's been translated into Swedish and then back again into English): "It felt somehow honest to cross swords with those Beagle boys. They looked like villains, were villains and were proud of it." This well sums up the appeal of the unashamed, self-confessed bad guy. In comics, he'd be the one to chuckle "Thanks for the compliment" when someone exlaims "You scoundrel!" In more serious contexts, the brush strokes won't be quite as broad as that, but the idea is the same. A beagle boy villain revels in his villainy and invites us to revel with him. Daniel Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop is a beagle boy villain, and perhaps the only one of Dickens's main villainous characters who is practically without any hint of leader-of-the-packiness. I may be mistaken, because I only know them from reputation, but I wager that soap baddies like JR Ewing are beagle boys too.

You'd think that leader of the pack appeal and beagle boy appeal would be each other's opposites, but it's not as simple as that. Each type of villainy carries with it its own problems: leaders of the pack risk getting too soppy and sensitive - lethal for a villain - and beagle boys risk shallowness and vulgarity. And so as often as not, a successful villain blends leader of the pack appeal and beagle boy appeal. It's called having your cake and eating it, and it's something villains are very good at.

Villain surrogate: Surprisingly rare character considering his usefulness: someone who displays the same style and cynicism as a villain, but is eventually revealed to be on the side of common decency after all. See Jaggers in Great Expectations.

High-prestige/Middle-prestige/Low-prestige villains It would be hard to find someone who has never, ever rooted just a little bit for a villain. But there are differences as to how far the great multitude are prepared to go in this regard. I have already mentioned the problem with high-prestige villains on this blog: they are universally popular, and so are just that little bit unsatisfactory for us hard-liners. Without the ordinary, unimaginative punter condemning our dearest love with words like: "Ugh, he's a creep", where exactly would we come in? Anyhow, you know a character is a high-prestige villain when no-one is the least bit surprised at your confessing that he's your favourite character: the reactions will rather be "of course!" and "mine too!". Count Fosco is and remains the prime example.

If you admit to liking a middle-prestige villain, there will be a few raised eyebrows, but you won't be in a minority of one. There are others who think like you, but they are a select group, like a club. Take Uriah Heep: most people may think he's awful, but he did get a rock group named after him. Most villains - and in my view the best - are to be found in the middle-prestige category.

If you admit a weakness for a low-prestige villain, someone is likely to call the nearest lunatic asylum. These are the really hard cases, deficient not only in morals but in style as well. They are not glamorous enough to encourage fan clubs: they're lacking in both leader of the pack and beagle boy appeal, in fact in any sort of appeal. And yet: such a challenge! Monsieur Lheureux in Flaubert's Madame Bovary is a low-prestige villain, a consciously deglamourised version of the Greedy Businessman Scoundrel beloved by writers such as Balzac. All the same - just a hint of the balzacian lynx remains in his make-up. And if we villain-lovers don't take pity on the runt of the litter, who will?                

What's the appeal of the ranting rebel?

I think I know which of my own taboos I will break next. Next time I fall in love - or, to be precise, develop a weird villain crush - the object of my affection will probably be an idealist who likes to explain at length his plans to save the world. Because, hitherto, I have not been able to see the point of this kind of bloke at all. Clearly this is a barrier waiting to be broken down.

It is, by now, impossible to find any one common denominator among all my villain crushes, except that they have been villains. But there is one thing most of them share: supreme selfishness. If pushed, they may perform a selfless act for someone they love (think of Soames, for instance). But sacrificing themselves to a higher cause? Nope - never, and quite right too. This down-to-earthness is one of the reasons I like villains so much. They cut through the waffle - or sneer at it and parody it to great effect - and concentrate on essential things. Like looking after number one.

Of course, there have been exceptions to the rule. Javert and Bulstrode are both idealists, and Chauvelin's exertions to capture the Scarlet Pimpernel are, at least at first, powered by his wish to be of service to the Revolution. But in each of these cases, what I've admired has been the style and personality of these men rather than their beliefs. I don't believe as fanatically in law and order as Javert (though anarchy certainly holds no appeal for me, besides not having to work), and I don't think people should be strong-armed into a grim and unmerciful kind of faith even by a scrumptious banker like Bulstrode. As for the Reign of Terror, we-ell, I suppose it got of hand just the teeniest bit. But no one could fault the way these gentlemen go about their business, with cunning (Chauvelin), powerful efficiency (Bulstrode) or just bare-faced panache (Javert).

The normal template for an idealist heartthrob in the world of fiction is nothing like Javert and Co. anyway. One good example, which made me think of the subject, is a character in the book I'm reading at the moment. It's called Park Lane and should be right up my street, as it has as its central characters a maid and her young mistress in a rich London household in the 1910s. An upstairs-downstairs perspective; balls; hard-to-find eligible matches; handsome (if annoyingly blameless) footmen - I ought really to be wild about it. Somehow, though, I'm not finding it as easy going as I'd hoped, and this is largely because I can't really warm to the novel's two heroines. They seem each in their own way very silly girls, and I find it hard to care when they get into completely self-inflicted trouble. The upstairs girl, Beatrice, is especially idiotic, more like a fourteen-year-old than a twenty-one-year-old. Both girls are full of admiration for Michael Campbell, the maid Grace's brother whom Beatrice encounters when attending a suffragette rally.

Michael is a texbook idealistic revolutionary, and describes his ideas of a new world order to anyone who cares to listen. He is full of glowering resentment towards the upper classes, and far from being put off by this, upper-class Beatrice thinks his rants are top hole. She even offers to type his glittering opinions and to find a newspaper publisher who will print them.

What is wrong with these women? Show me a self-important numbskull droning on about the people's revolution (while not so much deigning to wash up his own tea-cup, in most cases) and I'll show you a flock of women sitting entranced at his feet. Whenever a surly rebel turns up in a novel - or film or TV production for that matter - you can be sure one of the female protagonists will be making a bee-line for him. And I don't get it. I simply do not.

All right, perhaps it's partly, or even mostly, to do with the fact that the grand ideas that these rebels tend to spout hold no appeal for me. Also, I am a woman of the 20th century - we were taught to be wary of Utopias which hinged on the mysterious disappearance of a considerable part of the populace. The century's hard lessons weren't available to Beatrice, of course, but still it's hard to sympathise with her starry-eyed acceptance of both Michael's railings against her own kind and the violent actions planned by the group of hard-line suffragettes she's joined.  There is no excuse for committing foul deeds in the name of creating a better world. If it demands such things of you, how good can it be?

And so I throw down my gauntlet to future villains. Make me care for a wild-eyed social reformer who commits his villanies for the good of humanity, and you will truly have achieved something new.

TV bits and pieces

Blimey. I've forgotten how tired work makes you, and how much time it takes out of your day. I certainly don't feel up for any in-depth discussion of anything, which means this will have to be one of those bitty blog posts about all kinds of things like:

Richard II - well done, BBC: I know I've been hard on the Beeb since... ooh, forever now. Since they axed Dombey, in fact. So it's only fair to mention that I was extremely impressed by the first part of The Hollow Crown which I watched during my vacation. I was no fan of Ben Whishaw's Sebastian Flyte in the mainly disastrous film version of Brideshead Revisited (don't get me started!), nor of his journalist Freddie Lyon in The Hour. They both shared a trait of whinyness, which was a pity, considering Whishaw's nervy good looks - I really wanted to like him. He was great as Richard, though - still not exactly a stoic, but able to skewer his usurping cousin Bolingbroke (Rory Kinnear, satisfyingly conscience-stricken from the first) with wry conviction. First-rate acting and verse-speaking all round: yep, if it has to be high-brow, it should be like this rather than like the soporific Parade's End.

"New grit"? No way! As if The Village wasn't bad enough. Now another gloom-and-doom-and-indignation-politics costume drama has aired in the UK, called - wait for it - The Mill. Well, at least it appears to do what it says on the tin. Apparently, the series starts off with a child worker getting his hand mangled and a woman worker being "sexually assaulted", as reviews primly put it. The events in the series are based on records from a real mill, so this, like, really happened. Well, yes, I'm sure it did. I wouldn't be surprised if similar things have happened at my workplace during its long history, but not, I believe, at the same time and as an everyday occurrence. I strongly suspect the series creators of foul-cherry-picking, milking their source material for grim details which they can serve up to their viewers, so that everyone can have a good boo and hiss over the nasty industrialists. This is the second costume drama in a short time which I have no desire whatsoever to watch even five minutes of. And this time - to be fair to the BBC again - they are not the culprits. The Mill was perpetrated by Channel Four - a commercial channel. What's worse, 2.8 million saw the first episode, which is more than the channel's usual audience at this time. It's still only half of the audience for the new Upstairs Downstairs - which was deemed a failure viewer-wise - but still there is talk of a trend of "new grit", away from cosy dramas.

Let's face it, no-one does costume drama quite as well as the Brits, which makes it so upsetting when they're side-tracked like this. They could spare a thought for their international viewers. Do they honestly think we're going to go wild about some smug, mill-owner-bashing, mud-drenched misery fest? Will we watch it in millions? Will we visit the sites, buy the calendar, like pictures of the cast - all the cast - on Facebook, and swooningly comment on what great personalities they are and how marvellously they are acted? Not bloody likely. We don't want the "new grit", thank you very much. We want the new Downton.

Three is a magic number: A far cry from ambitious Shakespeare-watching, I spent my two last-but-one vacation days glued in front of the airiest and least demanding TV viewing possible: Lace and Lace II. Then again, it might look simple to come up with light and frothy entertainment, but I bet it isn't. As I've mentioned before, formulas must be handled in the right way, or the soufflé sinks. For instance, Shirley Conran settled for exactly the right number of girls for her schoolgirl pact in Lace. Two would have been too few. Four, and the story would have lost focus. Three friends with different characters and backgrounds (though all with families able to afford a pricy finishing school in Switzerland): that works beautifully. Other sure touches include an underplaying of the abandoned daughter's revenge plans in favour of more light-hearted aspects of the plot, such as the heroines' school-girl antics. All this, and a creepy chauffeur too - no wonder I started work in a relatively good mood.                                 

“Anti”-characters – hard to like, but can work sometimes

I’m happy to say that Fingersmith proved riveting until the end, largely thanks to its cunning plot – so twisty it’s hard to comment on – and the resourcefulness of its anti-heroines. I would call them anti-heroines, though, rather than heroines. Both Susan aka Sue and Maud can behave like perfect cows. Their reluctant and, for them both, inconvenient love for each other is engaging, but partly because it fitfully renders them capable of thinking of someone else but themselves. Sue has one more person she cares for – her foster-mother Mrs Sucksby – but Maud’s is not an affectionate nature. She is the hardest to warm to, the festering lily to Sue’s weed. But though there is a refreshing frankness to Sue’s selfishness, it is no less real than Maud’s. Both girls can sweep aside comparably innocent characters or use them for their own ends without any qualms to speak of. They don’t become noticeably mellower either as the story progresses. But they are good at getting out of scrapes, I’ll give them that.

The portrait of  the villain, a rogue nicknamed Gentleman, is typical of the tricksiness of the novel. From the moment he appears and proposes an unspeakably vile plan to Sue and the band of thieves she lives with, you think that he will represent the true force of darkness in the book,  compared with whom Sue will seem almost guiltless. In a novel where almost everyone is on the make, though, you soon have reason to wonder whether Gentleman is indeed the worst character around. Be that as it may, he’s not particularly appealing, and though his ostensible role at first is that of the fortune-hunting seducer, he behaves – when off-duty – more like a Sikesy thug than like a Wickhamish smoothie.  My villain-loving heart remained unmoved, though there was fun to be had from Gentleman’s patent lack of interest in either of the two girls, which makes for an unusual triangle relationship.

Normally, I’m not that fond of the use of anti-heroes and anti-heroines. I don’t much see the point of them. After all, a hero can have all sorts of weaknesses and humanising faults and still be a hero. An anti-hero tends to be like a bumbling hero, but without the conscience part. He tries to make his way, while not considering others, and fails. Which makes him fall between two chairs, in my view: why should the reader care for someone who has neither the good qualities of a hero nor the charisma of a villain? There is a similar problem with the anti-heroine: just look at the awful Madame Bovary.

Of course, there is a definition problem. What separates a bumbling hero from an anti-hero? What separates an anti-hero from a villain in distress, a type of villain for whom I am an absolute sucker? Is Pip in Great Expectations a hero or an anti-hero? Is Bulstrode in Middlemarch a villain in distress or an anti-hero? After all, in spite of his shady past, he doesn’t really wish the protagonists of Middlemarch any harm (except possibly Farebrother, and he is a minor character), and rule one for a villain tends to be that he should constitute a threat of some kind to the story’s nicer characters.

For my part, I’d call Pip a hero, and Bulstrode a villain in distress. The difference between a hero and an anti-hero is, for me, a question of fundamental decency. If a character has a core of decency, then no matter how matter how many mistakes he makes, I’d still see him as a hero. Much has been made of Pip’s supposedly “snobbish” behaviour, but only because he makes so much of it himself. He is most ashamed about his own state of mind at different stages: his crimes are for the most part “thought-crimes”. Had he been an anti-hero, he would not have had these qualms.

As for the difference between an anti-hero and a villain in distress, it is harder to define. I should say that it is not a question of success rate – most villains fail to reach their aim, just as anti-heroes do, because the story demands it – but a question of the potential of success. Anti-heroes are natural losers:  they can certainly wreck people’s lives, but not by design. They merely mess up (and can prove irritatingly self-pitying and unrepentant when they do). Whereas villains, even the ones who get into trouble and become picturesquely anguished, are and remain a credible threat: they’re carnivores who might very well lick their wounds and rise again, if they are not redeemed in time. A temporary set-back certainly won’t keep them down for long.

I realise that the anti-heroines of Sarah Waters don’t quite fit into this pattern. They’re not losers, but on the other hand they can’t be called villainesses, as the whole story is about them, and the biggest threat they constitute are to each other. They’re not, in my opinion, good-hearted enough to be called heroines. Maybe the main thing is that in this context, and much thanks to the central love story, they work.

Unexpected ripping yarns

Summer holiday! Meaning not much blogging, and mostly about books. Shiny new costume dramas are seldom launched in the middle of the summer (though Swedish television has started  sending The Paradise now) – in fact, few of  them get launched at all. I was in London for a few days and caught one of the episodes of The White Queen, which seems to be as good as it gets just about now. It’s a thrilling story, and the women were feisted  up convincingly, but the dialogue was very portentous, and always about politics. I kept half hoping for Elizabeth Woodville to say something like “Oh, and when you go, would you mind taking the trash out?” to her husband Edward after one of her morale-boosting, you’re-the-king-for-us-speeches. OK viewing, and the viewpoint is thankfully Yorkist, but it doesn’t beat one of the good old bonnet dramas of yore. As for the one remaining HMV store in London, the pickings were meagre. The closest I got to a costume drama there was buying an adaptation of Gormenghast. I remember testing it for about five minutes when it was aired on Swedish television and finding it silly, but potential villain-crush candidates don’t grow on trees nowadays. By this time, I’m ready to stand a great deal of fantasy nonsense for a sighting of one. (I’m not against fantasy in itself, but it is a tricky genre.) 

On the other hand, I bought a load of books in London – it doesn’t look like I’m going to do much reading in Swedish this year. I started with light reads, then when I came to the second-hand bookshops I was more ready to be ambitious and optimistically go for books like Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child (well, when it’s only 4 pounds…). Probably, the Ambitious Book Projects will turn out to be the most worthwhile ones, if I ever start on them. The hunt for the Perfect Light Read sometimes feels like the hunt for a white unicorn.

One of my best reads lately was, in point of fact, bought as an ABP, at least partly. The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones takes place in a dilapitaded country house roughly during the Edwardian era (the exact year is never stated), but it has not been touted as a country-house-during-Edwardian-era novel. Reviews have instead highlighted the Tales of The Unexpected angle of the book. As far as I know, the D word has not been mentioned by either marketing people or reviewers.

Sure enough, the Tales of the Unexpected angle was well handled, if not as unexpected as all that. But the book is also a highly satisfying miniversion of a country house drama. There are the spoilt, dark-eyed, attractive youngsters in their twenties, one boy and one girl. There is their eccentric, artistic younger sister. There is the  grande dame of the place with a few shady sectrets, the housekeeper who knows more than she’s telling, the self-made potential rich suitor for the daughter, the good-girl friend and her brother, who has grown up surprisingly handsome… All in all, a promising cast to spring the nasty surprise of a bunch of third-class (supposed) train-crash survivors on. A man from first class must be accommodated as well; at first, he seems the easiest to assimilate, but he turns out to be creepier than all the third-class folk put together. There’s a lot coming-of-age to be done all round, and lessons to be learned, but there is also a great deal of straightforward romance. Recommended.

I’ve now started on Fingersmith by Sarah Waters – one of those ambitious four-pound-buys – and it really is a ripping yarn. Admittedly, I have long been deterred from testing Sarah Waters by sheer prudishness. I thought – and believed my impression to be confirmed by the good but somewhat overly racy adaptation of Tipping the Velvet – that there would be more lesbian sex and shenanigans in Waters than there actually is. And man-free raciness really is wasted on me: I prefer a bloke or two to be in on the action (actually, the woman is more optional). In fact, raciness is thankfully absent – the only sex scene so far being more touching than graphic – and the problematic relationship between the two female protagonists has the universal quality that I believe the author was aiming for. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Fingersmith continues to be good, in which case I’ll have found a new source for great reads, and by a prestigious author too. I’m still not sure about ever trying Tipping the Velvet, though.   

To write pastiche or not to write pastiche? On balance, not.

I've been a bit on the fence when it comes to pastiches. I confess that I hate historical novels set in medieval times to be written in a Ye Olde Style - as if medieval times weren't strange enough already. But when authors try to write in the style of Jane Austen, or the Victorian novelists, I do see what they're aiming for. If some of the best novels around are written in a certain style, I can understand if you want to emulate it. "Finding your own voice" is all very well, but if you could sing in perfect imitation of Kiri Te Kanawa, who would ask for "your own voice"? I'd love there to be even more Dickens novels, so if someone were to be able to pull off writing a novel or two exactly in the style of Dickens, I don't think I would complain.

The thing is, though - can you pull it off? I remember thinking Jane Dawkins succeeded in capturing a credible Austenesque tone in Letters from Pemberley and More Letters from Pemberley, but otherwise, Austen's style seems rather harder to copy than sequel-writers think, and the best "Austenuations" are mostly those written in the writer's own style. As for Dickens - well, he is called The Inimitable. And though he has been successfully (and funnily) parodied, I doubt that his style could be captured and held up for a whole novel, by anyone but the man himself.

What I'm trying to get at is that if pastiche is not 100 per cent credible as "the real thing", it comes between the book's content and the reader. It is, quite simply, an extremely tricky genre, and I'm not sure that attempting it instead of writing in the style that comes naturally to you is really worth the risk. What's prompted me to think about this was reading D.J. Taylor's Derby Day. It is written in a mock-Victorian style which simply didn't work for me.

I was disappointed in Derby Day, to be honest, because I got the distinct impression from reviews that it would be colourful, frothy fun and a bit of a guilty pleasure. Booker prize-covering articles sounded surprised that it had made the long list. In effect, it is an ambitious novel, especially when it comes to describing the atmosphere around Derby Day (which takes place at the end of the novel) a little in the manner of Frith's picture, by weaving all manner of little scenes involving different characters - more or less important to the book's plot - together. But as for froth - no. Though some of the characters were interesting, none (barring perhaps a long-suffering governess) was particularly pleasant. It was easier to root for the horse Tiberius than for any of them. There was a woeful lack of romance, and the villain was the kind of superficial cad I can't get much out of. Above all, I found the style a bar to my enjoyment of the book: it wasn't like Dickens, or like Collins, it only seemed unnecessarily knotty. The Victorian fondness for simile especially seemed to get in the author's way a bit: I didn't get the feeling that coming up with similes came naturally to him, as it did to Dickens, and in that case it might be better not to attempt it in the first place.

I'll give Derby Day its due, though: I finished it, because I did want to know who won the race. But it is not really a good advertisement for pastiche. If you enjoy richly textured description of scenes of Victorian life (I don't much - social-history phobia again), it's well worth giving this book a try: just don't expect high-jinks and melodrama.                         

Not falling for the villain (or similar)

Villain crushes are like the pot that won’t boil if you watch it. When you’re actively seeking a new flame, you will mostly find nothing. The worrying thing is that so many of my crushes start with a “surely not?” phase, where I am in denial about having fallen at all, and I’m sligthly anxious about what taboo I’m going to break next.  There seems to be little rhyme or reason to when villain infatuations strike –they just happen, or don’t as the case may be.

How, for instance, can I explain my lack of enthusiasm for Doctor Simeon, later morphing into the Great Intelligence, in the latest episodes of Doctor Who? He’s Victorian, he’s chilly, he’s ruthless, he’s – well – intelligent: in sum, just my type. True, he’s played by Richard E. Grant, whom I have found vaguely unsettling in previous roles. However, I’ve always thought that this was because he was playing dashing blades (Sir Percy Blakeney, James Harthouse) or good eggs (Bob Cratchit) instead of villain roles, which he was obviously better suited for. Gosford Park seemed to bear me out: I approved of him as George the cynical footman (admittedly, it would have been hard to go wrong with a part like that).

In Doctor Who, though, the Grant-unsettling effect was still very much in evidence. Consequently, I had the weird experience of viewing a villain in the same way a majority of viewers do: with fear and even a little loathing. Instead of thinking “Yummy, what an adversary” I went “Yikes, I’d hate the likes of him messing with my past”. In a way, a triumph for Richard E. Grant then, as this was of course exactly how I was supposed to react. 

And why don’t I even like Thomas Watkins in Upstairs Downstairs? He’s not precisely a villain, but you could say that he’s a villain surrogate. He often behaves in a way no dyed-in-the-wool hero would get away with, and he’s got the cunning and ambition which you normally expect from the baddie. But I just can’t warm to the man. I’ve debated the point with myself roughly as follows.

“Why I don’t like Watkins? Well, he’s so shifty, isn’t he?”

“I thought you liked that in a manservant. And why don’t you call him Thomas?”
“Well, obviously I can’t. Anyway, Watkins only ever thinks of himself. He’d walk over corpses just to get on. Just look at how he lets the admittedly idiotic Mr Kirbridge down.”
“As I was saying…”
“And then he’s so cold in his personal life. He disappoints Rose, and I’m never quite convinced that he really loves Sarah. They both deserve better than him in my opinion.”
“I see, cold in his personal life. You mean like Mr Tulkinghorn? Or Bitzer? Or Balzac’s bankers?”
“Oh, just shut up, will you?”

As you can see, I can’t explain it, but there it is. In part, I can blame a latent bullish aggressiveness in Watkins’s character – even towards Rose, at one point – which I really don’t think is that common among my own diddle-diddle-darlings. Also, he came off rather badly in the spin-off series beguilingly titled Thomas and Sarah, where we learn that he didn’t make a success of his garage and he steadfastly refuses to marry his live-in-girlfriend Sarah. The spin-off ended – on a cliff-hanger too  – after only one series: I blame Watkins, plus the couple’s continuing bad luck (surely, also his fault).     

So, when it comes to villain crushes, maybe it’s just as well to stick with what I’ve got for the present. Away with embarrassment: sometime in the near future, I will buy that T-shirt with Downton’s Thomas on it and the caption “Trust me”. But the question remains when I’m going to wear it?    

Summer grumble

It starts with the bus stop tantrum. I seem to have one every year, in full view of a nervous audience of fellow travellers. The ongoing problem is, from the beginning of June to the middle of August, the bus timetables are changed and buses run much less frequently. This means you will either be far too early or a little late to wherever you're going - or, as is so often the case, much too late because the bus that is running is delayed (and packed, of course). Sometimes scheduled buses don't arrive at all. I certainly don't begrudge bus chauffeurs their holidays, but this drives me up the wall every single year. No effort seems to be made to keep time, and the impression you get is that the bus companies think that, hey, what does it matter, everyone's on holiday anyway. But I'm not on holiday. No-one's on holiday from June to August, worse luck. I'm still working, and the worst part of it is, I don't want to be. Having to run to catch a bus which then does not turn up or turns up ten minutes late only adds insult to injury.

The yearly bus stop tantrum is only a symptom of end-of-summer-term malaise. School is out, but work is still very much in. As the city shuts down around you and the TV channels start sending reruns, as the sun beats down and last-year pupils whoop and holler, enjoying one of the happiest days in their life, you are only too aware that your freedom is still far away - well, far-ish. It's not even as if things are slowing down, either at work or privately. There are so many things you need to fix "before the summer hols" that there is not much time for lazying in the sun - or out of it, comes to that.

But they will come, the holidays - and when they do, I'd quite like one of those famous good summer reads. In fact, I could do with one now. Why is it so hard to find an honest page turner? I tried another one of my family sagas and gave up after approximately a hundred pages - luscious descriptions of idyllic summer days full of honeysuckle, butterflies and what have you before Disaster Strikes (World War One) are not the best way to catch my interest. Not even Wilkie Collins can be relied on. The man in the black skull-cap in Hide and Seek turned out to be a sad disappointment - a Rough Diamond, if you please. I never much cared for men of the wild: I like my diamonds to be polished, thank you very much. Hide and Seek's plot reminded me of The Dead Secret in a way: in both novels, the characters who try to find out a secret and the ones trying to hide it are good-natured people, and so there is not much suspense. You know they will all get along swimmingly by the end. There was one plot twist I didn't see coming, but Hide and Seek still remains the weakest of the Wilkie Collins novel bunch. And even a pro-Victorian like myself must marvel at how little you need to do to be branded a vile seducer. No matter if you meant to marry the girl; no matter if you left the country not knowing she was pregnant; no matter if all your letters were intercepted through no fault of your own; no matter if you tried to make contact the moment you came back, only to learn that the girl was dead and the child you didn't know about had vanished without a trace; you are still a terrible person. Because you shouldn't have slept with her, should you? Not before you'd put a ring on her finger. I must say, supposedly moralistic Dickens cut Captain Hawdon in Bleak House much more slack than this.          

Anyway, I've now started reading a slim Swedish volume which seems to be evolving into an elegant chiller, set in a manor-house in an unspecified country during an unspecified war. I'm not greatly in favour of mysterious dystopias generally, but this story seems promising, and the author conjures up atmosphere without being boring. Perhaps I've struck gold at last - or at least first-rate electricity-conducting copper.

Upstairs Downstairs - The original

OK, back to costume dramas. As I've mentioned, I've started rewatching the original Upstairs Downstairs, one of the great costume-drama classics. As often with a classic TV drama, I was afraid it wouldn't quite live up to my expectations: after all, a lot has happened on the TV front since I saw it last, and programmes from the Seventies and Eighties now tend to seem a bit slow and talky. Upstairs Downstairs is still first-class viewing, though. Yes, it is talky at times, but the conversations are to the point and character-illuminating, not just jaw-jawing. Compared to some scenes in the first two episodes in The Forsyte Saga, which I have unwisely started watching in tandem (you should sandwich Upstairs Downstairs viewing with something modern and snappy, not another old series), the story-telling is well-structured, and you don't feel your inner editor commenting: "All right, cut that! You've already made that point. You can lift this scene right out and give us the information in an aside." (I mean, seriously, Forsyte - do we need to know the details about Mrs Heron's investments?)

Upstairs Downstairs is ground-breaking in many ways. One, it is an original story, not an adaptation of a novel. In costume-drama world, this is rare. Two, it shows a whole new way of telling the story of a well-to-do family (the Bellamys in this case), by bringing in the servants' point of view. Servants have played important parts in dramas before, of course, but I get the impression - though I confess I'm not an expert on the subject - that the double-perspective of masters and servants was something new and fresh at the time. In a story like The Forsyte Saga, servants are constantly glimpsed, but we can never guess what they really think about what's going on. How sanguine do James Forsyte's servants feel when they celebrate Winifred's marriage with food and drink provided for the occasion? What is Mrs Heron's maid's opinion of Soames, who always hangs up his coat himself - does she see it as a kindness, or does it make her feel small both figuratively and literally? Let alone do we get to know anything about the servants' own lives, loves, dreams and ambitions. Upstairs Downstairs shows that the downstairs view can not only be interesting in itself, but shed new light on what goes on upstairs. Far from becoming a dreary social-history lesson, this way of telling the story adds excitement and human interest, and helps middle-class neurotics like me to fight our uneasiness where servants are concerned. Yes, they are talking about you - but not necessarily in a nasty way.

Three, Upstairs Downstairs does something few dramas have the nerve to do (understandably as it's hard to pull off). It doesn't label its characters as good or bad. Each character has his or her flaws and failings, as well as his or her good parts, and the series asks you to accept them as they are and care what happens to them. It works and it gets you thinking. As an example, I remember how shocked I was when I rewatched the series the first time since girlhood and realised that Mr Hudson (the butler) and Mrs Bridges (the cook) - for whom I had cheerfully rooted first time round - were in many ways not particularly nice people. Mr Hudson's hidebound views have a stifling effect on the servants under him which the more good-natured Carson in Downton Abbey can only dream of, and Mrs Bridges is a terrible tyrant with her kitchen maids: somehow I was sorry that Ruby's bids for freedom never came off. Now I see the series again, I think I was being a bit too harsh on these two senior servants. Hudson's preaching about not gossiping about "our betters" may seem unfair when there are so few delights in a servant's life as it is; however, the episode "Magic Casements" shows that a household's happiness and survival might actually depend on the discretion of its staff. The scene at the end of that episode where Hudson mouths a silent "thank you" to the Heavens (at least, I think that's what he's doing) when he realises the Bellamys are reconciled is both human and touching, and I have seldom liked him more. As for Mrs Bridges, she cares for Ruby in her rough way, and who knows if Ruby - who, perhaps, is not quite as simple as the others take her for - may not have the last laugh.

As may have become apparent, Julian Fellowes owes quite a heavy debt to Upstairs Downstairs, which I'm sure he'd be the first to acknowledge. He's benefited from the servant-master perspective both in Gosford Park and in Downton Abbey, while going a little easier on the subtle characterisation part. Maybe as a homage to the great forerunner, he has borrowed one or two story lines from it, notably the "noble suitor of household's daughter who's really more into footmen"-plot (worth filching for the knuckle-smooching alone) and the "admirer of the cook turns out to be a skirt-chaser and only interested in her food"-plot. Also, there are a number of servant names that crop up both in Upstairs Downstairs and Downton. This may be because these were common names among servants - what do I know? - but I wonder. The Downton characters are always so wildly unlike their Upstairs Downstairs namesakes that I suspect Fellowes to have had some deliberate fun with the naming process. In Upstairs Downstairs, we have a determined and temperamental housemaid called Daisy, impervious to bullying or undue influence; a bubbly, pretty housemaid called Sarah who's quite unfit for service; a neurotic footman called Alfred, responsible for the knuckle-smooching mentioned above; and a cheeky-chappie Welsh footman/valet turned chauffeur called Thomas with an eye for the ladies and the main chance (though the main chance rarely has an eye for him). Rose (housemaid in Upstairs Downstairs, lady in Downton) and James (the Bellamys' son in Upstairs Downstairs, footman in Downton) have to be coincidences, though.

It is a little foolhardy of Fellowes to invite comparisons in this way: objectively speaking, Upstairs Downstairs is more ambitious script-wise and characterisation-wise than its successor. Nevertheless, Downton has a charm of its own, and for all its flaws need not be ashamed of itself even when compared with the best that costume drama has to offer. But then I'm rather biased in Downton's favour. This neither-good-nor-bad-character stunt showcased in Upstairs Downstairs has one hefty drawback - when it comes to recurring characters, the series is singularly short of villains.