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?