![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessMrs Wilson 1/3
I watched this agape that it was not only based on real events (bigamy! Espionage!?) but there was a definite charge to Ruth Wilson playing her grandmother, playing mother to her own father, and doing it with a fair bit of sympathy. The production values were good; it looked beautiful - if anything London in 1940 looked too glamorous until the Blitz hit, but I suppose that was part of the seduction of young Alison, down from Cumberland to London, and they wanted contrast between the time periods. The chronological jumping worked well, starting with Alison Wilson finding her older husband dead, and then, as the story of his life unravelled, flashing back in memory.
Having met him in the secret service, doing war work, she had believed his word about continuing to spy, which allowed him to lead a double life – the bigamy was the main focus of the episode, although the final reveal that there had been another ‘wife’, further undermining Alison’s ‘well, at least he was faithful to me, even if my Catholic man couldn’t bring himself to divorce his first wife or tell the truth’ take on things, was tantalising. But all the stuff about his probably/possible spy work was bubbling under – had he been working at a hospital and not the Foreign Office (because the FCO probably wouldn’t employ someone who’d been arrested for wrongfully wearing an uniform)? Had he gone to Egypt as she’d believed in the 1940s? And, essentially, what had he really been up to?
It featured typical British casting accidents. The most acute was that the show also featured, in Fiona Shaw and Keeley Hawes, actresses who’ve already been in big dramas this season (see the Beeb’s latest ‘aren’t we good at women in drama this year?’ promo). Hawes is just on the margins for now (although that was not an inconspicuous hat her character wore to the funeral), so you couldn’t snigger at why ‘the Home Secretary’ was hanging around suspiciously. (Is she Dorothy Wilson?) But with Shaw here playing a secret service boss lady (another variant), the resonance was stronger. And then I remembered that I first came across Hawes in Wives and Daughters, where she played opposite Iain Glen.
Ooh, the actor they got to play his oldest son was a good pick. He had a very similar bone structure and hairline to Glen, but also similarities to the actress playing his mother, And although Wilson, Glen etc were playing characters over many decades, the fact that he was closer in age to Alison than his father emphasised one of her attractions to Alec Wilson.
But Ruth Wilson did make her more than the naïve girl whose head was turned. I mean, you sensed that if she hadn’t been bombed that night, she might yet have walked away, from a newly divorced (as she thought) man. And we didn’t see her doing any writing after. In the 60s, she came across as tres respectable, even a bit controlling of her sons’ reactions. I don’t mean the slap at the ‘girl in every port’ line – that was pure emotional reaction, understandable (with a ‘like father, like son’ terror), but trying to manage their grief in general. Her history of secretive war work made this more understandable. And she was sympathetic, she’d married this man in (mostly) good faith and built up a life with him, and suddenly it was unravelling, so her grief was doubled.
Oh, and funeral aside, she was mostly dressed in blue – meant to make us think of the Madonna, as Alec’s Catholicism was emphasised?
I am intrigued, and the fact that it actually happened (give or take dramatization tweaks) adds a charge.
Of course, a mundane colleague has subsequently spoiled me a little – we don’t normally watch the same shows.
I will get around to posting about Blindspot and Berlin Station, though I'm behind on the latter. There I was thinking Thursday 9 pm would be a great slot for me, and no, it wasn't.
I watched this agape that it was not only based on real events (bigamy! Espionage!?) but there was a definite charge to Ruth Wilson playing her grandmother, playing mother to her own father, and doing it with a fair bit of sympathy. The production values were good; it looked beautiful - if anything London in 1940 looked too glamorous until the Blitz hit, but I suppose that was part of the seduction of young Alison, down from Cumberland to London, and they wanted contrast between the time periods. The chronological jumping worked well, starting with Alison Wilson finding her older husband dead, and then, as the story of his life unravelled, flashing back in memory.
Having met him in the secret service, doing war work, she had believed his word about continuing to spy, which allowed him to lead a double life – the bigamy was the main focus of the episode, although the final reveal that there had been another ‘wife’, further undermining Alison’s ‘well, at least he was faithful to me, even if my Catholic man couldn’t bring himself to divorce his first wife or tell the truth’ take on things, was tantalising. But all the stuff about his probably/possible spy work was bubbling under – had he been working at a hospital and not the Foreign Office (because the FCO probably wouldn’t employ someone who’d been arrested for wrongfully wearing an uniform)? Had he gone to Egypt as she’d believed in the 1940s? And, essentially, what had he really been up to?
It featured typical British casting accidents. The most acute was that the show also featured, in Fiona Shaw and Keeley Hawes, actresses who’ve already been in big dramas this season (see the Beeb’s latest ‘aren’t we good at women in drama this year?’ promo). Hawes is just on the margins for now (although that was not an inconspicuous hat her character wore to the funeral), so you couldn’t snigger at why ‘the Home Secretary’ was hanging around suspiciously. (Is she Dorothy Wilson?) But with Shaw here playing a secret service boss lady (another variant), the resonance was stronger. And then I remembered that I first came across Hawes in Wives and Daughters, where she played opposite Iain Glen.
Ooh, the actor they got to play his oldest son was a good pick. He had a very similar bone structure and hairline to Glen, but also similarities to the actress playing his mother, And although Wilson, Glen etc were playing characters over many decades, the fact that he was closer in age to Alison than his father emphasised one of her attractions to Alec Wilson.
But Ruth Wilson did make her more than the naïve girl whose head was turned. I mean, you sensed that if she hadn’t been bombed that night, she might yet have walked away, from a newly divorced (as she thought) man. And we didn’t see her doing any writing after. In the 60s, she came across as tres respectable, even a bit controlling of her sons’ reactions. I don’t mean the slap at the ‘girl in every port’ line – that was pure emotional reaction, understandable (with a ‘like father, like son’ terror), but trying to manage their grief in general. Her history of secretive war work made this more understandable. And she was sympathetic, she’d married this man in (mostly) good faith and built up a life with him, and suddenly it was unravelling, so her grief was doubled.
Oh, and funeral aside, she was mostly dressed in blue – meant to make us think of the Madonna, as Alec’s Catholicism was emphasised?
I am intrigued, and the fact that it actually happened (give or take dramatization tweaks) adds a charge.
Of course, a mundane colleague has subsequently spoiled me a little – we don’t normally watch the same shows.
I will get around to posting about Blindspot and Berlin Station, though I'm behind on the latter. There I was thinking Thursday 9 pm would be a great slot for me, and no, it wasn't.
