shallowness

Outrageous - 1.1 The Coming Storm

In a show where the main character criticises someone for speaking in cliches, the episode title is one, isn’t it? This is a dramatization of the Mitfords’ sisters’ lives, based on one of the many books about them (there was a brother but I don’t know if he’s even at Bramwell Bronte levels of relevance. He does appear here.) I know some things about the Mitfords: posh (and therefore Saying Something about the English upper classes of their day), one became a Nazi, one a Communist, one a scandalous mistress and one of them a writer, and there was something about the letter U. I watched ‘The Pursuit of Love’ and thought I’d watch this, much as I did the adaptation of ‘War and Peace’, as an easy way to gen up on the subject.

Stylistically, it has been influenced by the recent adap of ‘The Pursuit of Love’, lots of energetic camerawork, cheeky titles i.e. country houses are ‘piles’. Bessie Smith as Nancy, the eldest daughter (and writer of the family), does a lot of voiceover work, starting with an introduction in 1931, and then we’re zipping forward in a rush of months through 1932 to Unity’s coming out ball. There are a lot of characters (just the Mitfords are a lot of characters, I wasn’t entirely sure which was Jessica and Deborah – was it the first who was playing revolutionaries with Unity as if they were eight years younger than they were and who was attracted by workers’ rights? And was it the second who’d wanted to go to school to get to university?) It feels very broadbrush.

Nancy and Diana (Joanna Vanderham, looking amazing as the family glamourpuss) got a lot of the screentime, with the first trying to get her (younger?) boyfriend Hamish to get a job/commit to an engagement. An attempted seduction led to the reveal that his parents were sending him to America to get a job, and either he was too immature (or too secretly gay, but I’m going to state definitely mucked up by his English public school) but he hadn’t told her until he had to, and was going, not staying. Are we meant to ship her with Joss, the chap she seemed to be discussing this with the most, (or is he (a) gay, (b) leaking stories about the family to the press or (c) both?)

Diana was married to Mr Guiness (of those Guinesses? Although he seemed mighty English) and the mother of two. If Nancy had been labelled the clever one, she was the pretty one of the family. (This was a family of labels, which might have made it difficult for the younger ones.) And she was bored with her nice husband, whining he’d had too much handed to him on a silver plate, and definitely interested in Oswald Mosely (did not catch who was playing him, did notice that a Mosely was producing this and wondered as I always do with Moselys in British public life if they are related to that Mosely. Often, they are.) Who was also married and spouting politics (which didn’t sound that right wing, but the new party he was going to set up had fascist in the title, because it was the 1930s.)

Diana’s husband heard she’d been seen spending time with Mosely, put his foot down before Unity’s party, but by the end of Unity’s party, Diana was confiding in Nancy and their brother Tom (Mosely also went by ‘Tom’ which is the eleventy-one billionth detail that makes one gawp at the English upper classes) that she was going to get a divorce. Her brother, upholder and beneficiary of the status quo, was horrified, Nancy seemed more accepting of Diana going after what she wanted – although did Mosely know she was planning to leave her husband, and did he have plans to leave his wife, or his womanising ways?

I think, if the show had a thesis, it was that the girls’ father was a chauvinist and their parents’ (played by James Purefoy and Anna Chancellor) expectations that the girls would have limited educations and marry well (ideally to someone who’d be good to them and love them in an uptight way) meant that they were bound to burst out in strange ways. (Especially if they were carrying their pet rodent around with them everywhere like Unity – blonde, hair rarely combed – did. She looked like she was going to be the one who fell deepest under the sway of far-right politics.) Nancy might have written a book, but she was still broke. ‘Farve’ was trying to get the family to economise, and, yes, there were six daughters, four of whom were dependents (would farmer Pamela keep her position after Diana’s divorce?), but I sympathised with the starving and protesting working class more, say an imaginary miner with seven kids, at the start of the 1930s.