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Love in a Cold Climate:
Review
12th February 2001
Television
Andrew Billen enjoys Love in a Cold Climate's
anthem for doomed glamour
Ra, ha, ha
On Omnibus (31 January, BBC1), Deborah Moggach
pointed out that two things count against Nancy Mitford: first,
she is posh and, second, she is funny, "and we have an equivocal
attitude to humour". I think she is right - certainly about
our resistance to what another contributor called the "poshocracy"
- and it is a tribute to her adaptation of Mitford's Love
in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love that even
the fiercest class warrior will be moved as well as amused by
this story of overindulged lives lived in the vernacular of flippancy.
To the chorus of three actresses identified simply as "the
Twitterers", babies miscarry, marriages are ruined, sons
go off to war and hearts shatter.
 Mind
you, Love in a Cold Climate (Sunday, BBC1) is still very
funny. The head of the Alconleigh family, the xenophobic Uncle
Matthew, has the best lines, simply because he does not know
he is being funny. On Omnibus, John Julius Norwich almost
wept with laughter as he read out Uncle M's denunciation of the
nurse in Romeo and Juliet ("Bet she was Roman Catholic,
dismal old bitch") and in the dramatisation, Alan Bates
gave this speech welly. But his children themselves get superb
throwaways of the "Nanny, where do you keep that powder
you used to dust our bottoms with?" variety. As they grow
into women, the humour becomes more sulphurous. Our central heroine,
Linda, is not pleased by her infant daughter. "Isn't it
horrid? Like a howling orange in a black wig," she tells
her visitors.
- jumbled autobiography -
One
of Nancy Mitford's two surviving sisters, the Duchess of Devonshire,
mourned on Omnibus that Nancy is now known more for her
silly essay on U and non-U speech than for her fiction, which
is taken to be an extension of the journalistic noblesse oblige.
But the documentary made it clear that her novels were actually
a form of jumbled autobiography, with Linda standing in for Nancy
and Uncle Matthew for her father, Lord Redesdale. The dilemma
of how unsophisticated, undereducated but intelligent young women
could find purpose in Thirties England was, in fact, played out
on an even more bizarre scale in real life. Nancy's sister Unity
fell in love with Hitler; Diana married Oswald Mosley; and the
baby of the family, Deborah, nabbed the Duke of Devonshire and
inherited Chatsworth. Make it up, you could not.
Perhaps
it was because the story was so underpinned in biography and
because the production was shot at the Mitfords' home, Batsford
Park in the Cotswolds, that Moggach and her producer, Kate Harwood,
opted against telling the story through high camp. Although their
adaptation begins with an exaggeration - Lord Redesdale actually
pursued his daughters through his grounds with a single hound
rather than a pack - they achieve a remarkable degree of credibility,
helped by the unflashy camerawork of the director, Tom Hooper,
who only begins to let his hair down visually in the concluding
instalment.
- dangerously unsexy television
-
The
affecting young actresses who play the leads, Linda, Fanny and
Polly (Elisabeth Dermot Walsh, Rosamund Pike and Megan Dodds),
look older than their years and, if beautiful, then only in the
most unfashionable way. At one point, Polly's ghastly mother,
Lady Montdore, complains about this new quality of "sex
appeal" that girls are required to have. It is a problem.
In comparison with, say, The Camomile Lawn or the recent
Channel 4 adaptation of Sword of Honour, which also featured
Dodds, this is almost dangerously unsexy television. But libido's
loss is credibility's gain and, with similar good taste, the
accents are U but not Drones Club U.
It
is all frightfully well judged. I mean, compare Alan Bates's
Uncle Matthew to Peter O'Toole's appallingly over-the-top Lord
Emsworth for the BBC a few years ago. O'Toole was all affectation:
Bates provides an almost interior rendering. He is a faulty boiler
house of trapped emotion. Listening to an aria, his face twitches
with a kind of spiritual indigestion. He is superb, but his co-stars
are almost his equals: Celia Imrie as his wife, a portrait of
agonised passivity; Sheila Gish, as Lady Montdore, showing all
the vulnerability of a rusting battleaxe; John Wood, as Linda's
worldly confidant Lord Merlin, proof that an overdeveloped intellect
can lead you as far into eccentricity as anything else.
- a doomed and forgotten class
-
My
only reservation, having watched both parts, is that they fool
you into thinking you are watching something more substantial
than it actually is. As far as a moral can be drawn, it is that
love rarely presents itself appropriately, that it cannot be
guaranteed, even between parent and child, and, as such, that
there is no fool like a fool in love. As Diana Mosley said of
Nancy: "The only thing that was wrong in her life were the
men in it. They were hopeless."
Towards
the end, Moggach's script emphasises that this is also a story
of a doomed and forgotten class - a cliche that, unlike the "storm
clouds gathering over Europe", she leaves unridiculed. But
English writers have never forgotten the stately Hons of England,
who, even today, enjoy a lingering and undeserved half-life in
English literary productions. Off with their heads, I say. But
this production was still utter, upper bliss. |||
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London
Evening Standard
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