Television - With actors of this calibre, the cliches pale

You are much more likely to have seen the trailers for The Cazalets than to have seen The Cazalets. In them, no expense has been spared to put us off the show itself. Here it is, they seem to say, and you have seen it all before: the steam trains, the black-tie dinner parties, the frumpy wife wittering about her husband's business meeting, the quick cut to his rumpy-pumpy back in town, the hilarious near-miss of vintage car with vintage car on the road back to the big house. But war clouds loom, and soon there will be rain on the whole parade of silly period hats. Only one thought remains on a viewer's lips: "Who'll be evicted from Big Brother this week?"

Yet two episodes in, The Cazalets (Fridays, 9pm, BBC1) is proving to be involving, as television used to be before production values took over. This six-part serialisation of Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicles novels has production values coming out of its ears, but its adaptor, Douglas Livingstone, has written a screenplay that makes you concentrate on character, not costume. Such is his skill at gentle signalling that you may not even notice how the complex tangle of plots adds up to a larger, more serious theme of thwarted love and ambition.

The setting is middle-class Britain in 1937. The most remarkable thing about this other country is not the Bakelite telephones, the formal table manners or the stroppy servants, but the way that family still dominates British life. And what large families they were, and what large houses. We are asked to be concerned about 14 Cazalets - and yet they all fit so easily in the Cazalet HQ in Sussex that Brig, the gentle businessman-patriarch, plans to billet half of London in the outbuildings once the war arrives.

The Cazalets are not, collectively, an unhappy family, merely individually dysfunctional. There is something literally wrong in the head about the oldest son, Hugh. The X-rays say it is shrapnel, but it may be a morbid fear of war. His wife, Sybil, is his counterpart. She is physically frail.

Hugh Bonneville and Anastasia Hille do their suppressed dread well, but most scenes are stolen by Stephen Dillane as the womanising second brother, Edward. Dillane gives him the most deliciously self-satisfied laugh and pulls off the extraordinary feat of making his anti-Semitism pass for joie de vivre. His wife, Villy, played by Lesley Manville, is a portrait in dowdy domestic frustration. She would prefer her oversexed husband to have affairs rather than land her with another child. He does both.

Rupert, meanwhile, the bohemian youngest brother, is not interested in the family timber business, but not quite interested enough in his art, either.

Paul Rhys makes him simultaneously weak and unlucky, a man doubly punished in love, first by his original wife dying and then by remarrying an airhead called Zoe (Joanna Page), so jealous of her child-bride status that she wishes her own baby dead. The fourth of the generation is Rachel, a wide-hipped portrait in poignancy from Catherine Russell. Rachel is a lesbian so deeply in love with her best friend that she does not see her attraction is sexual.

One of the symptoms of the rottenness in the House of Cazalets is the difficulty the women have in producing offspring for it. They spend too much time being ill in locked bathrooms and calling on doctors. The most shocking symptom, however, is Edward's attempt to seduce his own daughter, Louise. When she rushes upstairs to safety, the direction, hitherto sedate, becomes emphatic, and her bedroom door slams thrice in slo-mo as if it belongs to a cell. Emma Griffiths Malin plays brilliantly Louise's transformation from snobby, sophisticated teenager to frightened child.

The greatest threat to everyone's hopes, however, is going to be the war. By starting the saga in 1937, rather than 1939, Howard allows the war to come at the faltering pace with which it really arrived. Chamberlain's radio broadcasts, which in folk memory have amalgamated into one, are separated and given in instalments, and the Cazalets listen to them with the deference they might accord the physical appearance of the Prime Minister at the front door. To prepare, Brig scrutinises the exact position of the wireless dial with a magnifying glass. This is what I love about The Cazalets: not the attention to detail, but the attention to the unexpected detail (note, please, the recurring motif of the distribution of bedpans in episodes one and two).

Yes, this show is middlebrow to the centre of its cranium. Characters are drawn so clearly that they are forever running up against their own cliches. You don't get just lesbians, you get tweedy lesbians. But the cliches are merely the badges the actors wear to identify themselves; and when the actors are of this calibre, the cliches pale. This series proves the old rule - more often demonstrated by the reverse of itself - that second-rate books make first-class television. The trailer people don't know what they are doing, and nor do the schedulers who have thrown away this autumnal, Sunday-night hit on a series of summer Fridays when all we want to know is when Big Brother's Brian will get his marching orders.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website