Emma Marriot’s Companion for The World of Poldark

From the frontispiece: Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza with Garrick

Just one of many many meditative stills: Aidan Turner as Ross looking out at the world with a characteristic expression

Mem’ries like voices that call on the wind.
Medhel an gwyns, medhel an gwyns.
Whispered and tossed on the tide coming in.
Medhel, oh medhel an gwyns.

Voices like songs that are heard in the dawn,
Medhel an gwyns, medhel an gwyns.
Singing the secrets if children unborn.
Medhel, oh medhel an gwyns.

Songs like the dream that the bal maidens spin,
Medhel an gwyns, medhel an gwyns.
T#aving the song if the cry if the tin.
Medhel, oh medhel an gwyns.

Dreams, like the castles that sleep in the sand,
Medhel an gwyns, medhel an gwyns.
Slip through the fingers or held in the hand.
Medhel, oh medhel an gwyns.

Dreams like the memories once borne on the wind.
Medhel an gwyns, medhel an gwyns.
Lovers and children and copper and tin,
Medhel, oh medhel an gwyns.
Medhel, oh medhel an gwyns.

Secrets like stories that no one has told.
Medhel an gwyns, medhel an gwyns.
Stronger than silver and brighter than gold.
Medhel, oh medhel an gwyns.
— M. J. O’Connor [sung as voice-over by Eleanor Tomlinson]

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been some eight months since my handy list, Poldark: the new incarnation and the Old. I’ve not forgotten Graham’s roman fleuve as a historical turn as this past fall I repeated a course on the first four novels I’d given the previous spring, and over the winter break wrote another paper for a panel on 18th century films, this time on “Poldark Rebooted: 40 Years on.” I finished that a couple of nights ago and when the ASECS conference is over will be publishing it, probably here on the Net on a blog part academic and part popular on 18th century topics.

To some extent I found out what many already knew: I studied the Onedin Line, a companion book as well as watched the first years’ series; and I read Diana Gabaldon’s first Outlander book and watched the first years’ series too. Yes the 1970s Poldark is partly modeled on Onedin Line; some of the departures from Graham’s book form parallels to Onedin. It’s no coincidence that a chief heroine of the first or 1971 season of The Onedin Line (often cited as a model for the 1975 Poldarks) also gets pregnant outside marriage, refuses to marry the father of her coming baby, and offered the choice of abortion, the streets or the baby’s father, marries a man not the father of the baby. The spiritualized landscape and mythic identity of Outlander is at least comparable (if not a source) to the new Poldark. An 18th century Scottish Laird and 20th century English nurse are repeatedly filmed in one horse against spiritualized landscapes of castles where megalithic stones are magical; so too the new Poldark has countless montages of Ross alone or with Demelza horse-riding against meaningfully heightened landscapes:

The actors are quoted and we see the whole cast rehearsing too:

I found enormously enlightening Lez Cooke’s history of British TV film. All four series fit into patterns Cooke describes. 40 Year re-bootings are all the rage. There has been an astonishing revival of respect for historical fiction and historical film, one adumbrated in the original Poldark series. There is a kind of thrill in watching the “old” Ross (previously the chivalrous Stewart Grainger type turned Che Guevara) turn up as the fiercely authoritarian judge standing off against, seriously threatening the “new Ross, e.g., where Horsfield reworks a scene using lines from the book to have a different feel where Robin Ellis now returned to play the Reverend Halse, an aging icy magistrate responds bitingly, ominously to Turner as Ross:

“Halse: “No doubt the common people you mix with have blunted your faculties as to what may or may not be said in polite society.”
Ross: “No I agree they alter one’s perspective, sir … have you ever been in a jail sir it’s surprising the stench thirty or forty of God’s creatures can give off when confined to a squalid pit without drains, water, physicians care.”
Halse: “The matter of your performance at Bodmin jail has not gone unnoticed, sir. There will be shortly be a meeting of the justices of whom I should say I am one … You offensive young drunkard. You’ll be hearing from us presently.”

“Have a care, sir [from an earlier scene].”

It seemed to me from reading Cooke the Rosses symbolize different eras.

I don’t want to go over my paper’s theses or various detailed comparisons until I’ve returned from said conference so thought I’d mark this occasion by bypassing the film so to speak to recommend a book I found a great help: Emma Marriot’s The World of Poldark, one of these “companion” books sometimes published alongside respected and popular TV mini-series. Like others, this one functions as a substitute screenplay: the story of the film is told chapter by chapter.

The real scripts the actors studied

These are not synopses of the books as they often change the emphasis from the original text, as well as literal details. Each section of the book though corresponds to some phase of the two novels following their order (more or less).

From the mini-series: Dr Choake (Robert Dawes), the banker Pascoe (Richard Hope) and Ross

The actors told of their conception of their character: a couple appear to have read the books, but particulars repeatedly follow a line of behavior in the film or changed conception of a character as distinct from the books which are nonetheless the source. They also invoke their own understanding of the relationships between character: Turner says that Ross likes Demelza because he trusts her (thus her deceit over Verity shakes him intensely), she doesn’t perform a role, and he sees himself as taking care of her.

The originating relationship

Heidi Reed’s talk of Elizabeth Poldark’s relationship to Demelza is revealing not so much because it’s so unlike the book but because she reveals how she cannot resist seeing these historical characters as somehow unreal: like a fan of a Jane Austen book she talks about Elizabeth “as just perfect.” Reynolds’ portrait of Emma Hamilton was the model for her as a type. Biographies of actors and filmographies suggest an attempt was made to find fresh faces, people not well known or associated with too many famous and similar characters. While Ruby Bentall as Verity talked about the character as found in the film she was one of several who seem to me to have read the books.

Verity and Demelza, becoming friends (from the book)

This is from the mini-series itself: a favorite moment for me: as I loved the section of the book Ross Poldark where Verity and Demelza bonded so I enjoyed this scene (I have myself danced these dances, first learned, practiced and then enjoyed them)

Everyone was then to fit in as an ensemble, only the costumes for Margaret were “over-the-top.” Each person reading will have his or her favorite portrait and section: I liked Luke Norris’s ideas about his character (he “attends to the poor and whoever is in need, and is tireless in his work”), and feel better about the replacement for Richard Morante than I had

There is a strongly progresssive agenda at the same time as high romancing. Like others, the book is also a kind of scenario offering the vision of the story: through pictures (drawings made by the staff, contemporary prints and paintings); using long suggestive quotations & passsages from contemporary histories (18th century histories of Cornwall, with citations, titles, dates); contemporary proclamations. There are genuine mini-historical essays on issues dramatized in the series: the criminal justice system, poaching, mining (from Roman to 18th century times, with emphasis on large economic forces), prisons. They will print an 18th century painting of the seashore, then a large clip from one of the paratexts of sweeping cinema views and then we see the cast [photographed on the same seashore cliff (colors enhanced by computer technologies)

Essays on “Domestic medicine” (items called “putrid sore throat”), how money worked (again issues itemized in bullet fashion with explanations) and gambling too; smugglingv(how widespread). Many photographs of the locations and buildings used. An sort of essay by the composer about the music he created. Chapters from the production and costume design people, wigs, characters portraits with a cornucopia of photographs of the actors and actresses in and out of costume. I’ve picked out just a few representative examples of plethora of materials generously (the book is not enormously expensive) made available:

John Opie, The Peasant Family, said to have provided inspiration for Demelza’s costumes — there are a number of reprints of less-well known (French, Italian, prints of soldiers in uniform) and famous paintings (by Gainsborough, Reynolds) which served as models for visuals of costume and character representation.

Contemporary fortune-telling cards — some of the contemporary visual paraphernalia used

Some of the drawing boards

This particular companion shows respect for history and Marriot tells a great deal about the film-maker’s aims, the teams’s sources, the genre of the film as envisaged for an audience. Marriot’s text explained a number of features of the first season that puzzled me: why these new Poldark episodes, individually so much longer than the 1970s films seemed to have much less time for the secondary stories: the idea was to establish a group identity and have many scenes of ritual and local work, three weddings replace complicated individually psychologized stories.

many silent sequences with some incantatory speech, Phil Davis as Jud warning Turner as Ross who determines not to listen:

Tis in the blood your father‘d say mining tis in the blood … the vein of copper ‘tis the bread of life  . . . eat sleep live and breathe it, she’s your salvation and your downfall, make you bold, many a friend did break and many more will follow … Tis a fool’s game … twill end in tears … your father died before his time … So his mining did for him… Well he won’t be the last neither, if he were here today he’d tell you not to make the same mistake

There is in this new series use of epitomizing dramas in order to project an archetypal reality, with an emphasis on folk culture (as in the original poem spoke by Tomlinson above). They didn’t want to make a film which would be seen as a re-make of the previous.

The new Nampara

Recreation of surface mining

Interiors re-done at Corsham, the town used for Truro

I learned the names of all the different creative people, their past history, conception of their role and how they went about making their materials.

My experience of this book has made me appreciate the series much more; after reading it and re-watching the new series, I found I understood and liked it much better

A cross-section map invented for (the fictional) Wheal Leisure which we see Ross (Aidan Turner) poring over

Demelza’s cloak, whose color fits into the color palette of the series

Ellen

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Downton Abbey Sixth Season 5 & 6: I take down my crystal ball

The best moments are the quiet ones: characters walking and talking, so here are Mr and Mrs Bates off to work (Brendan Coyle and Joanne Froggart)

Mr Moseley in the village square self-reflexively selling tickets to come see ….

Mr Carson: “Do other butlers have to contend with the police arriving every 10 minutes?”
Answer: No, but most are not part of moribund mini-series.

Friends and remarkably patient readers,

Despite outbreaks physiological and psychological of intense distress, surely you’ve noticed we are on our way to as happily ever after as human beings ever know:

I take out my crystal ball developed out of not-so attentive watching (I would open a book and take bets only that I don’t understand betting):

Our princess Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) is going to marry the self-indulgent drone Henry Talbot (Matthew Goode) and run Downton Abbey efficiently as a cross between a tourist attraction and generous farm rental site; Barrow will become head butler and spend his declining years indulging all Lady Mary’s children; our secondary heroine Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) will marry Bertie Pelham (Henry Haddon-Patton, a double-moniker there) despite Lady Mary’s final spiteful attempt to use her knowledge that Marigold is an illegimate child. Pelham is not a prince in disguise, but he is not the total shit Lady Mary had hoped. Mr and Mrs Bates (the one truly aggressive man in the series and his very long-suffering wife) will have that baby, which will be healthy and retire to their property to become prosperous landlords. Lord Grantham will not die young because Cora, Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern) is just too soothing and complacent a presence to allow an early death once Violet Lady Grantham (Maggie Smith) despite her Methuselah-like great age settles down to supporting Miss Dencker (Sue Johnston)’s matching spite and Spratt’s stamp-collecting habits (Jeremy Swift).

A single housekeeper, skeletal staff, and “day help” will replace “downstairs”

Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan) will show yet more extraordinary patience as she endures married life with that self-indulged prig of the patriarchy, Mr Carson (Jim Carter) who is not capable of going to bed without looking to see if the sheet corners are expertly done nor eat if his dinner is not eternally hot and as exquisitely cooked as if he were a Shah of Saudi Arabia. Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nicol) will marry Mr Mason (Paul Copley), bringing to his tenant farm her dowry of her property. Now married, a highly educated Daisy (Sophie McShea) and Andy (reading and writing too as the best of them, certainly no one knows pig theory better) will come to live with them.

Have I left anyone out? Tom Bransom (Allen Leech)’s fate is as yet obscure. Isabel Crawley (Penelope Wilton) and Lord Merton (Douglas Reith) have been granted an intermediary in the person of an astonishingly kind prospective daughter-in-law (what I can’t figure out is how she can marry that vicious son of his?).

While I just know in the longer run Miss Baxter (Raquel Cassidy) will marry Mr Moseley (Kevin Doyle) who will become a teacher in a school (he takes a test next to Daisy in Episode 6), there is another bit of a twist and turn down the road as it seems after all she had some feelings for the crook who arranged his theft in such a way as she went to prison. Both such good souls, they will work it out.

How easy some of them have it now? Lady Edith’s interviews of prospective women employees are without tension? No rivalry whatsoever. How is it that this newspaper is so easy to run?

What a gentle time of it they all have

As to Talbot, are there no aggressive males left on the planet? When with Lady Mary, he behaves as if he were in school assembly.

In Downton Abbey only servants are harshly treated …

So why are we carrying on? in this excruciating slow motion? (For recaps see Anibundel: 5, Who would have thought the old man had so much blood?, 6: Downton Abbey as Antiques Roadshow lacks information). Because the ratings were so high and potential audience and money from advertisers were too tempting.

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On Episode 5: I admit to being a viewer whose emotions have at times been deeply engaged with these characters, so when the hospital debate came a crisis with Violet’s coercing Neville Chamberlain himself to come to luncheon in the hope he will not permit the local hospital to be amalgamated to a county-wide organization and yet another of these tension-filled meals became too much for Lord Grantham — and his ulcers burst. What a comment upon 6 years of these dinners and luncheons, not to omit the occasional strained breakfast. I found myself distractedly distressed, tears running out of my eyes, to see this man coughing up huge goblets of blood.

Lord Grantham’s ulcer bursts — he has clearly had enough (Hugh Bonneville enters fully into the role assigned every time, DA 6, Episode 5)

So the first time I watched, I was started into upset, and my emotions rose strongly; but if a movie has real depth in it and has earned belief, adherence, the second time through should be stronger as you notice more. Alas (almost), the second time through I felt indifference; the contrived nature of the scene once the shock wore off and especially since Fellowes had relied on this melodrama. I read somewhere that the genuine shock on Elizabeth McGovern’s face came from her gown, face and hands being spattered with the false blood from across the room. That was not supposed to happen and you can do only so many takes with such a scene. In the event, they did two takes only. I could see how it neatly ties up with the hospital debate in such a way as the Dowager must lose, but I felt that a sensitive fine actor (Bonneville) who let himself go into the part was exploited by this use of him.

Mr Moseley helps Miss Baxter put on her coat after she has learned her ex-lover has pled guilty thus sparing her a confession of her complicity on the stand

As to Miss Baxter’s continuing agon, with the ever compassionate sensible Mr Moseley (who can put things into perspective with the joke — do you want me to go back and see if he will plead “not guilty”). What saves this series is not the humor (which is often not funny) but that continually as an undercurrent and some times rising to the surface (in coughed up blood?) are tensions, strains, disappointment, conflicted desires beneath the tranquil surface of life for these privileged lucky characters.

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The people on line are beginning to think somehow one group waiting has been favored over another, and the staff is doing what they can to push out such thinking from their minds.

On Episode 6: One of my favorite PBS shows has long been the Antiques Road Show on PBS as done in Britain; there is an American version, but for me not as much fun as these visits to large country houses and estates. And I have come to expect as a matter of course, that detailed knowledge of the most obscure objects will be forthcoming.

Taken as a gentle satire on the usual display of conjectured (they are careful to say it’s conjectured) information with prices that make the sellers unexpectedly happy, Episode 6 was worth a watch. There was a mild pleasure to be had in seeing how people really don’t know the facts wanted (or bogusly invented). Lady Edith couldn’t say who was in the picture; Cora, Lady Grantham did not know why one set of imitation shields over a fireplace had not been carved with any letters but over there was a bona fide Reynolds.

She never thought to ask why the shields are not carved — the false importance such tours give to brick-a-bracks, making them numinous because “gazed at” in this ritual way is felt

Robert: “What on Earth can we show them to make it worth their money? Lady Grantham knitting? Lady Mary in the bath?”

The dialogue where a tourist boy stumbles into Lord Grantham’s room to ask why he doesn’t get somewhere much more comfortable to live a bit heavy-handed but not all that improbable — if you think children are not alive to class and how rich people live differently. Mine and I knew by kindergarten.

Lord Grantham will soon tell the boy he lives this way because that’s what he is used to

What was registered was Fellowes’s looking askance at those people who come to gawk; and his quiet sneer that to keep such places going you have to let people in who envy a style of life they have misapprehended as exciting but who are really endlessly thinking of whether their egos have been assuaged.

Miss Dencker comes near to be fired for too much loyalty. When Dr Clarkson (David Robb) defected, she accosted him. He writes a letter of complaint to the dowager. So we see whose feelings count. Whose life matters. The Dowager’s response is not gratitude. What? did Dencker think she had a right to be loyal. to have any feelings at all? On the spot, the Dowager will fire her. The way Dencker holds on is to threaten to tell the Dowaer that Spratt hid his crook-nephew, so Spratt must go upstairs and ask for her reinstatement. When Spratt succeeds (so quickly it’s probable the Dowager did not want to sack Dencker), far from promising never to threaten again, Dencker says she will use short blackmail whenever she has to.

Thomas Barrow contemplates suicide as his utterly selfless teaching of Andrew Parker is sleazily misread (Rob James-Collier and Michael Fox, DA 6, Episode 6

Thomas is beginning to have had it. After all these years of faithful service and self-control on his part, he is still not trusted enough so that if he strikes up a friendship with a footman the first thought all have is he’s buggering him. And he is continually nagged to find a job where he might have something useful to do. Had this been imitative of life either he or Andy would have said he was teaching Andy to read.

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Lady Edith and her suitor stroll through St James Park — or is it Kensington Gardens we are to suppose we are entering into (Episode 5)

So what have we gained from Episodes 5 & 6: And they all headed to live happily ever after despite the occasional strong strains

I did remember this poem while watching some of the quietly strained moments amid the engineered systematic indifference of most to most between characters who pass through much splendor and have who at times have something to me:

Musee de Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
— W. H. Auden

Mrs Crawley facing Lord Merton’s persistence registers on her prudent face fear of what her marrying Lord Merton might cause them to experience

Ellen

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Downton Abbey, sixth season: 1-2: the exhaustion of a reactionary sensibility

Dowager Lady Crawley (Maggie Smith) to Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton), POV

Violet, Dowager Lady Crawley: “Dear old Lady Darnley. Always liked to stuff the place with royalty. She was addicted to curtseying! How we laughed. It’s sad to think about it. — Ah, Spratt (Jeremy Swift). Could we have some tea?”
Spratt: ” – Your Ladyship.”
Denker (Sue Johnston): “It seemed a little chilly, m’lady, so I’ve brought you a shawl.”
Dowager: ” – Oh, you are a wonder, Dencker.”
Dencker: ” – Thank you.”
Dowager: ” – I shall miss you.”
Dencker: ” – M’lady?”
Dowager: “Oh, I’m sorry. No, forget I said that. After all, nothing is settled.”
Dencker: “What’s not settled? I don’t understand.”
Dowager: “I thought you told Spratt about the staff being cut back here and at the Abbey.”
Dencker: “Well, I may have mentioned it.”
Dowager “Oh, well … As I said, nothing’s decided.”
Dencker: “But Your Ladyship couldn’t manage without a maid.”
Dowager: “Mrs Crawley does. Don’t you? ”
Isobel Crawley: “Indeed I do, but I don’t wish to upset poor Dencker.”
Dencker: ” But Mrs Crawley also manages without a butler, m’lady.”
Dowager: “That is true, but I don’t think I could break with tradition to quite that degree.
Shall we have some tea?”
Dencker: “Your Ladyship” [distressed, leaving the room]
Dowager: [Calling] “Miss Dencker? – (CLOSES DOOR) – [Louder now] Don’t worry, Miss Dencker. I’ve got a copy of The Lady upstairs.”
Isobel Crawley: “You don’t really mean to manage without a lady’s maid, do you?”
Dowager: “(SCOFFS) Certainly not!”
Isobel: ” – Then why did you — ?”
Dowager: ” – Sometimes it’s good to rule by fear.”

Far shot of Dencker unnerved, tottering off, Spratt, the butler, Spratt, supposed gratified)

Dear friends and readers,

The Sixth Season’s 1st & 2nd episodes make a telling parallel with Sherlock’s Third Season’s last episode: in both the originating material and ideas having been long exhausted, what emerges is raw actuating core: for Moffat and Gatiss a clever (modern, ever-so self-reflexive) gay subversion of a favorite hero series; for Julian Fellowes, a reactionary push-back by a male Mrs Miniver. I’m one of those who feels the first season was Fellowes at his (dreadful word) charming best: what more characteristic of the man than that flower show (a direct borrowing from Joyce Anstruther’s Mrs Miniver columns as well as the 1941 movie) and Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan) and her old suitor at the fair where she ever-so-delicately tells him no; and its analogy in a pig show and Mrs Hughes and her present suitor (Mr Carson aka Jim Carter) where she ever-so-delicately tells him (though an intermediary), well yes, but for once on her own terms:

“I just don’t want to be a servant on my wedding day.”

What is making this happen? ratings, advertisements, money. You don’t cancel or allow to go off-stage a cash cow. Which mini-series have been re-booted with great fanfare forty years on? The hits of the 70s.

For recaps I will be referring the reader to Anibundel (full disclosure, my daughter): The last days of Downton; March of the Pigs. For previous blogs over the 3rd, 4th, 5th seasons; the 1st through 3rd and miscellany and 4th, from my website.

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Miss Rita Bevan (Nicola Burley) from on high jinxes Lady Mary

Downton Abbey has the advantage over Sherlock in that its mode is naturalistic (the term TV critics use for TV realism) so one need only follow the rhythms of how night follows day, probable consequence from action, and voila, you have your story’s structure. The difference between this year’s 1st and 2nd episode is that in the first it did seem as if Fellowes preening over his success (seen in a recent interview with Judy Woodruff on PBS reports which now acts as an advertising vendor for PBS programs); and having been grated on when it came to doing yet another — he decided for an in-your-face program. Stories circulate that he wanted out after the fourth season, as witness how he was at his wit’s end for matter in the fifth, resorting to repeated scenes of excruciation of our true heroine, Anna Bates (Joanne Froggart). This is alluded to by Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) with a solemnity that hides the ludicrous narrow perspective: “Anna, no woman living has been put through more of an emotional wringer than you.” As an hour it had all the spite of Violet Dowager Lady Crawley (aka Maggie Smith)’s insouciant threat of a dismissal to Dencker, who has replaced the misogynistic role of resident female bitch hitherto Miss OBrien’s. How Fellowes must’ve hated lady’s maids in his male childhood (little master’s thoughts: “giving themselves airs, who do they think they are?”).

In the first episode Fellowes incessantly punished all the servants. I do just hate how Fellowes punishes these people with continual humiliation and has them all so grateful for not being humiliated and punished yet worse. Not much comfort in Mr Carson’s “Nobody’s going to be flung into the road, I can assure you,” to Thomas Barrow (Rob James-Collier) worried he will be fired since he has not been trained for anything but “service.” There was an increase in humanity in the second, in that a kindly solution seems in sight for Anna and Bates (Brendan Coyle) at last: now fully exonerated by the simple expedient of the murderer of Mr Green coming forward to confess (telling enough, one of his victims), our true heroine’s latest theme for self-hated and immiseration: she has an incompetent cervix (it’s almost comical). On the other hand, the solution for Daisy (Sophie McShea) having precipitated the new owner of her Mr Mason (Paul Copley), her father-in-law’s farm (Mr Henderson) into irrevocably throwing him out, because she dared, dared, to speak up against the systemic injustice of the private property system is to push out the Mr Drewes (the ever-patient all-heart Andrew Scarborough) with Mrs Drewes’s (Emma Lowdnes) happiness (!) as Lord Grantham’s rationalization and Lady Grantham’s (Elizabeth McGovern) surfacing plan to replace them with Mr Mason.

The Drewes, finally tenants turned out

Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville)’s remorse — the last stills of the 2nd episode; in the first season Grantham’s remorse led him to keep Mr Bates (Brendan Coyle), not now

It’s remarkable how these phrases all coming down to the same idea, echo and repeat with variations throughout both episodes: the break-up of the old hierarchy was unflinchingly destructive of all.

The key word being surviving (Lady Mary)

You sound like a governess in fear of dismissal … (Dowager to Isobel Crawley)

Miss Baxter (Raquel Cassidy): At least you know you won’t be asked to leave until you’ve got somewhere to go.
Barrow: I don’t know anything of the sort.

Interviewer: – Why are you leaving now? –
Thomas: It seems like the right time for a move.
Interviewer: Does it? Does it, indeed?

That’s from the work interview in the second episode, which Fellowes knows as much as anyone else is a form of suppliancy at best, hazing being not uncommon, where Thomas submits to sneers, mortification. What are the duties of an “assistant butler?’ he can ask; he cannot ask for how much on the first go-round. (The first.)

I mean who wants to work in Woolworth’s? Certainly not the Dowager who in the first season couldn’t get over Gwen wanting to go out of “service” to become a typist. Well, in real life my mother-in-law: she traded in a 7 day a week, 11 hour a day job (half day off every other week) for miniscule literal money as a lower governess in a great house for a 5 and 1/2 day week, with a wage that she could just about pay for a flat and her own food on in Woolworth’s. It was much more liberty and money, her own space to live in.

We must give them time to gnash their teeth alone (about the change in power structure of the hospital).

One servant to another: – Did you drink at luncheon? – No, I did not.
Reply: One wrong move and snap, you’re out on your ear.

Consider how Mr Mason grieves when he sees a box he contributed to for some wedding (where he contributed a small sum, so expensive was this box, that took him weeks to save from his income) now on auction. I will be told that I am to read this paradigm and all these utterances ironically, e.g., this is ironic:

Lady Mary: Don’t worry, Carson, your reception will be in the great hall if it’s the last thing I do.
Mr Carson: How reassuring, My Lady.
Edith (Laura Carmichael): How very reassuring .. (Edith was given a few good ripostes)

It’s impossible in context: in the first episode the continuous thread juxtaposed through (until we have our culmination in the auction) is the story of a seemingly smug, remarkably nasty, sneering financially aggressive female hotel servant who lies to intrude herself on Downton Abbey, in order to harass Lady Mary for money because she knows Lady Mary went to bed with the present married Lord Gillingham and can shame Lady Mary in the newspapers. No understanding is given this woman whatsoever. She is like some mean witch a glance at whom leads Lady Mary to fall off her horse. She is as weak though against Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) as — let us recall — an exactly analogous intrusive aggressive female was in the opening episode of the fourth season. Has anyone forgotten the sexually voracious Lady Ansthruther (Anna Chanceller, previously Miss Bingley, her name a perhaps unconscious allusion to Mrs Miniver) who sought to make Jimmy Kent (Ed Speleers) a kept man. In this former story an startlingly old (and some might hope) forgotten stereotype about the sexual appetites of thwarted (i.e., single) women came out.

The most scintillatingly alive moment of the second episode, the most pungently delivered line occurs when the Dowager Lady Grantham revels in a yet another moment of spite: yes her excuse is she is getting back at Denker for telling all the other servants they may be let go (Dencker has replaced Miss Obrien for resident female bitch) by carelessly letting her know she may be fired at any moment.

Sometimes it’s good to rule by fear, Maggie quivers with a spurt of glee. That says it all. Gives the game of inequality away: the 1% enjoy their power. It’s not enough to be rich, you have to be above others and how can you experience this?

But as to costumes, Maggie Smith won hands down.

Indoors – the dark red suits her very well

Light blues and greys were favored for her coloring

It seems to me a great effort was made to dress in her a series of exquisitely flattering dresses and place her in angle that favored the outlines of her face, her coloring, caught her body gestures and face. She had so many changes and so many lovely hats, it’s hard to pick. As in previous seasons, Fellowes’s control led to the camera making love to McGovern, so here our aging princess of great actresses. From her career and what I know of her life, Maggie Smith is stuff of the finest spirit.

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Barrow walking into the new intimidating place (don’t miss those lions)

He of course goes into the servant’s entrance

Interviewee not making eye contact

The employer’s unashamed full gaze

So wherein was the 2nd episode superior to the 1st? It returned to the rhythms of the first season. The quiet diurnal feel of every day life. Yes in both of these latest hour concoctions, as he does everywhere, Fellowes slides over the deeper disquiet one should have over any number of incidents in both episodes. The man has an uncanny ability to put his finger on suppurating wounds in relationships and systems and then pull away to safety. It’s safe to dwell on Mrs Hughes’s shyness in marrying Mr Carson who loves her tenderly. Edith’s story and desire to go live in London is told blandly; I’d love to know what Rosamund (Samantha Bond) really does in London. We never do, only that she goes out to plays only when she has friends visiting.

Lady Edith emerging from her manager’s office where she has lost a round, Lady Rosamund Painswick waiting outside — Lady Mary says she and Anna have had so many moments together, so too Lady Rosamund and Edith (over Marigold) but they are kept superficial where we most want to know

In the first episode Fellowes uses the juiced-up faux crisis in thread after thread become so common in film stories (often disguised by having them linked up to some mystery-thriller conclusion). In the second he does not. There is no juiced-up crisis moment in the interview scene of Thomas Barrow. In both he depends on us caring for the characters and I do for a few: Anna and Mr Bates, Daisy and Mr Mason, Miss Baxter and Mr Molseley, and yes even Thomas, so that another of his gift’s — for plangent dialogue and aphorism were effective.

Anna and Mr Bates — camera on her

Some might say he overdoes this in the concluding incident of the Drewes — but then we are made to feel a real wrong is done them when from the car, clutching the child, Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) and Cora, Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern) smoothly agree ever so quickly with the removal of the Drewes: “it’s for the best.”

One of my commentators recently wrote in response to a couple of my blog remarks: “he refuses to develop his characters in more sophisticated adult ways and deal openly with complex politics”; “fan fictions and postings and blogs too expose the nasty undercurrents of his portrayals, his fatuity“)

Comment; He exposes the weaknesses of his storytelling. I thought the first series of Downton Abbey was brilliant, but I have been progressively more disappointed by subsequent series. As I continued to watch the show, I repeatedly saw him squander enormous potential for emotionally-resonant storytelling.

This emotionally resonant story-telling (thrown away or perverted in the final message or not) was given more play in the second episode. We saw some of it towards the end of the first when Lord and Lady Grantham go down to the kitchen and talk about the food they find in the new refrigerator. The scene quietly epitomizes the theme of changing times: I do not remember either hitherto coming down to the kitchen to grab a snack. Nothing was juiced-up here. After they ate, to bed upstair they retired. In the second episode Mr Molseley (Kevin Doyle) acquiring test exams for Daisy to practice with. For all its slithering cruelty, the way the Dowager handles Dencker is done without juicing the turns. Lady Mary’s reciprocating decent behavior helping Anna to bring a pregnancy to full term.

(Using my crystal ball I predict the birth of a child in the Christmas episode, one who like Lady Mary and Sybil’s child is legitimate with a loving father and mother and assured future.)

The development of the fight over who will control the hospital. Mrs Hughes’s stubborn resistance of a take-over of “her day” by the hegemonic order she has lived in all her life. Not that she escapes it much: I foresee the wedding will be in the schoolhouse (like everything else, as the Dowager would doubtless tell us, standing on the extensive property of Lord Grantham) during this moment of (for her) liminal transition.

The two continuous threads of the second episode concern the question of where the latest wedding (in the series) is to be held and the question of the hospital. I found the dialogues over the hospital improved as the characters (the way they do in soap opera structures) recurred and re-formulated their positions over and over, bringing in new aspects as they went. And will end on two of these from the second episode:

The first intertwined with the thwarted marriage of Isobel Crawley and Lord Merton (Douglas Reith):

Walking and talking

Isobel: ” – Do you post your own letters?”
Merton: ” – Ha! It was vital it went off today and I’m never very good at delegating. As a matter of fact, I’m glad to see you. I’d value your advice. I’ve had a letter from the Royal Yorkshire Hospital, asking if I’d head the new Board of Charitable Donors. We’d be working alongside.”
Isobel: “Well, that’s if I stay the almoner, once we’ve amalgamated.”
Merton: “Well, of course you would.”
Isobel: “When we combine, we’ll avoid duplicating our efforts. The whole thing would work a lot more efficiently than it does now.”
Merton: “So you don’t disagree with the plan? Well, don’t you see what it could mean? How old is our X-ray machine? Does Clarkson really know how to use it? What advanced surgery do we offer? None.
If a family at the Abbey has a cut finger, they go to London, – but what about everyone else? – I bet you’d go to London too. – (CHUCKLES) I probably would, but I shouldn’t have to. And what about people who don’t have that option? So the battle lines are drawn and now we must fight it out.”

Upon Lady Grantham visiting the hospital (she is leaning towards giving control to a larger authority): part of the context is Isobel and the Dowager’s on-going vexed relationship

Dowager: “I don’t want Cousin Cora to feel outnumbered.”
Isobel: “It isn’t friendly, you know, to stir her up into opposition.”
Dowager: “It’s not very friendly to squash her into submission either.”
Cora: “Excuse me, but I don’t need to be stirred or squashed.”
– The facts speak for themselves.
– Your facts or mine? – What’s the difference? – Mine are the true facts.
Dr Clarkson (David Robb): Shall we continue this in my office?
Dowager: “I wish we could persuade you to help us stem the tide of change.
cora: “I’m just not convinced it’s the right way forward, to go backward.”
Dowager: “I do not understand you, my dear. – Are you saying Dr Clarkson is a bad doctor?
Cora: ” – Certainly not.”
Dowager: “And the other doctors that use our hospital — are they no good either?”
Cora: “I’m sure everyone does their very best, but there are new methods now, new treatments, new machines. Great advances have been made since the war. – Can’t we share in them?”
Isobel: ” – Hear, hear.”
Dr Clarkson: “Of course. I intend that we should.”
Isobel: “- We haven’t got the money.”
Cora: “- I see I’m not needed to lend you strength.”
Dowager: “You’re fully in command of the argument. Have you no pride in what we have achieved with our hospital?
Isobel: “I don’t think pride comes into it.”
Dowager: “Well, I warn you, Dr Clarkson and I will fight to the last ditch.”

And so the Dowager will. So did the aristocrats as a group, including those who lost much property. But these super-rich people, they keep making a come-back. It’s a big deal when they come down to breakfast:

Cora putting together her own meal:

Ellen

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2015 Poldark 8: How to make new mythic British matter, Poldark re-booted 40 years on

“There is much in the world which is monstrous” — Graham’s Ross on the beach, Demelza

“I am finding it very hard to live with myself” — Francis to Elizabeth, Christmas, Wheeler’s script, invented scene …

“Have a care for the law. Tis a cranky and twisty old thing. And you may flout it half a dozen times. But let it once come to grips with you, and you find it harder to be loose from than a great black squid.” — Captain MacNeil to Ross, Horsfield’s script, a darker variant on Graham’s utterance

On the beach carrying the burdens of life’s necessities, leading those who will come with him back (Aidan Turner as Ross Poldark, 2015)

Dear friends and readers,

So we are come to the end of this year’s first season: Poldark re-booted, 40 years on. Though I’ve not titled this blog to include Graham’s Demelza nor the 8th episode of the 1975 Poldark, as in all previous this is another comparative blog which assumes previous knowledge. Once again we have the old familiar pictures from the 1970s for those who loved them as I did. And once again, the distance as well as similarities between Ross Poldark and Demelza and the two disparate kinds of film art.

Our theme though is a bit different. I have been able to profit from watching one of Debbie Horsfield’s previous mini-series, the astonishing, riveting All the Small Things (directed by Metin Huysein, whose corpus includes the 1997 Tom Jones) and read about a couple of others. All the Small Things differs strongly in its dramaturgy from this new Poldark: Like Sex, Chips & Rock-n-roll, its scenes are not short, the characters use precise interesting complicated language, and its strength derives from what the characters say to one another. In neither is there this continual back-and-forth switching of montage and repetition of archetypes and simple ideas. This dramaturgy was therefore deliberate, and British ratings say it’s been widely watched. Thanks to Anibundel I’ve also been comparing costumes, hats, hairdos, wigs. If these be not costume drama, costume drama is nowhere to be found.

My suggestion tonight: while the 1970s film-makers were content to produce a sufficiently historically accurate and novelistic series reproducing the spirit of the original books (4 of them, post WW2 milieu), Horsfield’s cinematic archetypal approach is an attempt to make a new mythic matter. The 1975 films are Cornish regional romance, an adaptation of 4 historical fictions set carefully in the later 18th century, low-keyed enough for comedy. The 2015 films are not localized in the same way at all; they reach out to function the way recent films do, aware of themselves as in an intertexual film universe. This is not as hubristic as it may seem, as Graham says in the early 1970s when filming the first four books was broached to him, the idea was to make a British kind of Gone with the Wind, I half-regret to admit US mythic matter because so pro-Southern, so racist.

This is not to say that both don’t differ from the original book and try to appeal to the mainstream politics of the era. So in Demelza where it is acceptable and understood from centuries of custom, that the flotsam and jetsam of wreckage on a beach is fair game for the people living around both films takes into account this seems to our capitalist private-property obsessions crime of the first order. There was also a deep resentment against the excise tax, the imposed soldiers of the British army who were there to stop any reform movements lest they turn into a 1790s English style French revolution. In Graham’s Demelza Ross arouses Jud to waken the community, he is half-mad with grief and rage and needs to strike out against an implacable universe which has taken his child, his business, still threatens his wife, and he is gladdened to see the local people gain food and furniture for the coming year, and he participates, but he does not lead; he encourages, represses, orders where needed; only when a riot ensues when other groups of people come does he intervene to save the captain and his men and look to see if anyone needs saving on the ship.

Looking from on high over the beach, distraught (many close-ups), taking action, first a line to go into the ship and then stumbling on soldiers urging them back to Nampara (Robin Ellis as Ross Poldark, 1975)

Paul Wheeler departs from this by having Robin Ellis go to Jud to find help for the men on the ship, and only realize that scavenging will result when he looks into Jud’s eyes, and then exult; Ellis spends his night trying to stop the riot, and save people. We see the British soldiers as in an earlier corn riot killing the people. By contrast, Debbie Horsfield has Ross not only rouse Jud deliberately, but himself organize the scavenging so as to be deeply useful to all, alert throughout, a figure of controlled stern anger, taking on managerial functions; like Ellis and Graham’s Ross himself violent to stop others’ violence, as a last thought inviting the Captain and his men back to the house but if they do not trust him they need not come. We see the lead British soldier taking a bribe from Warleggan to lie about what Ross did on the beach.

The changes are telling. In 1975 we have a deeply psychological take on a man in distress and acting half-insanely, innocent of scavenging himself; in 2015 we have a hero caring for his people by scavenging with them. Wheeler’s is closer to the book where Ross means to allow others to scavenge, but then tries to stop the riot, but in neither film is there a willingness to dramatize one of Graham’s paradoxical themes: the self fighting society’s deep corruptions, refusing to be coopted except on its own definition of what is virtue.

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Graham’s Demelza, the last quarter

Chapter 1: Verity’s letter to Demelza: her happiness and gratitude, Verity now has the life to live she wanted to and could. Family and business, politics and gender are utterly intertwined in the world (seen in Graham’s Forgotten Story and Cordelia. Demelza did it. Chapter 2: a bleak Christmas — at Nampara and Trenwith. Francis despairing, alcoholic, Elizabeth turning away. Demelza and Ross and Enys carrying on with carols; he going over books, ending company; the two struggling through to be decent to one another and restore relationship; she visits Sir Hugh Bodrugan, Ross’s angery: he will not ask for loan; he will see Pascoe.

Chapter 3: The desperate illness at Trenwith brings Choake and then Enys; Ross’s meeting with Tonkin and then George’s offer to buy him out at inn; narrator insists on spite as strong motive in George. So Demelza’s (to Ross and the Poldark family) loyalty to her gender and sister-friend has destroyed Ross’s company. As in Ross Poldark where Ross’s humane rescue of the child Demelza brought down the community on him, so her humane rescue allows others’s exploitation. Chapter 4: News of illness at Trenwith: another decision of hers, to be a nurse to Francis, Elizabeth and Geoffrey Charles, partly because she feels she took from them Verity — this will lead to her sickness, the death of Julia. This is interwoven with Ross and Sir John, Ross and Pascoe where Ross will not sell his mine.

Chapter 5 Ross to Pearce. Pearce lives with his sister; he will arrange 1000 pound loan if he can; Ross home to Demelza who tells Ross where she’s been and what done: at Trenwith with the dying helping to save them. His intense business for a year is useless and he is thrown back on farming. He refuses still to sell his shares to Warleggan and takes out a new loan to pay through Pearce — refusing to bend to the monopoly. It is his choice to do this (which will lead to smuggling in the next book), but it was Demelza’s interference interacting with the family that inadvertently led to the failure.

Chapter 6: New Year’s Day, 1790, a gale, snow flurries, Demelza takes to her bed; Enys: both wife and daughter have it. Chapter 7: Northerly gale for another 3 days: Demelza’s nightmares; her father’s crazed religion about being saved: she dreams of Ross saying “let him die in the mud;” memories of Keren and Mark, she calls to her dog, “He takes things so much to heart, Verity had said” (of Ross); choaking someone’s hand there (Enys). The cold, the thaw, the weather, Demelza wakes and Ross lies to her that she can see Julia in morning; Julia has died

Chapter 8: The burial of the child; Ross’s rage; Julia will be lonely in the cold, she hated wind. Now deep in Ross’s mind (as we went back and forth between them just before and after marriage in first book); the wreck reported, how he rouses the people, Grambler miners to come, Jud says she never saw Ross looking so much like his father

Chapter 9: A scene Ross remembered for years afterwards: the men on the beach, women taking needed food; he gets inside ship and sees hopelessness (Sanson’s body) the fires, the wreck happening, and more men streaming on. Rose’s mind half-crazed but he does join in, advising, encouraging, repressing, ordering. There is a second ship and the wreckage is more ambiguous; it seems with help the wreck might have been avoided. But Ross’s despair and then identifying with the working classes utterly does lead to the high conflagration food riot: unintended consequences (rather like Demelza’s act for Verity). Chapter 10: Drunken fights and mayhem on the beach; men of ship come and Ross there invites them back to his house although his wife has been sick. Ross: “much in the world is monstrous”.

(A sub plot-design is Ross’s perpetual kicking against the laws and customs of his world directly while Demelza works against them indirectly — both are pro-family, pro-friend. This is by the end seen to be attached to his male friendships and companions whom he is loyal to: lower class, Jim and Mark, then upper for bank loans, and then at the end Captain MacNeil who warns him he must not get caught disobeying the law nor push it too far. MacNeil chases down smugglers on the beach and at the same time, Mark Daniels so knows Ross has been instrumental in freeing Mark. MacNeil and Ross identify as ex-solder who fought in North America, but their allegiance is to in McNeil’scase the state and law (MacNeil on the twisty nature of the law which will swallow Ross); in the Ross’s to friends, love, family, principles.)

Chapter 11: Morning after; tranquil now: he had planned so much for Julia; normative life returning to him; she so thin and weak; he takes her to window to look out, she asks that he let her stay in the sun. Book ends quietly, wrap my shoulders, let me have the light a little longer please.

For a more detailed exposition with themes worked out see Demelza, A Cornish world mirroring our own.

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1975, Episode 8: it’s been rearranged but just about all the original events and characters are there. The only loss is it ends more melodramatically than the book: the soldiers come to arrest Ross. A cliff-hanger and final anguish for Demelza (which is the way 2015 ends). As throughout the film opts for theatric while the mood is naturalistic, melodramatic romance, sudden action, or wry comedy. I’ve come to realize that Francis is made considerably more appealing by Wheeler’s script: Graham’s Francis is witty, but his open self-berating and guilt are from Wheeler; also his generosity of spirit now and again.

MacNeil (Donald Douglas) issues his warning …

Opens as a continuation of Episode 7. There we saw Ross helping Mark Daniels to escape from Cornwall and a murder charge from his own boat into the sea across to France, and running up the high cliff be shot at by MacNeil and his men. Episode 8 begins with him running down the hill and across the fields to Nampara. A delicious scene for someone totally on their side ensues. Ross runs into the house where Demelza awaits him at the window; she frantically pulls off his boots and he says since MacNeil has no evidence, MacNeil cannot jail him and he must go upstairs to bed. Jinny is there, quick with an alibi — he’s been in bed all night with “the headache.” There is a comic feel to the scene as all three know Ross, Demelza and Jinny are lying.

MacNeil bursts in and Demelza is there to greet him, with Ross upstairs and coming down in a robe. We see them outwit MacNeil while his eyes glitter and he issues a warning to Ross that the law will entangle him if he does not watch out. One visible motif of this episode is those stairs: Ross running up at the opening, coming down, from the last one Mark Daniels running past to the library; MacNeil coming in and out of the hall.

The Christmas scenes are ironic — they remind me of Trollope’s Christmas scenes as they show Christmas to be an extra fraught time (not the complacent joy of stereotypes). After Ross and Demelza first escape the clutches of MacNeil we switch to Demelza and Ross hosting Enys, Sir Hugh and Lady Brodugan — in book they are alone first Christmas Eve night and visit Brodrugan the next day and her desire to ask for loans is not enacted, just discussed. At first all seemed high cheer, until Demelza not being able to contain herself asks the knight and lady for a loan to help them out. They speedily leave and Ross is indignant at her.

Francis filled with self-loathing, the cool Elizabeth, the puzzled child

Switch to Trenwith and we see Elizabeth and Geoffrey Charles at table waiting for Francis. He comes to the table drunk, filled with self-hatred over his betrayal of the names of Ross’s contributors to George; Clive Francis again delivers a powerful performance, until he collapses. Elizabeth sends for Enys then at Nampara who returns with Demelza.

Ross’s first reaction to the news of Francis’s illness is indifference; Demelza’s determination to go over to Trenwith elicit an “I forbid it,” but when she insists this is family (the great sacred cow which is not invoked in Graham’s book) and says she will go anyway, relents.

The scene where Ross is driven from wanting to behave with high integrity, to moving again to try to outwit someone, this time it’s George he wants not to sell his property too. There is a self-destructiveness here we see.

Jill Townsend as an at first cool, regal Elizabeth

Elizabeth at first wants to turn Demelza out of the house for her low rank (and because Ross married her) but in her terrible need, allows Demelza in, and Francis in his terrible sickness sees and acknowledges. One night Elizabeth and Demelza sit and makes frends. Elizabeth confesses how she broke off her engagement with Ross, how she meant to marry for money and prestige and thought she could do without love (this reminds me closely the TV mini-series version of Trollope’s Lady Laura Kennedy by Simon Raven — made a year before this series). The scene is too inhibited in its mode of acting (as are a number of the scenes of this episode), but Graham’s material comes through enough and realization gives this film an intense edge of the books. Demelza saves Francis, wins over Francis and Elizabeth, only to return herself very sick.

Demelza sick unto death, Ross nursing

As she comes in Ross scoops her up and carries her up the stairs. She is very ill and the baby Julia catches it. Enys there throughout. As in the book, it’s the death of Julia and the destruction of Ross’s hope for a successful mining venture that intertwine behind his despair which precipitates his inciting the men to their violence. Film removes Jacobin arguments and moral preferences of book for friends, high ideals, independence, integrity.

The scene on the beach occurs. Very effective and unlike today done with no computers so literally for real in front of cameras, including ships brought in, really felt underproduced violence.

Ross brings home the crew and they return to their boat in the dawn. He hears her ill, goes up and find her hysterical over the empty cradle, down those stairs again to talk in front of the fire with captain and crew.

They are in the front room the next day or so dressed as from a funeral, her comments about the small coffin and the MacNeil’s entrance and arrest. In the book the funeral occurred first and Ross’s guilt over not providing food another motive for his wanting to see people fed.

Here they talk and in film she says now there is no Julia, he must be very bitter for he married her because she was pregnant with Julia. She stood in the way of his marrying Elizabeth. He loved Elizabeth when he married her. Of course this is not in the book as in the book he married her well before she got pregnant. He acknowledges this but says that was then and now he has learned to love her. He and she speak of their two years together since. It’s at this point the book Demelza ends with a beautiful dialogue between them (re-spoke here). Book does not emphasie rivalry between women at all; book interested in social and economic pressures

Eight, though, closes with MacNeil again rushing the house. This time Ross was not expecting to be arrested, and this time MacNeil has a warrant for his arrest. The episode ends with Demelza running out of the house crying frantically for Ross. A wild thrust.

Crying after him

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Cont’d in comments: 2105 Episode 8; concluding remarks.

Ellen

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Poldark 7, Betrayal of the group; or a Higher Fidelity of the Heart: 3 versions

” … to give way to them is to conform to rules set down by the evil-minded … Ross to Jinny upon her saying she will quit because social talk has accused her of sexual infidelity to Jim with Ross (Graham’s Demelza, Bk 1, Ch 14)

“Who is given a second chance?” (Verity to Blamey, Wheeler script, 1975)

“Poverty doesn’t offend me, nor does aspiration. But you are mistaken of you think greed and exploitation are the marks of a gentleman” (Ross to George, Horsfield Script, 2015)

Verity (Norma Streader) assuring Blamey she will now elope with him as they both have been tested for years (Wheeler script, 1975 Poldark 7)

Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson) defending herself for having helped Verity to choose her own life (well-acted but fudged words in Horsfield’s script, 2015 Poldark 7)

Dear friends and readers,

This week our preface must go beyond the usual dual caveats: the blog assumes the reader has seen the whole of the 1975 mini-series and knows the first 4 Poldark books pretty well (Ross Poldark, Demelza, Jeremy Poldark, Warleggan) and at least read all 12; I think highly of the books and write as a film and 18th century scholar out of an interest in comparative film adaptation (intertextuality is the fashionable term) and depictions of the 18th century in historical fiction and film.

At the close of the BBC Episode 7, Aiden Turner as Ross deeply hurt and puzzled by how Demelza has behaved to him (Horsfield’s script and reading)

Many US readers this week may have viewed the “finale” of the PBS Poldark series. They will have seen a smushed-up version of the last two episodes of the Horsfield series which cover the second half of Demelza. This time not only were 7 minutes cut from each episode which considering the brevity of most of the scenes and dialogue in this new Poldark until the 4th and 6th and this 7th episode (they are longer, which helps account for the superiority of these episodes), means a good deal; but the necessary re-arrangement this causes (the way movies make coherent is careful juxtapositions of scenes) is greater as they had to marginalize the first climax. This was done by (for example) cutting bits (I imagine the rhythms) of the painful close of Horsfield’s Episode 7 where (as in Graham’s book) Ross tells Demelza in hard unforgiving tones if she is going to be unhappy because the Poldark family is now estranged due to her interference on behalf of Verity, then she is going to be unhappy for a long time. Already foreshortened, the Mark-Keren-Enys story was reduced and scenes from Verity and Blamey’s continuing relationship by letters and joyous union.
Such as it is, it is in my view a testament to the strength of second half of Graham’s Demelza and Horsfield’s fidelity to those aspects of Demelza tracing an increase of disparate thoughts and feeling between Ross and Demelza, that the first hour of the finale remained compelling. For those who saw this version and want to read an intelligent detailed reaction to it, I recommend Anibundel’s No Infidelity Goes Unpunished. See also my comments explaining some queries she had in her blog (on diseases, the customary rights to scavenge, &c)

That Anibundel interpreted the material this way comes from her reliance on the 2015 Poldark which obscures a more complicated thoughtful questioning of the mores of the 20th century through the presentation of a version of the 18th: Graham suggests to his reader that there is a higher fidelity than obedience to law (in the book seen to be product of upper class interests), and (this is where his choice of the 1780s and 90s pro-revolution, radical and romantic period comes in) group customs and demands which are often perverse and counterproductive: Verity is allegorically named: she speaks and sees complicated truths from the time we meet her, which paradoxically weakens her against those who would use, control, and dominate her, but does not make her any the less deeply right. Verity has the right to choose her own life, the right not to be exploited to the point of non-fulfillment of her own if it hurts no one else. As did Ross in marrying Demelza who, like Verity, threw off an oppressive restricting family. And their decisions will not and do not hurt anyone else: the only hurt Verity inflicts is on Francis’s male ego. Ross’s decision is felt to undermine the ontological status of the upper class but as the characters in reality think of their own narrow interest, finally (in the book) the real hurt inflicted is on Elizabeth who had herself made the first of two bad husband choices. Ross tells her at one point that she dislikes anyone to say the honest truth: she does because she fears the risk following this entails.

This idea of truth to an authentic existence underlies Shelley’s and Byron’s poetry, much of the thought of the philosophes and political radicals like Thomas Paine: what? if slavery has been the law for centuries, that does not make it right. Truth to what’s in your heart is simpler and voiced by Blake. A conflict between group demands and the heart’s deeper impulses may be found in Cowper, Austen (as long as the heart is educated to be ethical), especially strongly in Crabbe (whose poetry Austen loved). If you find yourself punished by the powerful you hurt when you do this (as Ross does by George Warleggan), that is the price of the ticket you have chosen (as James Baldwin famously put it). You can of course choose wealth and position; that is George’s choice; there is a price to be paid there too.

I concede this idea is just about altogether lost in the soft way Verity’s escape is presented in Episode 7 of the 1975 film, and is overtly contradicted in Horsfield’s script, but will maintain it actuates the 1975 depiction (Episode 8) of the scavenger riots that evolves when (in the book) under the pressure of madness, depression, a desire to strike out against an unjust order, Julia’s death, motivates Wheeler’s Ross to awaken Jud to tell him to tell everyone there is a wreck and flotsam and jetsam for all on the beach, and then disappear. But that is for next week.

This blog is just on Episode and like last week’s begins with the book and then moves on to each film adaptation, with the aim of the comparison to show the different readings of the films. Honesty though compels me to say the 1975 film is better art, more thoughtful and consistent, worked out carefully at all points. I find the perspectives Horsfield invented (making Keren a slut, Enys a weak fool) and her adherence to group conformity as wisdom in life harder to take. She allows George Warleggan, a ruthless capitalist, liar, to utter conformist axioms we are supposed to think right.

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Graham’s Demelza:

Book 3, the matter covered in both Episodes 7 begins in July 1789. We have just experienced Demelza’s abrasive experiences at the ball; seen Enys and Keren’s love-making over his medical books at night, heard Nicholas and George Warleggan vow to destroy the Carnemore Copper Company because Sanson exposed and their business interests threatened.

Chapter 1: Verity’s escape: the child wants her to read to him; she slips away; comic scene of Jud in church contains real protest against the hypocrisies of these ceremonies. Chapter 2: Home to discover Verity’s note; Francis’s rage and blaming Ross, Elizabeth’s demurral (you have no proof, could have been Demelza); George Warleggan turns up to gift Geoffrey Charles, woo Elizabeth and successfully pressure and bribe Francis into telling.Warleggan comes to bribe him with a gift of 1200 pounds (forgiving one debt and cash for the other) Francis truly thinking that Ross had been gobetween again, betrayed Ross by telling Warleggan the names of the men in Ross’s new company. . It was Francis’s information that allowed this. Francis is frantic to keep believing this and then at the close Demelza coming over to tell it was she, precipates his rage — against himself too

Chapter 3 Andrew and Verity home together to joy at last. Chapter 4: Mark home early (how he is respected by young boy and fellows); goes to Enys’s house and realizes that a sexual liaison going on between Enys and Keren; comes back to house, Keren arrives; he confronts her and in an ensuing struggle, they fight by a window, she hangs out to escape him, and he strangles her. It could be an accident, but he wants to kill her, to blot her out because she has not loved him, and there is an allusion to Shakespeare’s Othello, with poignant imagery about her as vulnerable.

Chapter 5: Ross’s dreams of smelting, wakened by found body of Keren; Enys distraught; he loved Keren by this time, he feels guilt at his betrayal of his status in the community (that is what he used he feels); Ross to goes to the Daniels to offer Paul his boat for Mark’s getaway but no one must know (Vigus mentioned). He does not want to see Mark hanged; again the idea is the sentence is disproportionate. (Readers have felt this repeat murder of an unfaithful wife is misogynistic on Graham’s part.) Chapter 6: Nampara: Elizabeth to Ross telling him note that Verity is gone, implying Ross knows; Enys’s desperate visit to Demelza seeking solace, validation from Demelza; Ross brings in Mark and Paul.

Chapter 7: Near confrontation: Mark wants to kill Enys; a trap Mark says; not so Ross replies and helps Mark hide, the coming of McNeil; don’t underestimate McNeil Ross tells Demelza. He is an agent of the state, he is there to stop smugglers and execute the state’s justice. Chapter 8: a powerful scene of escape through tide: “Heavy windless rain set in as night fell. ” So Ross due to fidelity to a friend a second disobedience to law by helping Mark Daniel to escape the law when he murders his adulterous wife, Karen.

Chapter 9: McNeil and Ross’s dialogue with McNeil’s friendly warning: the law is a twisty thing and if you get caught, you will not get loose. McNeil though sympathetic to Ross; Ross goes to Sir John Trevaunce to sound him out on keeping Carnemore Copper going (he doesn’t give in), gets nowhere, Trevaunce inveighing against “that man Fox” (he is a Tory, unsympathetic to Ross).

Chapter 10: Demelza’s conscience leads her to go confess to Francis who throws her out; all Ross’s partners desert him as they get their letters calling in loans, they are not bankrupted but could be, and several forced to pay up owed loans, and it comes to Ross the only one not there who knew was Francis (name not mentioned). Chapter 11: Ross home and bitter with loss; Demelza confesses; he goes cold with rage at her betrayal; he does not want to hurt her (“you’ll get cold”); what has she done, she tries to sleep (scene of estrangement in bed) and he does not even try

Book 4: Christmas Eve 1789. Chapter 1: Verity’s letter to Demelza: her happiness and gratitude, now has the life to live she wanted to and could. Family and business, politics and gender are utterly intertwined in the world — seen in Forgotten Story and Cordelia (the mysteries are far more fantastic romance than the historical novels). Demelza did it.

A bleak Christmas ensues ….

For a more detailed exposition with themes worked out see Demelza, A Cornish world mirroring our own.

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The 1975, Episode 7: series of variations on the conflicts of sexual passion with family obligation, driving ambition and personal desires with morality. Scene arrangements juxtapose Keren’s infidelity to George Warleggan’s treachery and then to Francis’s betrayal of Ross. Verity stays to nurse Geoffrey Charles first (she does not in the book so 1975 film making her more exemplary). In 1975 film Francis betrays the Carnemore Copper Company before he learns of Verity’s flight so Demelza’s act made less consequential than book or 2015 film.

The paratexts: the alluring musical theme and the sun glinting on that mine tower, the starving striking men gathered; as in 2105 we see Ross on horseback riding; crashing waves and music.

POV is us, immersion in walking up the hill of a rocky town on a seacoast. Now inside, in a small house Verity is getting her things ready with Blamey; he shows bottle of liquor he keeps in a cupboard, it’s the legacy for the next tenants of this house. She’s not got her bags; she assures him she can slip off by herself from Trenwith. She wants to say goodbye especially to Geoffrey Charles whom she has bonded with. He worries somehow she’s not going to come back; why go back at all, their new house is ready. He “let’s go direct to Falmouth, the devil with your wardrobe.” She seems fearless and says she has no hesitations or doubts but rather regards herself as “the most fortunate woman. Who else is given a second chance as she has been?” He: “Please my dear be careful.”

Enys trying to explain to Ross and Jinny what happened

Ross telling grieving Jinny when she is ready to return to Nampara for salary and help, ignore rumors, he says

Switch to a neat hovel and a hand putting a sheet over face of dead Jim Carter. Ross sitting to the side of Jinny, says “it’s been months since we bought him out.” Why did he die? Enys says “the poor fellow lost will to live,” and Ross tells Ginny there’s a place for her at Nampara and not to let herself be guided by fear of crowd pressure.

Demelza warning Keren, moralizing, Keren says it’s easy for Demelza who lives in comfortable house with educated man

A scene of Demelza giving Keren presents. Keren tells Demelz a bit of her history; she joined company to get away from father who didn’t give her a minute’s peace since she became 10; sexual abuse is what’s implied. Demelza says now we both be wed to good men, and Keren laughs and insists on differences of lifestyle and man. “I’m alone shivering in that hovel” and Demelza lives a comfortable life with a respected man. Keren becomes critical of Mark and then when Demelza says there is gossip about her, Keren sarcastic “About me, oooh how exciting.” The parallel here is Keren’s lack of loyalty and appreciation of Mark with George Warleggan’s ruthless desire to undermine Francis Poldark and take from him Elizabeth and Geoffrey Charles — though undermining his pride in himself. Keren is pitied but the sense is she is wrong.

Enys leaves Geoffrey Charles in Verity’s hands

Elizabeth utterly self-absorbed, though frantically worried about child

Then Verity comes in to Trenwith and feels that is something wrong. Elizabeth emerges with an accusation: “where have you been? its Geoffrey” who has “the morbid sore throat” (diptheria) The doctor is now Enys (Choake dismissed for bette man) assumes Verity will do it all. Enys “the chld will need constant attention; he needs Verity” Enys dosen’t trust Elizabeth; illness is most contagious — we have foreshadowing of how Francis will get it. Blamey’s vigil the next day and Verity does not come. The camera on Verity caring for Geoffrey Charles; the note to Blamey. Blamey’s deep distress and anger, and he resorts to breaking things on the table.

Clive Francis as shamed Francis, grateful to Verity, Enys

Trenwith: Francis has genuine decency in him (as does Keren) and comes forth from Geoffrey Charles’s bedroom: “I feel so helpless,” and attempts to talk to Elizabeth for the first time in a long while, but George Warleggan intrudes. Elizabeth tells Warleggan stay, what they were saying was of no importance. Elizabeth insists Francis sees George alone. She is blind to what George is, and Francis is not.

Ralph Bates as Warleggan holding out 600 pounds, and Francis cannot resist

George gives Francis 600 pounds,” to which Francis says “I don’t want payment” George says this is to make up what Samson cheated Francis of.” Francis knows better, irritated by the man’s adeptness in social hypocrisies and piety. All George did was prompt Francis into betraying cousin, “an act he finds damnably hard to live with” and he goes out the door. Elizabeth says to Verity she will tend the child herself and Francs will help. Verity: “had you only said this yesterday.” Elizabeth all selfishness; unlike book Francis betrayed Ross well before Verity eloped.

Our knowledge of Francis’s treachery and his guilt then comes before the board meeting, the others not coming because found out and pressured by Warleggan. Credit to be stopped and mortgages called in unless they abandon the business at once. They insinuate it was Francis. Ross insists on proof “my cousin played Judas.”

At the mine, Mark hears unsavoury insinuations about Enys and Keren; Mark hears, go savage, breaks down the level and is buried by rocks. He is almost killed. A wound in his head. They tell Mark to go home.

Long scene between Enys and Keren as lovers: moving intimate scene

Camera on Enys house and then Keren in his bed; the two in bed. Camera switches to Mark in the empty house and sees empty bed. Night passes and now it’s morning and Enys is waking with an empty space beside his bed, Keren readying herself to leave. She says she must leave Mark and this place and soon and go back to Bristol. Enys does not love her; Enys says he felt that way was 6 months ago, now he cannot bear to lose her. He does love her but he cannot leave his patients and practice. He says he will find a way, trust me, we shall be together, now she doesn’t mind however long.

Powerful theatrical scene

She goes out and we see her from Marks’ vantage. Very powerful camera work as we watch her gayly strolling, then she feels a presence, it’s him. His shadow overcasts her and there is expressionistic TV The gestures are slow and symbolic as he strangles her. The camera show her splayed out among the rocks, her lovely clothes blowing up from wind.

Same morning: Ross and Demelza eating breakfast. He tells her Carnemore Copper Company is dead. She is naive enough really to have thought George meant to be a friend. Ross says it may have been Francis. Silence. MacNeil comes into the house with his soldiers. Donald Douglas plays an important new character who emerges in the last part of Demelza and is important in Jeremy Poldark. He stands for the state and he and Ross will come to direct odds in a number of larger issues: his troop detailed to stamp out smuggling and collect excise. He stands for law not morality; he is an agent of the state and later works for Warleggan. In the book and 1975 film he and Ross are men who recognize one another as equals and talk as if friends, two intelligent men.

Enys distraught on shore

Now he’s here to say Mistress Daniel is dead. The camera switches to Demelza, Ross looking at body. Enys rushes down from his nearyby tower, he is distraught. Now at Nampara: Demelza pouring wine, handing it to Dwight Enys. Dwight: “twas my fault.” I don’t think so” Ginny’s lack of any sympathy for this woman who was not loyal to the working man. Dwight feels shamed and wants to leave; Ross says you must not — there is a powerful pasage in the book expressing this moment. Ross: “How can you not continue to leave here; you think you can make your peace by leaving.” You cannot. You will not solve anything by leaving.”

Trenwith: Elizabeth feeding Geoffrey Charles; Francis says they must tell Verity that the child is better. She will be so happy. “Where is she?” he’s not seen her all morning. Elizabeth gives him the letter from Verity, Elizabeth reads, Francis intensely hurt, and the stream of talk becomes Verity in voice-over to her climbing hill to Blamey.

Free at last

She is with Blamey. A moving scene. So sometimes breaking away is right.

Francis incensed, and Demelza astonished to discover how she is despised, and that he did betray Ross

A painful scene where Demelza comes to Francis to tell him she helped Verity not Ross; he derides and snubs her: “I refuse to discuss the affairs of my sister with the likes of you.” Demelza: “I came to try and make friends” Demelza explains that she and Ross are ruined if Carnemore Company fails, and we see another motive for Francis’s having betrayed Ross: jealousy. Francis “Now that he is ruined perhaps he will understand what I have had to endure of later ….” We see his jealousy and envy of Ross’s position, character, it’s far more than Elizabeth that motivates him. Demelza sees he is the betrayer: “So it was you.”

Demelza for once fires up, defending what she did for Verity, why she went to Francis, but before Ross can react, Mark at window and is let in:

Ross now advising Mark

Nampara: she tells Ross what Francis said: “so what did you expect, hmmm” The 1975 film entirely skips Ross’s blaming Demelza, and presents Ross as sympathetic to Verity but would not have helped as his loyalty is to family first. Ginny serves a meal, and Mark there at the window. How they all feel for him. He hid in water of Wheal Grace; the plan to help him escape by Ross’s boat. Mark saw load of copper in Wheal Grace. MacNeil and men at door and they hide him from MacNeil. MacNeil sees the blood and wet by the window. Here as in the book we do have wife-murder in effect condoned. Othello is never condoned.

We conclude out on that wild seashore: Ross is leading Daniel down to a small boat by the Nampara cove, pushes the boat in and they see soldiers running up on beach. Ross does nto desert but helps Mark get afloat, then he runs. In final moment Ross is being shot at directly by MacNeil’s orders. Close ups back and forth of MacNeil’s and then Ross’s face. A final far shot of Mark rowing out to the Atlantic for his life and Ross fleeing to the house. Very powerful.

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See continuation in comments: 2015 Episode 7; concluding remarks on the three versions.

Ellen

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Poldark 6: between book (Graham’s Demelza) & films (1975 & 2015): the audiences & screenplay writers

Demelza (Angharad Rees) taken in by Ross (Robin Ellis)

Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson) walking down the stairway by herself
A young lady’s entrance into “le monde” who has not the status of a lady (1975, Paul Wheeler scriptwriter and Paul Arnett director, 2015 Debbie Horsbield scriptwriter and William McGregor director)

Dear friends and readers,

Another comparative blog but from another angle than those previous. This blog looks differently than I have before at the distinctively different characterizations of the 2015 mini-series (especially Francis and Elizabeth Poldark, both Paynters, George Warleggan) and the marginalization and lack of individuality given secondary characters (Jim and Jinny Carter, Dwight Enys) from Ross Poldark and Demelza and the 1975 mini-series, which also evidenced strong departures from the book (again, Elizabeth, though in the earlier film version, a very hostile presentation, Ross himself made far more domestic, less an angry radical Jacobin). What lies between most books and the films based on them is a mainstream audience, few of whom (in comparison with numbers watching the movies) have read or might like the books, most of whom conform to mainstream social norms of the year in which a film is made. Experience shows the way to understand a given film is to study the other films made by the screenplay writer and/or director.

So, as far as this was possible, one should look at Horsfield’s previous films. She’s been the writer of six TV series (and stray episodes), one panned (True Dare Kiss), all contemporary, respected. One has gained real praise, All the Small Things, and is available as a DVD so I’ve bought it and hope to compare it with her Poldark. It’s much harder to find distinctive material for directors of BBC films as the linchpins are the writer and producer who often hire directors after they have decided central aims for themselves. One of the volumes one of my essays on Trollope films appeared in had as its perspective filmic intertextuality (Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation edd. Abigail B. Bloom and Mary S. Pollock): all the essays (including mine on the Palliser films) showed how intertextuality among films helps explain them (Simon Raven’s other film adaptations of Edwardian material helped explain his Palliser films). Intertextuality also brings into play the screenwriter’s politics, themes and use of genres in other films. For now I have to wait until All the Small Things arrive.

So here we study the distance between the book and its film adaptation as this 2015 episode like the first, third and fourth, basically covers the same material as the 1975 equivalent episodes, only having 8 minutes more. I am using as a jumping off point Graham’s Demelza, Book 2, Chapter 5 (when Ross becomes aware that Jim is dying in the prison) to Chapter 14 (when after the ball, George and his father, Nicholas, determine to break the Carnemore Copper Company by calling in the loans of those of its members who banks with them, Anibundel’s mainstream blog showing how people who have not read the book nor seen the first film adaptation react to the new mini-series, and my own memories as well as three essays I’ve read on the subject of the 1975 audience’s reaction (remarkably uniformly favorable including those who had read the books, far more than today).

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Demelza (see also A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World)

The novel dramatizes the heroine’s difficult entrance into the upper class world for the first time. She cannot hold her own against the upper class males who show little respect for her because she lacks any status or rank even if married to Ross Poldark. This is the spine of the part. The ball is preceded by Ross’s attempt to save Jim Carter from death, with the help of Enys. The book makes it clear (as historical research does) that in this era prisons were increasingly critiqued and regarded as hellholes – they became a central bone of contention for the French revolution and in England in the 1790s. I own two facsimiles of books published in the era exposing the horrors of such places. Making Carter’s crime poaching is like Hugo choosing to make Jean Valjean’s crime stealing bread: everyone know that the Draconian poaching laws were a disguised war of the propertied against the propertyless and justice was meted out laughingly unequally. Verity’s presence at the ball is minor; Francis is rather troubled by the money he owes the Warleggan bank and lost to the cardshark, Sanson; he is troubled by Elizabeth’s obvious love for Ross. Verity and Francis have been close and he is hurt by her defection from him too. Elizabeth is there, but avoids Demelza (intensely jealous, but ever the upper class woman of integrity it’s the tactful and easiest thing to do). Demelza can hold her own against the spite of Miss Teague, now Mrs Treneglos, and the treatment of the Brodugans of her as a slut, but cannot manage the aggressive males because she does not understand the card signing system is an instrument to do that. Instead the men use her card against her. The powerfully theatrical lenghthy gambling scene is an invention of the 1975 film (by Wheeler), Ross does not risk his mine (he’s not a fool) and does not carry on to near bankrupt lengths, nor does he throw Sanson into a trough of water (Sanson is a Warleggan, not a servant like Jud). Halse is there as depicted in the 2015 film (he does not appear in the 1975 one), but the evening ends on Demelza breaking down under the pressure of harassment, finally Ross coming over to her to put with his authority as her husband to put a stop to her misery. At first he blames her (as men blame women who have been raped) but recognizing how she was at such a disadvantage, and how it was his duty as her husband to be by her side this first time, he apologizes.

In the book there are no remarks from any of the characters but Halse (who embodies the ancien regime) that Ross did wrong to pull Jim Carter out of prison. Jim Carter matters — as black people today in the US think they matter. A huge issue for the 3 revolutions in the era was the criminal justice system and how it threw individual away. The great act of 1789 were when the soldiers joined the people to open the Bastille.

As to the other additions in the films.

Verity (Ruby Bentall) made very unhappy by Blamey’s accusations and pressure on her

2015: The Verity scenes in the ball are from Austen’s Persuasion. Nowhere in the book does Blamey accuse Verity of timidity. Wentworth is angry at Anne Elliot for not rebelling. Blamey does not see Verity as timid. She is not. When I’ve taught the books girls in the class cannot stand Verity because she is obedient to family norms and does not seek power as an individual. You can see her type in Philippa Gregory’s Mary Boleyn (only Mary is easy about sex), Austen’s Fanny Price: it’s a very real character type in the era from the early modern period to the middle 19th century. In the ball Francis does see Blamey but he is all caught up in the gambling and never forbids Verity to see Blamey again nor outright insults him. Blamey is beneath Francis in Francis’s mind; he wouldn’t bother; he does want to control his sister because that’s part of his place or manliness in his house. A different issue. Horsfield rewrote the central Demelza scenes, making them marginal. Her Demelza holds her own against the man asking her to dance with no trouble. Horsfield cannot stand to have her women character not behave in superficial strong ways. She cannot stand to have the ones she wants us to identify underdogs. But Demelza is, and Verity must be as a spinster.

Clive Francis as a caged, grated upon man in retreat at the ball (1975)

1975 film. Wheeler also degrades Francis. Neither the 1975 nor 2015 audiences were expected to have any sympathy for the aristocratic types of the later 18th century. Francis does not work in the fields (he wouldn’t and how useless), nor Elizabeth go about in servants’ clothes looking self-righteous. They both carry on in their aristocratic clothes and ways, just shabbier and bleaker in expression. Wheeler has the prostitute Margaret insult his way of love-making. No where in the book does that happen. In the book not only does Verity value Francis, many of the other characters do for his gaiety, savoir-faire; he gilds experience for others. Elizabeth openly snubs Demelza at the 1975 ball; the 1975 team did all they could to make Elizabeth “awful” as they perceived their audience would find this; she remains regal yes, and in the 1975 and 2015 scenes great play is made of George dancing with her. She is succumbing to his insidious blandishments. The 1975 film also does not permit Demelza to be harassed. Apparently it was felt in both eras the female audience would not empathize with her. (And women often do not empathize with the particular women who have been raped in courtrooms.) Wheeler does more justice to the secondary parallel story of Keren & Mark and Enys. Keren’s desperation is understandable: we see Mark is illiterate, she is asked to spend hours, her life, alone in a dark hovel. Enys is far more active in the liaison as he is in the book.

The drunken prisoner-physician who has destroyed Jim (lying by his side) by his bleeding techniques (1975)

The scenes of the prison in book, 1975 and 2015 film are all effective. Unfortunately in 2015 Horsfield does not bring out the individuality of Jinny nor Jim. In 1975 he is brought home to Jinny still living and we see them together (albeit briefly) and all they have had taken from them. In 2015 Horsfield wanted to emphasize the risk taken when Jim’s arm was amputated; in the book Graham continually shows the limits of medicine in the 1780s to 90s to reflect the limits of medicine in the 1940s.

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Turning to the films in their own right: This time first the 1975 episode 6. Part of the fine quality of the 1975 film series is its unstressed tone. Nothing is overdone or melodramatic, no overproduction, and thus everything feels believable. Also the slow development of each story and longer scenes.

Much happens in this episode, all well prepared for. We have a different writer (Paul Wheeler) and he is writing a transposition while Jack Pullman wrote more of a commentary type adaptation and freely reworked plot-design so as to bring Elizabeth centrally in earlier.

It opens with the alluring music, the cliffs of Cornwall, crashing waves, high winds, and we see Ellis on his horse (it helps the series that he really does ride, it’s not a stunt man), and the starving men we saw last time standing before the mine. They have just been fired. We are to remember how they then tried to take corn and bread and were beaten and sneered at by the hired soldiers.

The ticketing scene (1975): Ross cool and collected, Zacky Martin takes the lead calmly

The economic part of Graham’s novel is woven in thoroughly. We are at a ticket auction and we witness a direct hard struggle to buy up enough ore to smelt with in a meeting of the hitherto uncontested monopolists (English) who buy and sell copper when they find this new company, Carnemore Copper is outbidding them. They grow indignant when the banker at the head of the table says the company is within its rights not to tell shareholders. To tell shareholders would invite their enemies who own the other banks to call their loans in. This would be like (in Godwin’s Caleb Williams where we see this) forcing people to vote your way because as tenants you can throw them off your land. Zacky Martin takes the heat to hide that the new company is Ross’s — Warleggan and others banking with him indignant, Ross sits quietly smoking: ticket auction: Carnemore Copper Company

Jinny grieving for Jim, tells Ross what has happened

Ross on horse comes home to Ginny washing floor intensely, weeping, Jim is ill, arm wounded and arm gangrene, no one taking care, they are sneering. She tells of how they laughed at her and said now he won’t be risking getting thrown into prison again. We see how little humanity people with power often have to eon another. Demelza comes down from her nursery and wants to know what has happened in the business. Ross says he has with 5000 pounds bought enough ore to smelt for months. Graham invites us to admire the entrepreneurial spirit as well as nerve, daring, and ruthlessness.

Next scene: when Ross visits Pascoe for this 5000, the banker says they are risking a lot, and also that Ross is taking liberties in the way he does not try to negotiate more slowly. Ross promises him drafts enough to cover; Pascoe assures Ross the secret list of men will reside safely with him. The banker actually approves this bold move on behalf of copper industry in Cornwall. So anti-colonalism as well as anti-monopolies and anti-classicism and cruel prison conditions. The banker says remember though there are many Cornish too who only seek to turn a profit.

Keren living her life in the dark and cold with Mark

A second romance plot-design (separate set of stories or characters) begins to develop. We see Karen’s dissatisfaction with her dull husband who works long hours: it’s so cold in that hand-made house, no window,night after night on her own, asks him to stay, to get another job, those on top come home regular times. He has no skills, no ability to do anything else, and says soon it may coome he’ll have no job at all so they must make as much money as they can to preserve it for harder times. We wee her walking on the wind-torn landscape visiting Enys in hs house apart, Enys’s intense attraction, it’s physical, but also his guilt. He does not lie and pretend to love her, and asks, Does she know what she wants. Well, not a man who’s never there and a house like a graveyard. She wants Enys, she wants to go back to Bristol, he sometimes people have to settle for less. She replies she is doing so, for she knows Enys doesn’t love her. Ross comes in, and she flees upstairs.

Ross tells Enys of of Carter and how he, Ross, intends to get into the prison, care for Carter and perhaps “bring him out.’ Enys agrees to come with him and do whatever is necessary — like break the law. On his way out we see Ross see the scarf and cape. So Ross sees that karen, Mark Daniel’s wife is upstairs. Ross says they’ll go Friday.

Keren’s gesture to Dwight repeats Demelza’s to Ross’s on the first night Ross and Demelza made love

Another tryst: Enys tries to say they should not, but she replies, Mark will be away till morning, and they close the door on us, their audience. Here we see a masculinist point of view where the man presented as moral and the woman sly, disloyal, really worthless if her boredom understandable.

A violent scene from Demelza: the servant Prudie with Ross’s baby daughter, a drunken resentful Jud comes in. He proceeds to curse, to insinuate Ross goes to bed with every woman (including Jinny Carter), sneer at Demela (now she’s in his bed like a queen and he doesn’t see why he should obey her), Ross comes in the throws them out as Jud accuses Ginny of being slut to Ross, insults Demelza Ross also throws out Prudie who (I did not quite expect this but it’s probably) defends her husband as “just the drink.” They are now out of work.

Blamey and Verity meeting on horseback in a beautiful day, and we meet George Warleggan for first time spying, vaunting over them; he introduced as son of Nicholas, smiles too much. Bates comes across as biting, someone you should not trust. It is hard to remember he is only introduced briefly in Ross Poldark, hardly appears at all until near the ball in Demelza.

A sweet scene where George’s invitation to the Warleggan Ball comes for both of them while Demelza with baby. She brings it in to Ross, she wants to go, and he concedes. The relationship is one of girl to older man and again it’s a masculine comfort myth. For my part I like Ellis as Ross so much by this time that I find him attractive and (naive but real response) imaginatively at any rate, a wish fulfillment of a girl, envy her.

Elizabeth (Jill Townsend) taken in by George (Ralph Bates)

Over to Trenwith; we see the elegant Elizabeth fine sewing. George Warleggan comes and we watch their first courtship scene. George wins her over not by sex but interest: he’d like to help Francis. For her sake, he says. Sure. (We the viewers are supposed to see through him and see Elizabeth does not.) She says he should discourage his urge to gamble, he has no influence there he says; he gives word as a gentleman no debt collector will set foot in the house. Unknowing it’s Elizabeth who gives away that the Carnmore Copper company is Ross. Verity arrives and George does not leave after all, but sits down with them. He has something over Verity but like Ross she refuses to be ashamed.

A powerful scene of the terrible dungeon, begins with rats. Ross and Enys arrive, the jailer who scoffs and then will not let them in. He puts me in mind of people hired to interview others for jobs, petty miserable tyrants. They do get through the stench and horror, and pull Carter out. A mountebank doctor, Dr Morris (saturnine sairic moment) has made Carter much worse. We hear Jim’s voice as they are carrying him: “they won’t get me Jinny if I run they won’t catch me”;’ Then from a high hill a working man watches wagon bringing him to Enys; then the next morning we see him brought to Ginny, his arm amputated. Says Ross, “No one will take him back there.” And no one does. Ross does have the power of his position and class.

Jim dying by Jinny’s side

But Ross is grim before the fire that night. He is shamed of his own class, and finds his despises his own kind. When he blurts out, Wilberforce weeps over black slaves’ but no care for workers, this comes from Graham. He then says were he to expose this scene it would do no good, for perhaps most peopel would look and laugh.

Ross’s speech against the ancien regime as experienced in Cornwall

Now Trenwith at night as people arrive. A moment or so to watch the lovely dancing. Milton Johns has his great scene as the open sordid cheating cousin (at cards): he is a parallel, the underside of George and Nicholas Warleggan. Many scenes: Francis is now after Margaret whom Ross used to visit (he paid her for sex), but it appears now she is married or she says he is. Elizabeth sees this enconter, and Margaret needles him after he insults her (you told me your troubles “during” sex; that’s a bore).

We see the gambling begin and Francis sit down. Gorgeous waistcoat, high vanity of the man. Clive Francis continues his portrait of a man who hates himself more and more all the time, living down to his lack of self-esteem. He will try to kills himself: one reason for killing yourself is you hate yourself; he will also be reckless and do himself in because he finally he does not value himself enough — the 1975 film accounts for this by the father’s denigration of him. (Graham’s book makes Francis’s death an accident, part of the meaningless of life’s hardnesses).

George to Elizabrth dancing: it is attractive of him and she is allured.

Ross and Demelza arrive. We see the coarse squire Hugh Bodrugan who chases Demelza in the book and his nasty wife: calls Demelza a monkey who stays that way no matter what she wears. The unstressed quality makes this scene effective.

Margaret comes over to Ross and we get too much praise for the hero (a false note). Nicolas comes over and Ross open and indignant, insulting him and we get choral voices (banker, Pascoe) saying Ross should be more conciliatory, he is making enemies.

Demelza holds her own dancing again. Verity and Blamey arrive; Ross welcomes him as no one else does and Demelza asks him to dance. We see our chief couple on a wave length, compatible in values.

Far shot

Sanson

Ross

Then the long gambling between Samson and Francis who loses, Ross takes Francis’s place and proceeds, evening wears on. We see all watching this pair and Ross’s sudden exposure of Samson as Samson has gathered too many aces by this time to hide them. Then Ross throwns Samson into trough — a parallel to Ross throwing Jud in the mud.

George assures Francis he will be reimbursed — we know that George has in his mind to undermine Francis’s relationship with Ross as he has asked Elizabeth if the cousins get along. We saw Francis (cowardly in a way) refuse to join the Carnmore venture and Francis fire his miners as a result. Francis a failure because he doesn’t have the nerve Ross has.

George then making (pretend) overture to Ross who says (sincerely partly) in reply, he wants to be friends too. The ball ends on George watching Demelza and Ross leaving, then a scene with his Father over trough (they were shamed and laughed out over Samson) telling father that the men in Connmore copper company bank with them.

The two Warleggans at dawn over the trough

The long shot comes as they move over to the horses. The music begins again. Dawn sky. This is fine art.

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Although wholly unlike Graham’s character, Horsfield’s Francis as played by Kyle Soller continues to be the most interesting character in the films — here he is here in his troubled vexed household

2015: This is powerful successful episode because of the intense dramatic tension kept up throughout; Horsfield’s intention seems to be to depict a growing strain between Ross and Demelza before Verity with her help flees. In the book Demelza is not angry with Ross at the close of the ball as she is in this film. She is disappointed with herself and tells herself that she needs to learn more about Ross and his world’s ways before she can manage both more effectively.

The 2015 differs by opening on the prison, showing the horrors. We move to Jinny and Demelza hanging out clothes with their babies on their arms, talking of Jim: this is quintessential 2015; you just would not have this “earthiness” (so-called) in 1975. Demelza is not seen holding her baby all the time in 1975; in fact she seems relatively baby-free with Jinny caring for the baby much more so she can visit Karen and give Karen her discards. We then go to Trenwith to find Francis threshing the fields — this is absurd, completely unprepared for. What good would this do him? Elizabeth is wandering about looking wounded with a basket on her arm. Ross happens by on his horse; he wishes he could help. Francis responds with a sneer at Elizabeth and walks off.

Elizabeth (Heidi Reed) looking back at him — it is notable how many scenes in Horsfield have the POV the woman

The ticketing scene with Turner as Ross appearing angrier and angrier as the Carnemore Copper Company is protested against. Zacky Martin keeps his cool.

We move to Keren and Mark outside the house Mark has built. Keren is her usual sarcastic and insinuating self; Mark protests he does all he can. Why they sit out of doors is a puzzle, except maybe there is no set inside the shell of a house. Upon Mark leaving for work, Keren notices some children playing nearby (you’d think this was a public playground) and she goes over and deliberately breaks her ankle; we see her at the door of Enys’s house; he cannot refuse her entrance as she walks in. Enys is completely deprive of any pro-active character in this mini-series thus far. Switch to Demelza and Verity discussing the coming ball, with Demelza telling Verity she must tell Francis (in the book Demelza knows this is the last thing Verity should or can do). This is reinforced by the next scene of Blamey somewhere outside also pressuring Verity to tell Francis.

Ross questioning Demelza who evades his question; Graham’s Ross does ask Demelza and she falls silent

The troubled household at Trenwith juxtaposed to Ross and Demelza in bed with him asking Demelza what she knows about Verity (he had some rumors told him during the ticketing). Next scene Demelza practicing her dancing in the meadow; Ross rides by on a horse; further along Keren goes to Dwight’s house, either he is not home or refuses to bome to the door. She looks disgusted.

The long powerful sequence of going to the prison, rescuing Jim, amputating the limb, and his death. These scenes are too dark to present stills for. Jinny’s grief. Move to Nampara later that night and Ross’s fury at what was done to Jim. Ross does not want to go to the ball, and Demelza understands, but suddenly Verity is there, all social wisdom: Ross must go or he’ll be in trouble over rescuing Jim. We see Keren get into Dwight’s house and the door shut.

A shamefast Enys against an insistent Keren

Back to Verity scolding Ross; she does urge Ross to go in the book but not emphatically and Ross decides to go as much for Demelza’s sake and his pride.

Then the long ball sequence. Two of the features of this episode which make it good are the lengths of the ticketing scene, the prison rescue and death of Jim and this ball (with the gambling scene as central). Horsfield’s Episode 4 also had long connected scenes (if little original or interesting dialogue). Here (as in Graham’s Demelza) the Rev Halse sits down to play and is angered at Ross’s cavalier insouciance and defiant anger at Halse as a wholly unjust man:

Rev Halse (Robin Ellis, again inimitable in the role)

Ross openly assailing him

For the moment Sanson not paid attention to

In this ball we see Francis’s anger at himself and then Verity as a convenient surrogate, Blamey’s anger at her, Elizabeth’s graciousness towards Demelza who nonetheless is very angry at Ross for over-gambling, drinking and not paying sufficient attention to her. He seems unrepentant; we are to understand he drinks for five days straight — this is disapproved of by Horsfield strongly (the mainstream audience of 2015 is much more anti-alcohol than either the readers of 1945 or viewers of 1975 because of automobile accidents). A key moment in the ball scene is given over to Halse’s threat and warning to Ross he can try to imprison him (in reality in this era he would not find a sympathetic jury to commit Ross at all), with a scene of the women outside being put into the coach.

Ross in anguish, Demelza kneels

The episode concludes on the burial of Jim and once again Ross and Demelza standing over the landscape together, vowing once again to love one another in the face of this tragedy and whatever is to come.

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In reality in this period huge numbers of people hated the authority figures as tyrants (tyranny and superstition were the outcries of the era – -what you wanted to get rid of).

In 1975 a scene of apparently the regular meeting of Verity and Blamey to ride: they glimpse George Warleggan from afar and it is our first look at him fully

The 1975 scenes are unbeatable, fully done, precise, moving. Yes they are slower and less is happening during each episode, much less switching back and forth. They do justice to the growing love of Keren and Dwight so we have three marital triangles. They also include Jud beating up Prudie, throwing at Jinny the rumors that her baby is Ross’s and Ross firing them. So again the 1975 film includes more even though it’s only 50 minutes to Horsfield’s 58.

At the ball it is telling how the camera focuses on George (looking anguished from the red around his eyes) not Elizabeth when he comes to ask her to dance

Except Halse’s all the remarks given characters saying Ross did wrong are from Horsfield. Horsfield is deeply pro-capitalist, deeply pro-work ethic: that’s one reason why she cannot develop ideas interestingly from Ross’s point of view. Her gut instincts lie against it. That’s why she brings in George Warleggan early and doesn’t make him the bully and really insidiously treacherous man to Elizabeth and Francis he is in the book. I will be interested to see Horsfield’s All the Small Things to confirm or maybe contradict this surmise. This new one grates — I’m beginning to think that the way Horsfield sees Francis resembles the way so many fans see Mr Bennet: failed in his responsibility to his family; the way Anibundel is led to praise Elizabeth for the mainstream audience today (in the book Elizabeth is not pious she) comes out of a deep adherence to the capitalist work ethic and notion of manliness.

Both mini-series substituted male confrontations for the center of the matter of Demelza at this point: the humiliation and hurt of the heroine. This is bowing to the audience’s mores. Both were over-melodramatic in comparison with Graham; both tried to do justice to the exposures of prison and throwing away of Jim Carter. Horsfield re-inforced her male hegemonic point of view by turning Keren into an aggressive heartless slut; there Wheeler showed some understanding of Graham’s proto-feminism. Horsfield modelled her gambling scene on Wheeler’s 1975 one though more accurate literally by including Halse, she emphasized him too much and shaped the scene so that Halse appeared to be right!

Ellen

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Upstairs and Downstairs: British TV costume drama, Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey (3)

Anton Lesser as Thomas More (Peter Straughan defying a fear a wider swathe of viewers will declare a series boring or slow-moving returns to some of the techniques he used in Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy … ) The Washington Post featured a editorial column by Charles Krauthammer inveighing against the distorted portrait of More, showing how seriously these films are taken …

Dear friends and readers,

My concluding blog review of this unusually rich volume of essays on the often neglected and casually dissed costume drama from the BBC, for several decades a leading and influential creator of fine TV drama. The first part covered different ways of dicussing these serial films ; the second the history and evolution of historical films, and this last on the power of these drama’s audiences (especially in the age of fandoms on the Internet with their instant commentary) and how they can influence how a given mini-series might develop and frame how the series is discussed in public media.

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All we are permitted to see in the 1970s is the morning after (Ellis as Ross, Jill Townsend as Elizabeth)

Chapter 16: Julie Anne Taddeo’s “Why don’t you take her?”” Rape in the Poldark Narrative.” I liked this one — it coheres with my point of view on gender politics in the Poldark series (though I differ in how I see Graham’s stance). Where she differs from the approach I would take is she organizes her findings around the fan groups which protest regularly, where misreadings are a result of mainstream cultural values. It offended many viewers of the 1970s mini-series that Ross rapes Elizabeth, and they are given ammunition in this view by the relatively chaste presentation of the 1970s depiction, and by later qualified backtracking in the novels, to be noted in Ross Poldark’s memory — but not sufficient to turn away the reality that Elizabeth manifests intense bitterness towards Ross in The Black Moon and is in The Angry Tide given a very “rough deal” indeed (Graham’s terms for the realities of women’s lives in our culture): she dies of miscarriage she pays a doctor to bring in by causing early parturition, using some herbs known to lead to gangrene. why? the intolerable life she finds herself having to endure when George Warleggan, her aroused jealous husband begins to believe that her second son, he thought his, and born prematurely, is Ross Poldark’s.

Taddeo begins with the enormous popularity of the Poldark mini-series as well as the unacknowledged (by elite groups) extent of Graham’s readership for years of his Poldark and mystery-thrillers-psychologically complex books. Her point will be to show how the fan groups managed to influence how the film-makers changed Graham’s books when they filmed them. The central dilemma of the 12 books is that Ross Poldark loves two women, Elizabeth Chynoweth, aristocratic, upper class, who chooses to marry Ross’s cousin, Francis, partly because she fears marriage to Ross (as a man of renegade risky outcast behavior), and thought he was dead and promised Francis; partly because Francis is the oldest son’s older son, and thus the heir and she hopes can provide her with a high culture social life. Ross takes in a pathetic abject working class (beaten up or abused) young girl, Demelza Carne, to be a servant in his house. Demelza grows up and eventually they have sex (almost inevitably and this carries on) but he marries her quickly — as someone he really likes and feels comfortable with, as a good sex partner. As to defy his class; it is an act of rebellion.  He falls in love with her gradually and deeply. In the 1970s series this altered so that Ross and Demelza have sex for just one night (the film-makers feared the audience would think Demelza unchaste if there were many nights, and that even today would not condone breaking the taboo of marrying far beneath him); Demelza becomes pregnant, even tries to an abortion, but Ross finds out, stops her and “gives” and their child “his name.” When Francis Poldark dies, and Elizabeth finds herself impoverished, alone, insecure, lonely, she marries George Warleggan, even though Ross has made intense efforts to help her (like giving her a lump sum he and Demelza needed badly for his mining business).  Incensed, enraged, he goes to Trenwith and forces himself sexually upon her.  To take her back, to assert his right to own her.  Fans resent bitterly the idea that Ross could have raped anyone. Just the other day I debated this issue off-blog and off-facebook with a long-time ardent reader of Graham’s books and about his life.

So fans of the mini-series argue over this triangle, wanting to absolve Ross and turning to hating Elizabeth. Taddeo shows that Graham is seriously interested in the question of rape, presents women as subject to men; in the second mini-series (out of Books 6-8), we have a young woman, Eliizabeth’s cousin, Morwenna, forced into marriage and Graham dramatizes her experience of married life as continued sadistic marital rape — happily her husband dies, and she remarries a brother of Demelza, but she never recovers from her two years of such experiences.

A scene related to the one focused on above: another rape scene written by a man, and this time we are encouraged to see coerced sex as aggresive seduction (Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary, forced down by a Turkish friend of one of her suitors, Downton Abbey, the first season, 2010)

Chapter 16: Andrea Schmidt dilates on “Imaginative power” of the fan fiction and postings on the Net about Downton Abbey. She demonstrates how these fans — often disdained — expose the absurdities and perversities of Fellowes. He hires a “historian” as a reinforcement of his claim that he refuses to develop his characters in more sophisticated adult ways and deal openly with complex politics because is he keeps to “historical accuracy” no anachronisms in his characters. “Historical accuracy” is his mantra (like the US uses “national security”) behind which he wants to control the depiction of the characters to suit his defense of this super-rich order of people. At the same time he can write dialogue and invent presences with the power of suggestivity. He is usually real enough, and registers the depths and amorality of people sufficiently to open up suggestions we can play with — such as my argument last year that Mr Bates murdered his first wife and Mr Green through the clever ruse of accident.

Schmidt suggests that Downton Abbey fan fiction develops his characters from hints and behaviors Fellowes refuses to make clear or explicit — he cannot sue them as they are making no money and are not acknowledged as legitimate or serious by those in charge of literature and art. These fan fictions and postings and blogs too expose the nasty undercurrents of his portrayals, his fatuity. They complicate his stories in more “interesting, self-aware and sensitive areas” that he (in effect) refuses to. One I noticed is a fan fiction that postulates a love affair between Miss Obrien and “arguably the most underdeveloped character in the series, Cora, Lady Grantham.” A pair of lesbians. In another “poor Edith” is given a sarcastic and funny voice and describes the passive-aggressive relationship of Matthew (his sycophancy and making up to her) and Lady Mary (her cold indifference and potentially needling tongue) one New Year’s Day. They allow Robert (Lord Grantham to have his affair with Jane (the widowed housemaid?).

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From Mr Selfridge: the opening episode, Miss Agnes Towler gazing yearningly at the dress in the department store window

Chapter 17: Andrea Wright’s “This Wonderful Commercial Machine” defends and analyses “Gender, Class, and the Pleasures of Spectacle in The Paradise and Mr Selfridge compared to the 1970s House of Elliot. The 1970s is incomparably more genuinely feminist in outlook — for a start, the owners are women. These costume dramas have lots of “good girl messages” I’d call them — stay home, be obedient, don’t rock the values that sustain you supposedly and you’ll be safe and maybe unhappy critics who complain about the spectacle and shopping should realize that’s the point of these series; women go there for pleasure. The older program had 2 ambitious women now we have ambitious men.

Like The Bletchley Circle, The 1970s House of Elliot featured women in charge, dealing, negotating

Wright finds that conservative ideologies have taken over; we espape the present. In The Paradise something less authentic is taking over – modern retail is characterized by cavernous hypermarkets that lack all individiduality. The Paradise maintains its French origin in feel and tone. She carefully goes over the décor of the two series and what is projected – -an opportunity to revel. Respectability and reputation are central to women of all classes. Agnes the desperate girl of Mr Selfridge is matched with Denise of Paradise, a prey to men, clerks on display like the goods, women as a consumable pleasure. Wright compares the kinds and fates of the female characrers in the two series. They fail to offer progressive roles for women and reiterate rigid class structures. A French business women Clemence is a threat sexually as she seeks to win through sexual enticement; she is cast as a dangerous other. Normalcy restored. Agnes has little opportunity, she gets paternistilc support, a sexual education rather than emancipation. We have also another Miss Bunting, desperate over debt, who steals is not pardoned and kills herself.

The upbeat 1940s Cherry Ames/Sue Barton feel to the series can be seen in this kind of stylized cheerful promotional shot — connected to the above still, women going to work

Chapter 18: Louise Fitzgerald’s “Taking a pregnant pause: Interrogating the feminist potential of Call the Midwife.” It’s the story of a newly qualified midwife who arrives in Post WW2 London to take a position alongside other novice midwives and Anglican order of nuns – Jenny Lee, a middle class woman who once loved classical music. The midwife can be seen as a feminist figure because she has been cloaked in misogynies – female strength not liked, a scapegoat. Birth and reproductive rights continue to be a central feminist subject; the show breaks this aesthetic taboo. Abortion becomes a flash point in the series – a story of a backstreet abortion at a time abortion not legal; Nora Harding almost dies – we witness her screaming. Neither woman (a story of Trixie who is first seen painting her nails with blood red varnish) is judged by her community, but both women are in effect punished and abortion and sexual assault are seen as the result of sexual desire. After success of first season Heidi Thomas (the writer who is a centrally important person in costume dramas, especially British) began to try for feminist content. Midwives are a much more visible presence in the UK; US media did not like its bleak ideologies and socialist Health care system. It is feminocentric and about women – none of women defined by relationship to a man – it suggests a communitarian spirit and that domestic history is valuable history.

Another promotional still which does show the ambiance of at least the first season

The main concern of the series is the relationship of poverty and social welfare even if topics – domestic violence, abortion, rape, birth, prostitution are feminist issues – there are so very few programs with women at the center is one reason for its success. Channel 4’s reality TV show One Born Every Minute has a high prioritization of birth stories – central in popular culture today and does reinforce “fact’ of women’s biological difference from men – Call the Midwife is a ghettoizing of what it means to be feminist because midwifery childbirth and motherhood seen as female space. No new points of identification. There is a nostalgia in the way class identity and hierarchies are used (reinforced too). It is white – one nun makes an “unintentional racist” remarks does not provoke disquiet that working class women’s behavior does. A story about a black child is told without referring to the child’s race; the story about the man as a father and man. Call the Midwife does not offer new paradigms for identification nor systematically challenge sstems of oppression and inequity. The larger problem in feminist of racism is here.

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As general constant across the three parts of the book and different subgenres of costume drama and mini-series is the gender fault-line: there are men’s films and women’s films from the point of view of the characters and stories and from the point of view of how the screenplay writer, director and producer treat this content. And even if they are apparently feminist, written by women, feminocentric, sympathetic to women, they do not escape the hegemonic male dominance of our culture.

Chapter 20: Elke Weissmann’s “Transnational Complexity and the Critique of Masculinity in Ripper Street.

Promotional: Matthew Macfayden to the fore, the women ghostly

Elke Weissmann writes on a mini-series Ripper Street (2010-) produced by BBC and BBC America. She feels the mini-series “emphasizes the problem that is constituted by traditional patriarchal masculinities.” This drama exposes while it attempts to critique the results of these behaviors and especially a nostalgic view of them. It offers an intense emotional engagement with its characters — part of serial drama. A central character played by Matthew Macfayden is at first presented as a traumatized and admirable male; he’s a versatile actor and apparently unlike Walter White in Breaking Bad where (according to Weissmann) we see a good man gradually corrupted, Reid was corrupt to start out with. A large theme is the problem of policing: who is to police such a society when the police are part of the problem. Along the way she describes similar min-series which she aligns or contrasts with this one: none of them have I ever seen; Dixon of Dock Street (British 1955-76), Wire (HBO – -I know this one is much admired), Hill Street Blues (I know it was popular.

It’s telling how easy it is to find stills on the Net of profoundly wounded women with supposedly protective standing over them (from Ripper Street)

She thinks Deadwood the best of these, but it too makes an exaggerated use of violence, which is shown to be “deeply troubling”. Ripper Street manifests deep unhappiness and does allow for other concepts of masculinity. Violence is shown by the storylines to be a “key element of traditional, hegemonic masculinities,” is traumatizing and central to the problems men face too.

I’ve probably seen so little of this type of thing because I avoid high raw and continuing violence that I know is typical of a lot of filsm — Breaking Bad was an unusual program for me to watch

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Rob James-Cellier as Thomas Barrow, a homosexual footman who attempts to blackmail Charlie Cox, the Duke of Crowborough but finds the Duke has far more power than he (Downton Abbey, 2010, the first season)

I’ve omitted Chapter 12, Giselle Bastin’s treatment of the two Upstairs/Downstairs series and keep Chapter 19: Lucy Brown’s “Homosexual Lives: Representation and Reinterpretation in Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey to a minimum. As I remarked in the second of these blogs, I watched the two seasons of the 2012 Upstairs Downstairs and want to deal with the changes from the older to the new series separately, but here I would like to record the central insight of this essay. Lucy Brown shows that paradoxically the depiction of a gay footman in the 1970s, Alfred Harris, much more hostilely than that of Thomas Barrow, which actually ends on Harris’ execution as a spy is in a way far more truthful to the suffering and reality of life of homosexual men until the mid-1970s (Stonewall anyone?) than the sentimental way that Thomas is on the one hand sympathized with when it comes to his love relationships but otherwise stigmatized as a spiteful angry desperately snobbish man (in cohoots with that witch, Miss Obrien).

A single collection of essays has to leave some topics out. I was glad to see the emphasis in two of the essays on the importance and central function and dominance of the screenplay writer in the way the BBC does its actual film-making, but wished that there had been more about the business side of things. For example, a British friend told me:

it no longer produces drama itself. It commissions it from private companies — many of them (originally at least) comprising people who used to work at the Beeb. This new system has been in place for about twenty years, and certainly applies to Wolf Hall. Commissioning seems to work both ways — the idea may come from the Beeb, or the independent companies may pitch to them.

There are reasons to dislike this way of going about things, but it has resulted in many cases in higher production values — contrasting Wolf Hall with the 1970s Wives of Henry VIII shows the difference. It has also led to dumbing down, but Wolf Hall is not guilty of that.

Some the aspects of these dramas beyond dumbing down (short scenes, much less dialogue, itself much less complicated and thoughtful) which the essayists in the last part attribute to the power of audiences could be the effect of profit-making companies who want values that uphold their company and executives to be enacted.

I am a lover of historical fiction, biography, narrative history, historic fiction (older fiction) and think all these literary forms directly connected to, give rise to serial costume drama. I will be writing soon about Peter Weir’s Master and Commander (adapted from an amalgam of several of Patrick O’Brian’s novels, directed and written by Peter Weir, featuring Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany).

Bettany as Stephen Maturin on the Galapagos islands, writing up his notes)

Ellen

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