Simply Stunning
The weekend’s TV
Nancy Banks-Smith – The Guardian
Ah, the BBC Sunday serial! Something special like your Sunday best. Cranford (BBC1) will see you through beautifully until Christmas. Elizabeth Gaskell’s perfect little classic, beautifully and minutely observed, has been beefed up with two more stories. May God forgive them. In His own good time. However, as the extra stories are also by Mrs Gaskell, they transplant pretty naturally, like a couple of kidneys. Not that there was anything wrong with Cranford’s kidneys in the first place.
It has a simply stunning performance from Eileen Atkins as Miss Deborah Jenkyns, an upright, downright, do-right bit of single blessedness. She has a flicker of the eyelids, which cannot be confused with a flutter. When she spoke, I sat up straight. I had an aunt like that. The power of her performance is all the more remarkable considering the company she keeps. The gang’s all here. Judi Dench with that heartbreaking catch in her voice, Jim Carter, Imelda Staunton, Francesca Annis looking deliciously delicious, Julia McKenzie and Julia Sawalha. Jim Carter, you notice, looks a little isolated there. “A man,” as Miss Jenkyns remarked, “is so in the way in a house.”
Nothing happens in Cranford, though what might have been sometimes ripples across its placid surface. So, when something actually does happen, it has the impact of catching the down express in the small of the back. The most dramatic incident in this episode is a cat swallowing a fine lace collar, which has been left to bleach in a saucer of buttermilk. I was told once, and cannot swear to the truth of it, that in television dogs are actors but cats are props. This seems unfair on the cat, who gave a cracking performance. It is a world of bounden duty, faded love affairs laid aside in lavender, genteel poverty and quietly remarkable women.
Grafting Mr Harrison’s Confessions on to Cranford offers a great deal more excitement and a good dollop of men. Jem Hearne (nice work by Andrew Buchan) falls out of a tree and smashes his arm. Happily, young Dr Harrison has just arrived in town on, appropriately enough, a white horse. He refuses to amputate a carpenter’s right arm and, as Imelda Staunton says, hitting every plosive on the head, “seal the stump with tar”. Treating the patient with sugar, brandy and ice (which, if it doesn’t work, should at least make a decent drink), he gallops off for surgical needles and wax candles. (There was, I must say, a touch of the two Ronnies about his vain request for candles in the hardware store.) Dr Harrison pre-dates what Queen Victoria would call “that blessed, blessed chloroform”, and Jem’s yell as his bone is set raised me three inches from my chair. As the last candle guttered out, you could not be sure if it was morning or a metaphor.
Cranford is beautifully candlelit. They read by firelight, they sew by candlelight, sitting in little illuminated pools among the crowding shadows.
3 Responses to “Simply Stunning”
Comment from anne percival
Time 20 November 2007 at 10:39 am
why isn’t there a repeat at an accessible time? Not everybody HAS recording equipment – used to be a repeat (ie Bleak House) on a teatime slot later in week
Comment from mina
Time 25 November 2007 at 10:29 pm
I am loving this production so much, in fact I would say that I am hooked! Thank you to every one involved, I am going through all emotions, laughing and crying in equal measures with the story lines.
No one is to phone or visit while this is on, in fact, my children have to disappear!
Comment from Daphne Jones
Time 19 November 2007 at 11:37 am
Truly wonderful. I kept thinking that my grandfather and grandmother (both born in 1845) would have been children at the time. What a different world my 8 year old granddaughter lives in today!). Looking forward to the next instalments.