Miss Matty (Dame Judi Dench) is shaken when a mysterious acquaintance from her past resurfaces
SPOILER ALERT: This is a detailed plot description, it may spoil the experience for any viewers and potential viewers.
Cranford Ep 2/5
Sunday 25 November
9:00pm – 10:00pm
BBC ONE
Deborah surprises Matty by encouraging Jessie’s romance with a visiting soldier named Major Gordon, in part two of the classic drama serial set in a town on the cusp of great change. Read the rest of this entry »
BBC’s Cranford: it’s a classic
Max Davidson visits Lacock, the Southern village playing a Northern one in the BBC’s Cranford.
Knutsford, Lacock. Lacock, Knutsford. What’s the difference? If the BBC can rig phone-ins, it is hardly going to balk at replacing a Cheshire village with a Wiltshire village, is it?
Elizabeth Gaskill grew up in Knutsford, Cheshire, where she Read the rest of this entry »
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 Read the rest of this entry »
Small absurdities and major tragedies
SPOILER ALERT: This is a detailed plot description, it may spoil the experience for any viewers and potential viewers.
Cranford Ep 1/5
Sunday 18 November
9:00pm – 10:00pm
BBC ONE
Part one of the drama is set in June/July 1842.
Mary Smith (Lisa Dillon) flees a crisis at home in Manchester to stay with two spinster sisters, Deborah Jenkyns (Eileen Atkins) and Matty Jenkyns (Judi Dench), in the small, rural town of Cranford. Deborah is the dominating force in Cranford society, and the kind-hearted and eccentric Matty believes her to be the best judge in all matters. Read the rest of this entry »
The first housewife superstar
By William Langley – Daily Telegraph
Profile: Elizabeth Gaskell
It has taken 150 years for the novelist known as Mrs Gaskell to escape the deathgrip of Victorian sanctimony and ascend into our age as Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Superstar – mother, mistress of manners, model of multi-tasking, and, from tonight, the surest hit on television.
The BBC’s adaptation of Read the rest of this entry »
Morris men set for small screen stardom
By Emilie Bradshaw
A group of Lancashire morris men are to feature in a new TV drama starring actress Judi Dench.
Producers called on the skills of Leyland Morris Men for a May Day scene for the BBC’s five-part drama serial, Cranford.
Nine members of the group travelled to London and spent two days on set where they got to meet the multi-award-winning actress.
Morris dancer Mike Bailey, from Lostock Hall, said the production team wanted a north west team, as Cranford is set in Cheshire.
He said: “Nine of us went down, including the team leader. Eight of us were dancers. The team leader was calling instructions and liaising with the producer.” Read the rest of this entry »
“I’ll not listen to reason,” she said, now in full possession of her voice, which had been rather choked with sobbing. “Reason always means what someone else has got to say.”
Cranford an ‘antidote’ to reality TV
Rome star Simon Woods has encouraged viewers to tune into new BBC drama Cranford, saying it makes a nice change from “shouty, sweary celebrity programmes”.
The 27-year-old actor, who plays heroic young Doctor Harrison in the adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel, said: “There’s something lovely about watching this because it’s such a gentle thing.
Cranford is a nice change from celebrity TV, according to Simon
“In a world where our TV is full of I’m A Celebrity… Eat My Car and Big Brother and all these kind of shouty, sweary celebrity programmes, it’s a very Read the rest of this entry »
Cranford – community brought to life
Ian Wylie - Manchester Evening News
THE Manchester railway is on track to arrive in Cheshire as a landmark TV period drama comes to the screen.
“I didn’t realise quite how big the programme was until the first day,” recalls Sue Birtwistle, producer of £8m five-part serial Cranford.
“The guy who organised the transport came to me and said, `I’ve worked on huge feature films but never in my life have I had to get so many leading actors to the first day of set at the same time.’ This is the BBC stretching its limbs and making a jewel in the crown.”
Cranford is based on Read the rest of this entry »
The noble art of curtain twitching
From The Sunday Times, Jenny Uglow
The BBC adaptation of Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford borrows narrative techniques from ER. How do you scrub up a literary soap?
Anyone who thinks that stories about widows and spinsters in rural Cheshire in the 1840s are irrelevant to the modern world is in for a surprise. The BBC’s new dramatisation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford has the intimacy of a soap opera, alive with the tug of hopes and fears of daily life, and, at a deeper yet pervasive Read the rest of this entry »