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Television

True lies

Simon Hoggart

Wednesday, 21st November 2007

Arrange Me a Marriage (BBC2), Cranford (BBC1), and The Blair Years (BBC1)

Cranford (BBC1, Sunday) was lovely, one of the best bonnet-rippers for a long time. It should have been labelled ‘based on the characters created by Elizabeth Gaskell’. For one thing there was almost no anachronistic dialogue, no ‘if it please you, sir, I shall be your faithful servant 24/7’, though Judi Dench’s line ‘It is all go in Cranford’ did make my teeth itch. The writers realised that the books are essentially a form of soap opera, in this case set around 13 miles south of the original Coronation Street. So there has to be love, loathing, death, disaster, lashings of snobbery and plenty of humour. In the absence of Andrew Davies, sex is always going to be a problem when you adapt books in which there is no sex at all, but the scene in which the two spinster aunts go to their separate bedrooms to suck upon their orange slices vividly evoked a lifetime’s sexual frustration without a bare boob or thrusting buttock.

Cranford preceded yet another programme about Tony Blair, a largely forgotten political figure older readers might recall. I found myself wondering why we needed yet another analysis, especially as Michael Cockerell’s three-parter earlier this year more or less said it all. The Blair Years (BBC1, Sunday) did have the possible advantage of an interview with Blair.

But Blair wasn’t going to say anything new or interesting. It was worse than Hamlet without the prince — it was Hamlet saying, ‘Of course I had occasional disagreements with my stepfather, but these are inevitable in any close family situation. On the whole, it was a most fruitful partnership and of great benefit to the people of Denmark...’ You could read between the lines, but it’s very second-best.

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