Comfort viewing

Foyle’s War is back on Sundays, sporadically, with Kingdom filling in the gaps on ITV. The BBC has followed Cranford with Lark Rise to Candleford, a series which makes the intervening Sense and Sensibility look harrowing by comparison. The danger to television is not dumbing-down but, on Sunday nights at least, a sort of down-filled duveting-down. Apparently, the night before we go back to work, we need our brains to hibernate. I’m sure that as the real problems of earning a living loom we don’t want dramas about feral children abandoned by junkie single mothers, or vicious crimes committed in the hell that is urban Britain today. We want pleasant, sanitised murders solved by Honeysuckle Weeks and her boss, Michael Kitchen, who plays Foyle. He is a master of the minimalist, Sunday-night school of action: a faintly raised eyebrow indicates astonishment; an imperceptible twitch of the lip, disgust. And if he isn’t on, we want Hercule Poirot, or Morse’s old sidekick Lewis. Or to see another few dozen people in Midsomer bumped off.

Sunday-night television offers us the equivalent of those climb-in and zip-up eiderdown things you see advertised in the back of magazines, designed so that old people can save on fuel bills by swathing themselves in something cosy, warm and re-assuring. (But embarrassing if anyone rings the bell, since you would have to hop to the door as if in a sack race.)

This downing-down process means that nothing at all can be challenging or upsetting. (This week, Kingdom actually managed to tuck the topic of child abuse into its cuddly eccentricities.) So whereas life in rural Oxfordshire a hundred years ago involved poverty, disease and back-deforming work, the villages of Lark Rise and Candleford — their façades built specially for the series, since nowhere real could possibly be so idyllic — are delightful, Center Parcs with honeyed stone and mob caps.