Conduct becoming

Every so often a programme appears which can be recommended even to people who hate television. Parade’s End (Friday, BBC1) is such a work. The awkward — one might think impossible — problem of shortening Ford Madox Ford’s 800-page masterpiece into five hours of television, without violating the spirit of the book or seeming to cram a quart into a pint pot, has been solved by getting Tom Stoppard to write the script.

Stoppard’s less is not exactly more, but there is a certain liberation in being able to leave things out. Ford’s wit, penetration and eloquence are distilled into the five acts of a play, and some of his best lines echo all the clearer for being spoken in relative isolation. The drama’s hero, Christopher Tietjens, is a kind of English Hamlet: a man of brilliant intelligence, capable of decisive action, but too scrupulous to move with lethal force against the member of his family who has betrayed him. For Hamlet, the enemy is his uncle, Claudius: for Tietjens, it is his wife, Sylvia.

The logical, self-interested thing for Tietjens to do would be to divorce the ‘papist bitch’ (as another character calls her) who trapped him into marriage and has now cuckolded him. But this is England in 1912 and although Tietjens knows that ‘the end of the world is upon us’, he is committed to a code of conduct that renders him unable to save himself. As he himself puts it, ‘For a gentleman, there is such a thing as, call it “parade”. I stand for monogamy and chastity and for not talking about it.’

Do not be put off by the severity of the code. The surface glitters with jokes.