James Delingpole James Delingpole

Honest, faithful and fantastically enjoyable: BBC1’s The Pursuit of Love reviewed

The writer/director Emily Mortimer has played a very clever trick, slipping a deeply subversive adaptation under the BBC radar

That bath scene: Linda (Lily James) and Fanny (Emily Beecham) in BBC1's The Pursuit of Love. Image: Theodora Films Limited & Moonage Pictures Limited / Robert Viglasky 
issue 15 May 2021

I had been expecting the BBC to make a dreadful hash of The Pursuit of Love, especially when I read that they’d spiced it up with hints of lesbianism and punk rock. But actually, I think what writer/director Emily Mortimer has done here is play a very clever trick — the equivalent of releasing a cloud of aluminium chaff from your fighter aircraft to distract the enemy’s missiles.

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