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

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.

So while everyone is cooing about how refreshing it is that lesbianism has finally got a look-in (see also: every other drama and comedy series on TV from Killing Eve to Call My Agent), Mortimer can get on with the deeply subversive business of slipping under the BBC radar an honest, old-fashioned, faithful and fantastically enjoyable Nancy Mitford adaptation.

Yes, I agree with those complainants who say that Lily James’s diction can be a bit slurry and unintelligible; but she does look and feel right for the part of undereducated, upper-class, romantic dreamer Linda Radlett (even in the scenes where she’s supposed to be 17 when in real life she’s 32); and she makes a fine, touching and convincing double act with Emily Beecham as her BF Fanny Logan, especially when they’re sharing a bath.

That bath scene, by the way, was the ‘lesbianism’. Everyone is so ignorant and common these days that your average viewer (and indeed critic) has simply no idea what standard inter-war upper-class behaviour looks like, and so colours it with their own fatuous misconceptions. To me, though, this adaptation definitely passes the sniff test — even if the hunting scene wasn’t quite echt, what with it having been filmed obviously out of season with all the trees in summer leaf.

The make-or-break character, for me, is Uncle Matthew — the one who keeps on his wall the entrenching tool he used to kill eight Germans in the Great War, who thinks education is completely wasted on women, and who hunts children on horseback as if they were foxes.