James Walton

The Village: Sunday-night TV at its most unsubtle and addictive

Proof that television has changed a bit since 1972 came with an archive clip shown on BBC4 on Sunday. ‘My first guest:’ Michael Parkinson announced matter-of-factly on his Saturday-night chat show, ‘W. H. Auden.’ Auden then made his way gingerly down the stairs, lit a fag and began by discussing the failure of the poetry of the 1930s to effect political change. ‘Nothing I wrote,’ he told Parky, ‘postponed war for five seconds or prevented one Jew from being gassed.’

The clip appeared in Great Poets in their Own Words, the first of a two-part series combining archive film with talking heads to provide a useful if workmanlike history of 20th-century British poetry. In fact, given that Sunday’s episode covered the first half of the century, where the archives are pretty hit-and-miss – there’s no TV footage of Dylan Thomas, for example – the heads had quite a lot of talking to do. There were, however, several gems, among them an uncompromising performance from the Welsh poet and priest R.S. Thomas. When not defending the burning of English-owned holiday homes (‘I admire the people who are doing this because they prove that this nation is not entirely dead’), Thomas explained how his initial horror at the lives of the rural poor had gradually given way to sympathy and admiration.

Which brings us with spooky neatness to The Village (BBC1, Sunday) – a series that clearly wants us to experience the same transformation. Traditionally, rural Sunday-night dramas have been determinedly heart-warming affairs, featuring a cast of benign toffs, lovable eccentrics and twinkly yokels. The Village, by contrast, began last year with six defiantly bleak episodes, in which what R.S. Thomas called ‘the phlegm and spittle’ of impoverished rural life was represented by alcoholism, mental illness and suicide – as well as a fair amount of phlegm and spittle.

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