A 20-year record was hit for television drama a fortnight ago, with nearly 13 million people tuning in live to watch the final episode of Line of Duty’s latest series go out on BBC One.
We’re unlikely to see the likes of those numbers any time soon, but this week the Beeb has done a great job of reminding us that other quality new television is also available.
Filling Sunday night’s prime slot was The Pursuit of Love, actor-turned-writer-and-director Emily Mortimer’s period adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s semi-autobiographical 1945 novel.
It stars Lily James as Linda Radlett, a Bright Young Thing of the 1920s, born into the stuffily eccentric Oxfordshire stately home Alconleigh; “practically middle-aged”, she whines, although she’s a teenager for much of this episode.
Emily Beecham is Linda’s visiting cousin Fanny Logan, educated and sensible, in stark contrast to her own mother (a cameo from Mortimer), who is known as “the Bolter” for her habit of leaving one man for another.
The young folk live in fear of Linda’s father Matthew, who practises his whip technique on the lawn at dawn and hunts his children on horseback.
A part played with terrifying awfulness
Dominic West plays this part with terrific awfulness, braying sneerily at Fanny’s education and flying into a rage at news of Linda’s engagement to the “bloody Hun” Tony Kroesig.
James plays the difficult part of Linda well, walking a tightrope between a winsome teen desire to escape and precocious, wayward sexuality. The show’s lively and a lot of fun, although it has a number of audiences to please, who perhaps won’t enjoy the compromises made for one another.
Where Mitford fans might find the author’s scathing humour planed off by the demands of Sunday night prime-time, period drama watchers may get a jolt from the soundtrack of The Who, T-Rex, Marianne Faithfull and 2000s feminist punk like Le Tigre and Sleater-Kinney.
Certainly, though, the arrival of Andrew Scott’s dandyish, pigeon-dyeing Lord Merlin amid a glam-rock harlequinade is one of the year’s most memorable entrances.
On Monday night, meanwhile, Anna Maxwell Martin stepped away from harassing Line of Duty’s AC-12 as cold-hearted copper Carmichael and back into her other defining role as jittery, permanently stressed mum Julia in the third series of Sharon Horgan’s comedy Motherland, reinforcing her reputation as one of the actors of the moment.
Talk at the school gate
Alongside Diane Morgan’s sweary, scathing Liz, Lucy Punch’s alpha-snob Amanda and Paul Ready’s Holly Willoughby-loving stay-at-home dad Kevin, the topic of school gate conversation this time in the low-key but first-rate sitcom was nits, grabbing a bit of the zeitgeist with a sharp Coronavirus comparison in the first scene; because which parent hasn’t wondered why lockdown didn’t eradicate the things?
Finally, another of the greatest comedies of recent times also put in a return appearance on Monday night with the sixth series of Inside No.9, by The League of Gentlemen’s Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton.
This time they presented a one-off collision of classic commedia dell’arte and high-energy, Reservoir Dogs-style heist action which packed a lot of high and low humour into half an hour – including Gemma Whelan’s smart, fourth wall-breaking narrative, Paterson Joseph’s gruff, scene-stealing gang boss, some intentionally bad punning, the lyrics of Queen, an exquisite clowning montage and the evergreen humour value of drawing penises on blackboards.
