The Granthams lost the plot in a glutinous Downton Christmas special and a disappointing William Boyd thriller somehow transformed Rufus Sewell into Michael Gambon
*Downton Abbey* (ITV1) | *ITVPlayer*![ext]()
*Restless* (BBC1) | *iPlayer*![ext]()
*Loving Miss Hatto* (BBC1) | *iPlayer*![ext]()
*The Girl* (BBC2) | *iPlayer*![ext]()
*David Suchet: In the Footsteps of St Paul* (BBC1) | *iPlayer*![ext]()
By tradition the Christmas special is special only in the sense that it's broadcast at Christmas. For with a vast captive audience gastronomically paralysed in front of the box, Christmas Day is a time devoted not to quality but gluttony.
As the ITV1 continuity announcer said: "Your ITV Christmas wouldn't be complete without a trip to *Downton Abbey*." Leaving aside the queasy thought of an "ITV Christmas", it's the idea of completion that's key here. The Christmas special is the pudding that must be eaten, regardless of appetite or appeal, because it will make us full. The gluttonous paradox, however, is that the result is nearly always unfulfilling.
In a series in which characters are wont to drop dead at any given moment, the trip to Downton Abbey turned out to be almost parodically uneventful. The Granthams paid a visit to Shrimpy Flintshire's handsome Scottish pile while the bulk of the servants remained at Downton, thus providing a double helping of lavish country estate photography for people who like that kind of thing.
As it was a one-off episode there was no story to speak of, just a series of inconsequential incidents in which the characters, high and low, spoke of their feelings with the emotional incontinence of a group that had swallowed a lifetime's supply of Gestalt therapy.
Shrimpy was having trouble with his wife, a sour-faced nightmare of a mother played with persuasive relish by Phoebe Nicholls, but he had a sympathetic ear in Lord Grantham, who felt his pain. There was sympathy everywhere you looked. Each time someone fell into a grump, a consoling shoulder would instantly be made available to moan on.
Except with Lady Edith, of course, whose role is to suffer in perpetual romantic limbo. She is the tragic spinster par excellence, a pain-seeking missile who couldn't be more open to repeated nuptial disappointment if she wore a large sign on her back saying: "Jilt Me". Her latest suitor seemed an ideal match, as he is legally incapable of marrying her. But no one cared in the least about Edith's hopeless plight because Lady Mary was preggers, which is to say her belt may have been loosened by one hole. Despite no obvious stomach protrusion, she managed to give birth to a fully-grown baby.
If you started taking note of such details, you'd soon find yourself asking why Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) and one of the footmen have such obvious blond highlights in their hair. And from there you could start re-examining some of the more implausible plot developments that have enlivened the show, and, well, that way lies madness.
In any case, just when all seemed tiresomely benign, that demented serial killer, Fate, returned once more to Downton. Distracted by the joy of new fatherhood, and perhaps the mystery of his hair colouring, Matthew crashed into an oncoming car in a demonically jolly final scene. He appeared to be utterly and irreversibly dead. But as this is Downton, such a condition need prove no impediment to his playing a full and active part in the next series.
Various members of the Downton cast cropped up elsewhere over Christmas. In *Restless*, Michelle Dockery was no more convincing as Charlotte Rampling's PhD-researching daughter than she was as an expectant mother. Adapted by William Boyd from his own novel, this tale of secret service intrigue flipped back and forth between the war years and 1976 without ever establishing a credible device for making the transitions.
Structurally it was reminiscent of Peter Kosminsky's The Promise, both films relying on their latterday protagonists to take an extremely long time to read a brief diary. Rampling was intriguing in the 1970s section, but the drama only really came to life when Hayley Atwell was on screen as Rampling's younger self in the 1940s. The camera feasted on her lush looks, and in return she almost single-handedly saved the story from its incomprehensible plot and funereally slow pace.
It was hard to believe that the vivaciously ripe Atwell would ever mature into the leanly enigmatic Rampling. As many secrets as she may have harboured, she surely didn't have that much to get off her chest. Still, such quibbles were trifling compared to the daunting intellectual struggle to accept that Atwell's devious lover and spy boss, Rufus Sewell, would grow, as it were, into Michael Gambon.
Although ubiquitous, Gambon is unique. Whereas Sewell was calculating but ambiguous, Gambon was irreducibly Gambon, as if he had arrived fully formed in old age, unencumbered by a past, much less a conscience. Somewhere there was a great character study about aging and deceit, but unfortunately it never found its way into this bold, elegant but ultimately unsatisfying thriller.
Phoebe Nicholls once again played a sour-faced nightmare of a mother in *Loving Miss Hatto*, Victoria Wood's dramatisation of the Joyce Hatto classical CD scandal. Much more of this and people will begin to talk.
With Alfred Molina as Hatto's dodgy-dealing husband, a neat suburban setting and an innocent young girl half-conniving in her own corruption, there were more than a few echoes of An Education![ext]()
. Surprisingly for a Wood script, it lacked that film's warmth and wit, although there were some evocative lines. When Joyce asked her husband on their wedding night if he wanted to see her in a negligee he replied: "I'll say. Let the dog see the rabbit", a phrase that seemed to capture a whole world of repressed fantasy and social gaucheness. But while the script and art direction summoned the pinched dreams of postwar Britain, neither was capable of doing much with the dramatic inertia of the source material. Instead there was that familiar sense of a small story inflated to a size that its characters, despite several strong performances, simply couldn't sustain.
For some time now there has been a fashion in British TV and film for taking slight events from the past and smothering them in historical or cultural significance. This same complaint could be made of *The Girl*, which looked at the abusive working relationship between Alfred Hitchcock (Toby Jones) and his two-time muse Tippi Hedren (Sienna Miller).
That Hitchcock displayed a psycho-sexual obsession with beautiful blondes is hardly a revelation, but its creepily controlling nature may have come as a mournful disappointment to his fans. Jones excelled as the director assailed by self-loathing and sadistic impulses. This was a beauty-and-the-beast story without a happy ending. The more beautiful the beast made the beauty, the more beastly was his behaviour towards her.
Hitchcock confessed in one drunken scene that he would give up all his achievements to be slim and dashing. As he was allowed no redeeming features, and Hedren no conspicuous vices, the story's point seemed to be that physical ugliness begets moral ugliness. Or, to put it more theologically, gluttony is a deadly sin. Although too limiting as a character motivation, that might just work as a Christmas message.
Talking of which, the man who was the most influential disseminator of the Christian message was the subject of the two-part *David Suchet: In the Footsteps of St Paul*. No, not Suchet – he was just the obligatory celebrity – but the one-time Jewish zealot Saul/Paul. "As an actor," said Suchet, "I actually feel I would like to play him." The documentary was merely the two-hour audition. Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 days ago.
*Downton Abbey* (ITV1) | *ITVPlayer*
*Restless* (BBC1) | *iPlayer*
*Loving Miss Hatto* (BBC1) | *iPlayer*
*The Girl* (BBC2) | *iPlayer*
*David Suchet: In the Footsteps of St Paul* (BBC1) | *iPlayer*
By tradition the Christmas special is special only in the sense that it's broadcast at Christmas. For with a vast captive audience gastronomically paralysed in front of the box, Christmas Day is a time devoted not to quality but gluttony.
As the ITV1 continuity announcer said: "Your ITV Christmas wouldn't be complete without a trip to *Downton Abbey*." Leaving aside the queasy thought of an "ITV Christmas", it's the idea of completion that's key here. The Christmas special is the pudding that must be eaten, regardless of appetite or appeal, because it will make us full. The gluttonous paradox, however, is that the result is nearly always unfulfilling.
In a series in which characters are wont to drop dead at any given moment, the trip to Downton Abbey turned out to be almost parodically uneventful. The Granthams paid a visit to Shrimpy Flintshire's handsome Scottish pile while the bulk of the servants remained at Downton, thus providing a double helping of lavish country estate photography for people who like that kind of thing.
As it was a one-off episode there was no story to speak of, just a series of inconsequential incidents in which the characters, high and low, spoke of their feelings with the emotional incontinence of a group that had swallowed a lifetime's supply of Gestalt therapy.
Shrimpy was having trouble with his wife, a sour-faced nightmare of a mother played with persuasive relish by Phoebe Nicholls, but he had a sympathetic ear in Lord Grantham, who felt his pain. There was sympathy everywhere you looked. Each time someone fell into a grump, a consoling shoulder would instantly be made available to moan on.
Except with Lady Edith, of course, whose role is to suffer in perpetual romantic limbo. She is the tragic spinster par excellence, a pain-seeking missile who couldn't be more open to repeated nuptial disappointment if she wore a large sign on her back saying: "Jilt Me". Her latest suitor seemed an ideal match, as he is legally incapable of marrying her. But no one cared in the least about Edith's hopeless plight because Lady Mary was preggers, which is to say her belt may have been loosened by one hole. Despite no obvious stomach protrusion, she managed to give birth to a fully-grown baby.
If you started taking note of such details, you'd soon find yourself asking why Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) and one of the footmen have such obvious blond highlights in their hair. And from there you could start re-examining some of the more implausible plot developments that have enlivened the show, and, well, that way lies madness.
In any case, just when all seemed tiresomely benign, that demented serial killer, Fate, returned once more to Downton. Distracted by the joy of new fatherhood, and perhaps the mystery of his hair colouring, Matthew crashed into an oncoming car in a demonically jolly final scene. He appeared to be utterly and irreversibly dead. But as this is Downton, such a condition need prove no impediment to his playing a full and active part in the next series.
Various members of the Downton cast cropped up elsewhere over Christmas. In *Restless*, Michelle Dockery was no more convincing as Charlotte Rampling's PhD-researching daughter than she was as an expectant mother. Adapted by William Boyd from his own novel, this tale of secret service intrigue flipped back and forth between the war years and 1976 without ever establishing a credible device for making the transitions.
Structurally it was reminiscent of Peter Kosminsky's The Promise, both films relying on their latterday protagonists to take an extremely long time to read a brief diary. Rampling was intriguing in the 1970s section, but the drama only really came to life when Hayley Atwell was on screen as Rampling's younger self in the 1940s. The camera feasted on her lush looks, and in return she almost single-handedly saved the story from its incomprehensible plot and funereally slow pace.
It was hard to believe that the vivaciously ripe Atwell would ever mature into the leanly enigmatic Rampling. As many secrets as she may have harboured, she surely didn't have that much to get off her chest. Still, such quibbles were trifling compared to the daunting intellectual struggle to accept that Atwell's devious lover and spy boss, Rufus Sewell, would grow, as it were, into Michael Gambon.
Although ubiquitous, Gambon is unique. Whereas Sewell was calculating but ambiguous, Gambon was irreducibly Gambon, as if he had arrived fully formed in old age, unencumbered by a past, much less a conscience. Somewhere there was a great character study about aging and deceit, but unfortunately it never found its way into this bold, elegant but ultimately unsatisfying thriller.
Phoebe Nicholls once again played a sour-faced nightmare of a mother in *Loving Miss Hatto*, Victoria Wood's dramatisation of the Joyce Hatto classical CD scandal. Much more of this and people will begin to talk.
With Alfred Molina as Hatto's dodgy-dealing husband, a neat suburban setting and an innocent young girl half-conniving in her own corruption, there were more than a few echoes of An Education
. Surprisingly for a Wood script, it lacked that film's warmth and wit, although there were some evocative lines. When Joyce asked her husband on their wedding night if he wanted to see her in a negligee he replied: "I'll say. Let the dog see the rabbit", a phrase that seemed to capture a whole world of repressed fantasy and social gaucheness. But while the script and art direction summoned the pinched dreams of postwar Britain, neither was capable of doing much with the dramatic inertia of the source material. Instead there was that familiar sense of a small story inflated to a size that its characters, despite several strong performances, simply couldn't sustain.For some time now there has been a fashion in British TV and film for taking slight events from the past and smothering them in historical or cultural significance. This same complaint could be made of *The Girl*, which looked at the abusive working relationship between Alfred Hitchcock (Toby Jones) and his two-time muse Tippi Hedren (Sienna Miller).
That Hitchcock displayed a psycho-sexual obsession with beautiful blondes is hardly a revelation, but its creepily controlling nature may have come as a mournful disappointment to his fans. Jones excelled as the director assailed by self-loathing and sadistic impulses. This was a beauty-and-the-beast story without a happy ending. The more beautiful the beast made the beauty, the more beastly was his behaviour towards her.
Hitchcock confessed in one drunken scene that he would give up all his achievements to be slim and dashing. As he was allowed no redeeming features, and Hedren no conspicuous vices, the story's point seemed to be that physical ugliness begets moral ugliness. Or, to put it more theologically, gluttony is a deadly sin. Although too limiting as a character motivation, that might just work as a Christmas message.
Talking of which, the man who was the most influential disseminator of the Christian message was the subject of the two-part *David Suchet: In the Footsteps of St Paul*. No, not Suchet – he was just the obligatory celebrity – but the one-time Jewish zealot Saul/Paul. "As an actor," said Suchet, "I actually feel I would like to play him." The documentary was merely the two-hour audition. Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 days ago.