Drama needs balls
...lavish costumes, family feuds, social snobbery and class warfare— and The Hardacres has it in spades. More please!
Channel 5
- Caroline Frost
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Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be – at least not on our TV screens, and at least not until the arrival on Channel 5 of The Hardacres, a tale of a working-class family who escape their life at the docks by virtue of cooking herrings well. This is “Fish of Dreams”: fry it and they will come. Next thing you know they own a big fortune and a bigger house.
Set in 1890s Yorkshire and adapted from a 1976 novel by CL Skelton, this drama could in fact write itself. Father Sam (Liam McMahon) is laid-back and handsome like a boxer, mother Mary (Claire Cooper) is all cheekbones and defiance. They clash with one another – “I’m no lord of the manor, Mary” – and with their new snobby neighbours – “You seem to have forgotten the fish course” – and you just know the snobby neighbours’ daughter is going to cause problems.
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If it all feels a bit like a French and Saunders parody at times, it doesn’t make me enjoy it any less. It’s been a while since we’ve had a bonnet-quiverer on this scale. When was the last time you bedded in for one of those sprawling dynastic dramas that used to be standard Sunday-evening fare, full of bags of coins and betrayals, and secret romances across the class divide? No, I can’t accept Netflix’s juggernaut Bridgerton because it’s too arch, having its cake and eating it with its lush ballrooms and modern knowing glances. I’m talking about the heartfelt, earnest “families and finances” stuff of years gone by: Penmarric (mining), The Pallisers (politics) The Onedin Line (ships and a theme tune that even got into the pop charts.)
It's been a while since we've had a bonnet-quiverer on this scale
For 30 years or so we took all of this for granted, and that was before screenwriter Andrew Davies brought us Mr Darcy’s post-swim white shirt (Pride and Prejudice) and Rufus Sewell’s curls (Middlemarch). We had an embarrassment of riches, and rags to boot. My two personal favourites were The Mallens – the rewarding premise of a ruthless squire with a white streak in his hair, something inherited by all his children, legitimate and otherwise – and, later, A Woman of Substance, with Barbara Taylor Bradford’s heroine Emma Harte similarly buying the big house from under the noses of her former tormentors. “I want it torn down, Blackie, brick by brick…” Delicious.
Aidan Turner smouldered as Ross in Poldark. BBC
Away from the pool of indecipherable kitchen island dramas we’ve come to expect in more recent times, three shows have successfully run with the bayonet of lush historical yarns. Back in 2010, my old flatmate and I used to plan our Sunday evenings around Downton Abbey on ITV while on the BBC we’ve had Poldark and Peaky Blinders. All three were massive international hits, delivering rich worlds of yesteryear, thanks to big budgets, great writing and a roll-call of diverse characters played by talented actors.
Why then do we keep being hit over the head by TV bosses bringing us shows with infinitesimal differences between them – Vigil, Bodyguard, Nightsleeper… need I go on? Line of Duty was wonderful, but its success has begotten a generation of Swat teams entering a building. Meanwhile, it seems Channel 5 has quietly become the guardian of the past. It triumphed with its reboot of All Creatures Great and Small that, like the Hardacres’ mansion, was bought from under the noses of the BBC, who wouldn’t commit to enough episodes of a show now in its fifth series. And now The Hardacres shows the same promise of a long and satisfying run.
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The good news for producers is that CL Skelton wrote a sequel, so there’s more water in that well. The good news for viewers is that, on one channel at least, bonnets are back!
Authors
Caroline Frost
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