Life in Squares

Given that this short series involves quite a few flashbacks and a relatively large cast of characters, the choice to have different actors play the "younger" and "older" versions of some of them really doesn't help, I think. Not only does this make it hard sometimes to work out who they are, but it leads to harsh comparisons of the performance (and in some cases the looks) of a few of them. Apart from the children, this would have been better done with make-up, I feel. In particular, Phoebe Fox is so great as Vanessa Bell that she is sorely missed in episode three. No offence to Eve Best, but she comes across as a completely different person - not only does she look nothing like Fox, but Vanessa feels "gone".

Having said that, it was nice not to have painful and protracted exposition of who all these people were, as collectively there would have been too much to fit in - and the series would have felt even more episodic than it sometimes does. As it is, the classic period drama cliches of "terrible things happening far away" are present and correct, as are their very real tragic effects, but the underlying aura of very privileged people playing around lingers.

Worth a look - although really only a 6 out of 10, IMHO. I gave it the 7th for Phoebe.

Life In Squares

It was a dreadful rambling mess that just amounted to self-indulgence. The lives of the Bell's and the Woolf's was just so tedious and yet we had no sense of all the work they did and the money they made opening companies and creating books, paintings and designs.

With regard to their "shocking" lives, perhaps unconventional for the time but surely not for a group of artists. It was a really nothing more than commune living.

We spent half our time trying to work out who was who as we had two sets of actors playing the parts of the characters at different ages. The script was clunky and the emotions, at best, superficial.

I'm giving this a 4 outta 10, but my advice skip the whole series as it was rubbish!

I TRIED (I really did) with the first episode of LIFE IN SQUARES but after twenty minutes my brain started to dig a tunnel through my spine and tried to escape the UTTER TEDIUM of this smug little series. Worse, the episode moved with all the speed and urgency of a glacier, unlike my brain digging the escape tunnel.

It was like being trapped in a room with a gang of self-regarding teenage Hipsters and Emos all moving in slow motion because of clinical depression.

Frankly (and this is rare) I gave up after that twenty minutes and I won't be returning.

Were the Bloomsbury Set a significant collection of artistic types who paved the way for the freedoms we enjoy today or a bunch of tedious and ultimately irrelevant posers only of interest to similar posers who write long serials for the BBC? Discuss.

Confused look at the Bloomsbury Group over several decades. This 3-part miniseries jumbles the narrative time and the actors so that it's a confusing mishmash. Some actors play the same part over time and others change. The various actresses who play Virginia and Vanessa look nothing like each other and the dumbest bit is Eve Best (a dead ringer for Virginia) playing Vanessa.

None of the people are particularly likable and maybe they weren't in real life. They come off as self-absorbed boobs. Maybe they were. But this makes for an unappealing 3 hours.

Some viewers may be shocked at the sexual escapades among the group members but sex existed even in this post-Victorian era.

This series is a remarkable portrait of the Bloomsbury group, and the large cast is universally excellent. The sexual radicalism of many of the characters is handled in a way that is very explicit but also sensitive. One imagines that some viewers would find some of the scenes shocking, especially those involving Duncan Grant's sexual relationships with other men.

But the writers and artists in the Bloomsbury group were all about disregarding the constricting social norms of early 20th century England, so it is appropriate that this series contains some graphic scenes and images.

The photography is very artistic and evocative, and it suggests Vanessa Bell's modernist perspective as an artist. Vanessa is at the heart of the drama, and her character is fully developed and very nuanced. Her love for the gay painter Duncan Grant, superbly played by James Norton, is perhaps the most poignant of all the romances that are shown here.

I wish more attention had been paid to Virginia Woolf who was, after all, the most significant and most brilliant of the Bloomsbury group. Her emergence as a novelist, the woman who became England's greatest novelist of her era, is glossed over. But the series is so unusually in its atmospheric depiction of the lives of these various free spirits that Virginia not getting enough attention can be forgiven.

I would definitely like to see more series about authors and artists whose lives defied social conventions.