Love in a Cold Climate

I loved this show! So much! I was just so disappointed when it ended after only 3 episodes! Broke my heart! Such a good mini-series!

Aside from them not including the characters of Emily (the aunt that actually raised Fanny) and Davey (who plays an even more important part), I think the casting is excellent. Sure Rosamund Pike looks nothing like what Mitford described Fanny as but she does embody the nature of Fanny. I can't think of who better to play Matthew and Sadie but Alan Bates and Celia Imrie. Davey played a very important part in the novels, and in this version they merely lump his part into Lord Merlin; and he was also the one of funniest part of the novels with his hypochondria. They also dismissed the eldest Radlett daughter, Louisa, as really she marries straight off but is the one who had the disastrous coming out ball. I thought it was a fun production nonetheless.

This is just about as good as it gets in costume drama. Even the BBC, which is so good at this sort of thing, got it absolutely right, even though this version ran at a much shorter length than the equally excellent 1980 version. The cast is good enough to eat: no-one strikes a wrong note, and some of the acting is downright fabulous (watch Lady Mondore's emotions shift and change). The period detail is, as one has come to expect, far superior to most other attempts at this period. As for the luscious sets, especially those in Paris — what can one say? Watch for the moment when Lady M., having breakfast in bed, says to Fanny that she married for 'all this' and the camera snaps back to show her, not just in a bedroom, but in one of the most sumptuous rooms you could ever hope to see. Deborah Moggach's adaptation strikes the right note all the way through, even for Nancy Mitford fans. But when will a version of the 1980 serialization be made available???

Nancy was the first to exploit the glittering vein of inside jokes and family legend that's sustained the Mitford industry for over fifty years, and when her two most popular books, the titular "Cold Climate" and the earlier "Pursuit of Love," were "adapted" (sliced and diced and drastically condensed) to fit this stingy two-episode format, there were bound to be a few loose ends. My brilliant wife, a fiction editor by trade, spotted a brief two-character scene that didn't seem to make much sense; it turned out to be a collage of the zingier lines from three different scenes involving two sets of characters and spread out over twenty pages. Do admit, Fanny!

Mitford loyalists will mourn the loss of Uncle Davey; they may also wonder why, say, on the page it's Aunt Sadie who can't talk horticulture with a dinner guest because she prefers to leave such matters to the gardeners whereas on the screen it's daughter Linda who can't identify the soup because she prefers to leave them to the cook.... Still, if the script is a little dodgy, the cast is just about perfect: Alan Bates, as Uncle Matthew, prowls the floor at a deb dance like a Rottweiler on parade; Celia Imbrie is delightfully distracted as Aunt Sadie; Elisabeth Dermot Walsh and Rosamund Pike are charming as lovely, clueless Linda and the all-seeing narrator, Fanny. Special mention goes to Jemima Rooper and Anna Popplewell as sex-mad innocents Jassy and Victoria. The earlier, 8-ep version, still available on disc, has more room for plot material (including Uncle Davey), but the younger characters aren't nearly as well cast.

Nancy Mitford's two delightful novels, 'The Pursuit of Love' and 'Love in a Cold Climate' were beautifully if rather slowly realised in 6 x 50 minutes episodes by Thames Television 20 years ago in a production so vivid that much from it still lingers in my memory. Much funnier and much less pretentious than 'Brideshead Revisited' it no doubt did for respect of the aristocracy what Jack the Ripper did for blind dates, but it was a great romp nonetheless.

This time round the BBC has covered the same ground in 150 minutes. It is another beautiful production but I was left with the distinct feeling the fast forward button was on. The novelist Deborah Moggach was responsible for the script. Some things still come across well - Linda's relationship with her French lover Fabrice is well portrayed and the return of the Bolter for instance is a highlight, but the Cedric character and his relationship with the Montdores is truncated and that classic neurasthenic Davey Warbeck so sympathetically played by Michael Williams in the 1980 version has disappeared altogether. John Woods's Merlin is very good though and Anthony Andrews (who starred as the doomed Sebastian in 'Brideshead') is excellent as the feckless bounder Boy Dugdale. Alan Bates as Uncle Matt is rather more menacing than Michael Aldridge's delightfully dotty 1980 version (I guess we can't have our fascists too lovable anymore) and some of the comedy is lost thereby. Elisabeth Dermot-Walsh is lovely as the love-struck Linda but Megan Dodds as Polly is strangely hollow.

The stately homes are well cast as usual – the Mitfords may have been aristocratic backwoodspersons, but they lived in a very nice part of Oxfordshire and location shooting is used to good effect. However, it seems that current TV production costs mean that a novel adapted for TV can never be more than severely edited highlights (no-one would do 'Brideshead' in 13 x 50 minute episodes today). This being the case, there's only one thing for it – read the book!