Is there a surer sign that a middle-aged man has morphed into a fogey than the sight of him shouting at the television? Sunday evening is when my inner Victor Meldrew tends to be unleashed. Period costume drama is the proximate cause. The BBC usually, but not always, the culprit.
These shows – Poldark, Call the Midwife, Lark Rise to Candleford – promise a gentle drawing down of the weekend, a televisual duvet in which to wrap ourselves and banish thoughts of Monday morning.
The dramatisation of Len Deighton’s counterfactual novel SS-GB is the latest series to render me choleric. That’s in spite of the fact that there’s much to admire. Leading man Sam Riley is terrific as Inspector Archer, a wartime British detective trying not to be a collaborator. The plot, based on the idea that Germany had won the Battle of Britain, makes us wonder what we would have done. As a study in temptation, it is Lenten fare.
The devil, however, is in the detail. It doesn’t take much for the suspension of my disbelief to be suspended. The sight of Sam Riley’s hair is enough. The style worked perfectly when Riley played a troubled 1970s singer in the biopic of doomed Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis. But a 1940s copper? In the ultimate story of historical revisionism, it is Brylcreem that has been airbrushed from history.
Spotting historical inaccuracies in TV costume drama has become a national parlour game. Such is the hue and cry generated that I wonder whether it’s sometimes done knowingly by publicity-hungry producers. “If Ross Poldark swings his scythe up and down, not right to left, the Daily Mail’s bound to notice – let’s do it!”
My friend Alastair Bruce dismisses such PR fantasies. He is an expert in heraldry, a successful author and Territorial Army colonel. He’s also a royal and constitutional commentator used by Sky News, which is where we met. In recent years he’s carved out a niche as the historical adviser on films such as the Oscar-winning The King’s Speech. I’ve been his guest on the set of Downton Abbey, whose producers he helped avoid anachronisms for five years.
What gets his goat? “The downplaying of Christianity in the daily life of characters,” he tells me. He can understand that, when TV time is short, having characters saying grace before dinner might not be an efficient use of resources. But like many of us, he’s baffled when shows gratuitously edit faith out. A few years ago the makers of Coronation Street reportedly removed a cross from a church where some of the soap’s characters were marrying to avoid “causing offence”. Such egregious examples make headlines, but lesser omissions are routine.
Alastair still has a following from his Downton days. Hardcore devotees of the show loved spotting his cameo appearances. Like Alfred Hitchcock, he would pop up as an extra, sometimes sporting a cavalryman’s moustache, or the beard of a ghillie. Alastair also gave talks to large gatherings of Downton fans in America, where the show was even more popular than it was here.
Indeed, in the United States, religion seems to get a fuller hearing than it does in Britain. Recently, my three eldest daughters and I sat and watched Deepwater Horizon, a disaster movie starring the Catholic actor Mark Wahlberg. At the end of the film all the grizzly oilmen drop to their knees and say the Our Father. Not since Russell Crowe recited the Lord’s Prayer at the end of Master and Commander have my daughters been so struck by the insertion of faith into film.
Last month we were burgled. I woke at 2.30am to the sound of the dog barking, the security light sparking into life and, chillingly, the unmistakeable sound of someone in our porch. I clumped to the door, relieved to hear that whoever was rooting around was now disappearing down our isolated country lane at speed.
I walked over to the stable block. The tack room, home to thousands of pounds’ worth of saddles and bridles, was unmolested. No harm done then.
Only when I got back to the front door did I see that all our Wellington boots had all gone. What would Inspector Archer have made of that?
Follow Colin Brazier on Twitter: @ColinBrazierSky
