TV review

Published Friday 23 November 2007 at 12:20 by Harry Venning

Any viewer happening accidentally upon Cranford, with its preponderance of bonnets, ludicrous formality and twittering, combined with an absence of any event, might easily mistake it for a parody of a BBC literary adaptation.

However, any such notion would soon be disabused by the prestigious, and presumably expensive, cast assembled. Get out your I-Spy Book Of Costume Drama Stalwarts and just start ticking - Judi Dench, Imelda Staunton, Eileen Atkins, Jim Carter, Francesca Annis. The list goes on and on.

But its licence payers money well spent. Not only do the cast wear their period costumes like second skin, but they can make the most strangulated dialogue appear fresh and spontaneous, qualities painfully absent from the recent series of ITV Austen adaptations.

As it happens, much of the early dialogue in Cranford consisted of characters informing each other that, “This is Cranford!” occasionally stretching to an outraged “But this is Cranford!” when something untoward was about to occur. Having spent the introductory 20 minutes establishing where they all were, the inhabitants then ambled away into their respective story lines, based upon three of Mrs Gaskill’s novels spliced together.

We have the prim spinster sisters who take in a racy young ward, the arrival of an impecunious ex-army officer with his two daughters, tensions arising between the handsome new doctor with radical ideas and the established GP for whom amputation is a cure-all, and a cat that eats some ribbon.

Cranford doesn’t exactly fill the screen with action, but it does contain enough elements of small but significant drama to hold the interest. Plus, it produces a few genuine surprises as well. Most memorably, the cat that ate the ribbon whose story climaxed in a scene of purging that drew upon all the skills of the BBC sound effects department.

Exodus was an ambitious and imaginative retelling of the Moses story set in a Britain of the near future, ruled over by a fascistic dictator Pharaoh Mann and his jack booted police force.

A fan of quick-fix politics, Mann has Margate’s Dreamland Amusement Park transformed into a giant internment camp to house the nation’s social undesirables, and it is from among their ranks a leader arises, promising to lead them to a land of milk and honey, presumably Broadstairs.

First off, Exodus looked great. It was never less than visually stunning. But the production was let down by a woeful absence of characterisation and some truly terrible acting. There were also moments of unintentional hilarity, such as the phalanx of storm troopers searching a room but inexplicably stopping three yards short of the table behind which our hero was hiding.

It reminded me of the Seinfeld routine about swimmers on the beach who cram their cash into the toe of their shoes because no thief would bother to look that far.

DETAILS

Cranford - Sunday November 18, BBC1, 9pm

Exodus - Monday, November 19, Channel 4, 10pm