Season 3 - The Edwardians (1973-1974)
The Edwardians is an odd series because I don't think it was meant to be a series. It's just eight ninety minute long stories about prominent Edwardians. There is no cohesive theme, no cohesive style, more on that later, in fact some of the episodes are in black and white while others are in color and all have horrible sound. I'll note I have no idea if half the episodes being in black and white was due to a Colour Strike like with Upstairs, Downstairs, but my guess is that it wasn't. Also use the closed captioning, it will help with the sound. What the series did do well was highlight bizarre aspects of these seven peoples lives that might be common knowledge in England but which I personally didn't know too much about. And if you noticed that there are eight episodes but only seven eminent Edwardians profiled, it's because one of the episodes is just about Edwardian music halls and their performers unionizing leading to a very bleak ending when the days of the music hall died. You will learn lots of weird things about the Edwardians sex lives, Frederick Royce, of Rolls-Royce, had a sexless marriage, Edith Bland, the children's author known as E. Nesbit, was basically in a trupple and raising the other woman's child as her own, Conan Doyle was having an affair on his dying wife, and Lloyd George, well, he'd sleep with anything. As an interesting aside, the Conan Doyle episode does a better job with the George Edalji case than either the book by Julian Barnes or the miniseries adapted from that book. But my favorite episode by far is the one about Daisy, one of the MANY mistresses of Edward VII. This episode is black and white and all done on one set that looks like it was designed for a ballet. There's choreography and movement and it looks very much like it was shot in one take with little set pieces in different areas of the amorphous white womb that is the set. It's so surreal yet somehow that just makes it not only more memorable, but work in a way the other stories don't. It's taken out of time and turned into a parable or fairy tale about a woman with many loves who eventually embraced Socialism. Yes, it's odd. But it's so odd it's not to be missed.
Post a Comment