Fifty-Five Years a Masterpiece
You know, five years ago when Masterpiece, no longer Theatre, celebrated their fiftieth anniversary and I dedicated several months on my blog to said celebration? Well, spending that year watching old British shows kind of became a habit. In other words, I started watching shows for the fiftieth anniversary and, well, I just never stopped. And now it's the fifty-fifth anniversary and I have watched so many shows in the intervening five years, not all done for Masterpiece, but, well, almost all done for Masterpiece. Or at least PBS. I mean, I had to get Ballykissangel in there somewhere. What this means is that I couldn't let the fifty-fifth anniversary pass without another celebration. I was like a kid in a candy shop searching out old Mobil posters I'd never seen and trying to find just one more series that hadn't been released in any format stateside. YouTube is, surprisingly, my friend now. It might be the biggest shock of the last year. Shows I'd never thought I'd be able to see were available, and shows that I thought I'd hate, well, it turns out I owe the seventies production of Poldark a big apology. Masterpiece helped form who I am, creating a love of literature, art, and England. I have recently made it my goal to somehow watch every show ever aired on Masterpiece. It might take another five years, meaning there's already a sixtieth celebration in the offing, but until I succeed, possibly by bribing PBS employees to help a girl out, let's celebrate what wonderful shows I have watched in the last five years. Are any of them your favorites? I mean, how could you not love All Creatures Great and Small or Downton Abbey? Or are there certain ones that left you cold? For example have you developed an extreme aversion to Ben Cross? Because I know I sure have. Here's to Masterpiece! It's a piece of us all.
Celebrating All Creatures Great and Small: For the Love of the Yorkshire Dales by All Creatures Great and Small 
Invisible Helix by Keigo Higashino
Gallant by V.E. Schwab
Spelunking Through Hell by Seanan McGuire
The Nice House on the Lake by James Tynion IV
Deadly Director's Cut by Vicki Delany
Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama by Bob Odenkirk
The Art of Alice and Martin Provensen by Alice and Martin Provensen
A Royal Murder by Verity Bright
The Letter from Briarton Park by Sarah E. Ladd
The original All Creatures Great and Small has always held a special place in my family's heart. My grandfather, who has to be held partially responsible for turning me into an Anglophile by having the rule that every Sunday when we visited the TV had to remain on AND remain on PBS, had the complete series of books by James Herriot that I ran off with. As for my father, let's put it this way, when one of my friends announced she was marrying a rural Canadian vet his first question was had they watched All Creatures Great and Small together yet. I have a sneaking suspicion that my parents didn't get an invite to the wedding because my friend knew the gift would be the complete DVD set of All Creatures Great and Small followed by incessant pestering if they had watched it yet. Therefore when the new series was announced it was greeted with incredulity in my house. How could they remake such a classic!?! My Dad was actually a little flabbergasted that I wanted to watch it when it started on Masterpiece. I told him my reasoning. First, it had aired in Britain earlier and all my friends there who had the same fanatical devotion to the original show that my father has fell in love with it. Secondly, it would be a return to something comforting and secure on a Sunday night, which I think we can all agree we need right now. On January tenth the first episode, "You've Got to Dream," aired and I KNEW my father was hooked by the fact he was copiously sobbing at the complicated labor of a cow. I was more shocked than anything though when after a few episodes he said he thinks that Samuel West is a better Siegfried Farnon than Robert Hardy. This is as close as it gets to blasphemy in my house. But the show is magnificent. It's a breath of fresh air, and those gorgeous Yorkshire landscapes! THIS is what Masterpiece Theatre has always been about. Tapping into the perfect dream of England, with a little trouble and strife along the way, but a happy ending to cap it off. Nicholas Ralph who plays James Herriot says he hopes next season that his character and Helen go on their first date after her engagement with Hugh was broken in the Christmas special. Personally a true happy ending to me will be their marriage! Or I will be willing to substitute Samuel West wearing those gorgeous knee-high leather boots in every episode.
I don't think it's just me, but I feel like there has been a plethora of book adaptations over the last year. Not only have I not gotten around to watching them all, but of the ones I've seen I feel like I'm barely touching the tip of the iceberg! I want to binge them all! Bridgerton, The Stand, Clarice, Resident Alien, All Creatures Great and Small, and on and on. Because if there's one thing Covid has done it's to let us fully embrace the binge on a level heretofore never seen! What's Bridgerton or The Queen's Gambit in a day? That's nothing compared to not leaving your couch for months on end! In fact it gives you something to do while on your couch! But what I'm amazed at is that we're constantly getting new shows, how is it that the film industry has kind of wobbled but television and streaming have continued on so robustly? Oh, does it really matter? Not when so many beloved books were finally adapted this year. Terry Pratchett? Yes please! Alan Tudyk is a what? I'm overjoyed! Regency England is cool again? What, is this 1996 again? Because at this moment I think I'd be OK with that. So here's to all the shows I've watched, I'm watching, and I plan to watch, all emanating from my favorite medium, books! Because I want to make it abundantly clear, an adaptation doesn't legitimize a book, a book is a perfect finished product in it's own right. An adaptation just gives me joy at seeing what I envisioned on screen. And even if they get it horribly wrong... well, they tried right? Plus, I do kind of like complaining when things go wrong...
My parents made it a habit that for the holidays they'd give me box sets of their favorite Masterpiece Theatre shows so that when I wanted to watch something they'd get to watch something they wanted to as well. One Christmas I got a gift "From Your Irish Friends." After me trying to guess what the present was and failing, it turned out to be season one of The Irish R.M. staring Peter Bowles. I feel bad that it's taken me about twenty years to finally get to this show, but it really needs to be taken into account how many shows are out there and how many shows Masterpiece Theatre did that I'm trying to catch up on. That is a hella big backlog people! On the scene we have a lot of my favorite actors, or I should say, Peter Bowles, but behind the scenes we have the whole crew from Upstairs, Downstairs, a classic if there ever was one! So I knew the show had rightly gained it's status as a classic in it's own right. Yet it did take me awhile to get into. The show deals with the clash of the very British Resident Magistrate with his very Irish neighbors who come before him in court and seek to manipulate him outside of it. My problem was that I felt the show's humor was at the expense of the Irish, and that made me feel a bit dirty. The Irish have always been the oppressed in any relationship with the British and the way jokes were set up to have the Irish use their humor and wiles to try to outwit their enemy felt too much like it was written by British writers to make fun of and further demean the Irish. Eventually they found the right balance where everyone was the butt of the joke, British and Irish alike, and with this the show found it's footing. It could also be that as time went on I started to love the characters and saw them less as the initial stereotypes they were set out to be and more as the individuals they were. But this has to do with the actors more than the writing in my opinion. In the end the show is a marvelous amalgam of All Creatures Great and Small and Father Ted. I defy anyone to argue that the R.M.'s housekeeper Mrs. Cadogan (which she insists is pronounced Mrs. Cadergorn) isn't the inspiration for Mrs. Doyle on Father Ted. They both so enjoy their misery.
January tenth of this year marked the fiftieth anniversary of Masterpiece, no longer Theatre, but still Theatre in my heart. If you watched the "special" hosted by Alan Cumming you were probably just as baffled as I was that it was nothing more than an infomercial for their most recent seasons without touching on the glorious history and the wonderful shows they have aired over the past fifty years. Let's just do a really fast montage of the hosts to prove that it wasn't the biggest mistake of our lives firing Russell Baker, OK? Sigh. In fact the very touching tribute to Diana Rigg at the end of the second episode of All Creatures Great and Small this season was longer than the tribute to past hosts in a special about the show's history! My quibbles aside, Masterpiece didn't just change television, it changed me. It informed everything about me growing up. It was a touchstone, there every Sunday night, where I could get respite from the world and escape into a show before the onslaught of Monday morning. The theme music was used as the processional music for my eighth grade graduation. I have spent more hours than you can count going through shelves at used bookstores to find the old tie-in editions with the beautiful poster art that Mobil produced for each show. I learned about new shows wandering bookstores and seeing the newly released tie-ins for the upcoming season. I have found more favorite authors than I can count because of this show! 
