We begin on BBC1 with the final episode of Jane Eyre. A typical Classic Serial of the period (Barry Letts producing, Terrance Dicks script-editing) it features Timothy Dalton in maximum brood mode as Mr Rochester. Zelah Clarke played Jane – period drama clearly suited her as she also appeared in the likes of How Green Was My Valley, The Duchess of Duke Street, A Christmas Carol, Dombey & Son and Lady Jane.
Next is Hi-De-Hi! (The Marriage Settlement). We’re coming towards the end of the Jeffrey Fairbrother era I’m afraid. Surprisingly, there’s no Christmas special for the series – the next episode airs in early January.
S1 of By The Sword Divided concludes. I’ve a lot of time for this series (created by John Hawkesworth, which explains why it has an Upstairs Downstairs feel at times). The programme’s budget limitations were obvious (characters would go marching off to war but we tended not to see the battles onscreen as they would have been too costly) but then the character interactions were always the thing. I think this is one I’ll have to revisit in full soon.
ITV offers Agatha Christie’s Partners in Crime (The Unbreakable Alibi). The source material for the series is pretty thin stuff, but the adaptations were always sympathetic – which meant that the end result always bore some resemblance to the original Christie story (something you can’t always take for granted these days). And even if the stories don’t always sparkle, Francesca Annis and James Warwick always do.
I’ll be rounding off the evening with The World at War on Channel 4.
Archive Television Musings 
Re. Zelah Clarke: Although the serial was well-received and Zelah gained a lot of publicity at the time – it basically ended her acting career. Nobody was interested in her afterwards. She said in later interviews that it was a very depressing experience for her, but that ultimately she found happiness away from acting. Without wishing to be cruel, I can spot one obvious reason why her career ended – she was less than five feet tall.
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One thing that stands out is that the Radio Times listings page is mostly still in black and white, while TV Times used some colour pictures.
Two things I do remember watching were Partner in Crime with Agatha’ Christie’s lesser known detectives Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, and I wasted forty minutes of my time watching Forty Minutes: Pranks, which looked at the kissogram industry.
I said before that one reviewer summed up Forty Minutes as being either “a fascinating look at human life” of “boring collage on a facile theme”, and more often it was the latter, and Pranks is one such example. Most of the kissograms and stripograms featured in the programme were tacky and unfunny.
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I’m a fan of By the Sword Divided as well – I feel that you can relate to the characters and the personal aspects of the story in a very modern sense, while it still holds its period authenticity, which isn’t always the case with historical dramas. I feel the budget limitations and the absence of epic scenes never detracted from these kinds of productions, and made the characterisations that much richer.
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