johnwarthen

That I saw even part of this series around 1974 seems to me now pure luck-- it ran without fanfare on Georgia's PBS, late on Thursday evenings, and I was able to see four of its six stand-alone episodes. I barely knew Hardy's work then, only his reputation for foredooming his rural characters, and the outcomes for the rustics on view here were mournful indeed. But the individual episodes are remarkably distinct from one another, as befits the very different talents involved: Dennis Potter, David Mercer and William Trevor (!) among the scenarists. The two most memorable: "Two Ambitions", a quiet tale of brothers striving to make lives for themselves and an act of ruinous self-betrayal, and the series closer, the wildly Gothic "Barbara of the House of Grebe".

What is almost surely to be WILL's only season ended last night (hits aren't relocated to 11pm broadcasts) and I'm sorry if that's all. Gaffes and all, I liked the nerve of the thing and appreciate its raw verve. Laurie Davidson gave good show of WS's sensitivity but the real coups were Bremner's arch-villain, Jamie Bower's louche Marlowe, and the fantastic Olivia de Jonge (she was 18 when making this? Amazing!). Plus whoever the eccentric young actress was playing the bird-song fetishist in episode 8 (the cast-list isn't helpful); the series was studded with vivid young players, appropriate to its subject. Ep.8 is the best- written of the ten scripts-- it ends with two grieving young people resorting to The Lord's Prayer, and when was the last time you saw that in a cable series?

Am a U.S.viewer, watching Series 1 on an all-region DVD player. I ordered this series as something my elderly mother might enjoy and have become engrossed myself. Sounding initially like a British variant on LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE, CANDLEFORD turns out to be a rich spectacle which discovers complexities in itself after pleasant but lightweight opening installments and by episode 4 becomes something altogether finer (I've seen only 1-7 so far). I think it not entirely accidental that this same fourth episode engineers a lengthy hiatus for LARK SPUR's most egregious blemish, the already oft-slammed Dawn French as the hamlet's debtor-reprobate. French isn't distractingly familiar in the U.S. but her lazy anachronistic performance, straight out of the classic "Coarse Acting" handbook, is an irritant just the same. Might as well note the other flaws that persist, noted in the more critical IMDb critiques: the usual over-explicit music; some wobbly continuity from one episode to the next (particularly notable in the lack of carryover after the milliner-sisters' traumatic reunion with their father); the disregard for the 18 mile separation of communities so forcefully laid-out in episode 1 and subsequently ignored; and, yes, the absence of squalor. Can't comment on the adaptation's disregard for the source-book since I haven't read it.

But lordy, how much else excels! The writing, encompassing parlor-protocol and pub-chatter, has Dickensian swagger. If LARK SPUR's creators disembarked from the original text, they found their independent stride within a few traversals of their 20-or-so characters. Note how the Welsh postman, an evangelical stereotype and already tiresome within the first hour, in Episode 5 has a spiritual crisis, conveyed in a layman-sermon whose earnestness emits a skittering undertone of near-madness (wonderfully performed by Mark Heap). The porcelain lady-of-the-manor of Eps. 1-2 by 6-7 emerges as a tragic heroine. Twister, Lark Spur's aged comic layabout and scrounger, in Episode 6 has recall of a long-dead sister he imagines come back to haunt him in scenes as rapturously sad and true to senescent remorse as any great tragic work (Karl Johnson, an actor I've never noted before, is extraordinary). More than simply showcasing the series' mostly wonderful cast, the collective of directors grows increasingly muscular in their framing of scenes as LARK SPUR progresses: a complex moment in Ep. 7, in which the squire's wife watches her husband across the street and submits to the goading of shopwomen she dislikes, imagining the worst, is shot with an economic forcefulness that moots distinctions between TV and cinematic filming. Nothing "twee" about craft of that order-- nor about the series itself, once past its establishing episodes.

Yet subtleties noted here are secondary to something LARK SPUR has in fixed place from the start: Julia Sawalha's post-mistress, and her rapport with lifetime friend and village squire Ben Miles, an attenuated near-romance that in abstract sounds an embarrassment-- two terrific actors who appear to realize they have found gorgeous grown-up roles in the unlikeliest of projects, and like the rest of the production's cast/crew, perform as if BBC's calculations about "Sunday night programing" wholly underestimated their work. I cannot push these Reg. 2 programs at friends, who haven't the equipment to play them, and so I can only enthuse here. This is beautiful serial television.