Peter Viney's Blog

Netflix series 2020-21

Created by Chris van Dusen
Based on the novels by Julia Quinn

MAIN CAST

Golda Rosheuvel – Queen Charlotte
Regé-Jean Page – Simon Bassett, Duke of Hastings
Adjoa Andoh – Lady Danbury, benefactor to Simon
Hugh Sachs – Brimsley, aide to Queen Charlotte
Freddie Stroma – Prince Friedrich, a Prussian

The Bridgertons
Phoebe Dynevor- Daphne
Claudia Jessie- Eloise
Jonathan Bailey – Anthony
Luke Thompson – Benedict
Luke Newton – Colin
Will Tilston – Gregory

The Featheringtons
Ben Miller- Lord Featherington
Polly Walker- Lady Portia Featherington
Harriet Cains – Phillipa
Bessie Carter – Prudence
Nicola Coughlan -Penelope

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Matin Imhangbe- Will Mondrich, a bare knuckle boxer
Joanna Bobbin – Lady Cowper, a bitch
Katherine Drysdale – Madame Delacroix, a ‘modiste’
Sabrina Bartlett- Siena, an opera singer
James Fleet- King George III, a king
Julian Ovenden – Lord Granville, an “artist”

Not so much a review as a series of comments on the series. By the end of Episode 5 we didn’t think we’d bother to go on with this Carry On Jane Austen. However we turned off a couple of bad film choices on Netflix (Bill was one) and resorted to more of it. Karen was more vociferous in criticizing it than me.

I hadn’t wanted to watch it as I’d read one review (Jane Austen with bonking). Also we’d come straight from The Queen’s Gambit (one of the best TV serials I’ve ever seen) to ‘The Queen’s Gambols.”

Jane Austen with bonking? Well, Mr Darcy never explained how to masturbate to an awestruck Elizabeth Bennett, nor did we ever get to watch a moaning and ecstatic Elizabeth Bennett testing it out.

Mills & Boone

At a literary festival years ago, there was a talk on “How to write for Mills & Boone.”  The speaker wore an immaculate two piece skirt suit, high heels,  a ruffled blouse, was beautifully made up, and was dripping with jewellery. I don’t recall her name, but it was along the lines of Dolores. She asked in perfect RP if she was our concept of a Mills and Boone author. We all nodded. She kicked off her shoes, took off her jacket and said, ‘Well, me name’s (Annie), and I’m a maths teacher from Sheffield …’ (Name and city invented today – but that was the gist). It was the best talk on writing I’ve attended. They had a strong formula from memory of the talk – exact extents and chapter extents too. This was twenty years ago but they had three defined levels of raunchiness. Bridgerton would be their top level. Plus a bit.

Many years ago the Society of Authors did a survey on publishers from the authors point of view. A number of areas were rated and Mills & Boone came easily top.  I wish I could find it. The Author was somewhat snotty about the result saying that Mills & Boone authors had rarely written for anyone else so had less basis for comparison, but then agreed that they paid extremely well and sold lots of books.

Bridgerton is the main Mills & Boone formula. The hero (The Duke of Hastings) and heroine (Daphne Bridgerton) dislike each other, but decide to plot together for another purpose. They will not fall in love. They are like magnets with the wrong poles facing. But turn the magnets around and wham! Love is in the air …

It’s on the raunchiest end of Mills & Boone. To avoid conceiving children, our Duke has to resort to explicit coitus interruptus (a word WordPress’s spellchecker is too innocent to have listed). Explicit down to the handkerchief in spilling seed upon stony ground. This comes at the end of very lengthy sex sessions in Episodes 5 and 6, where poor Daphne is instructed to groan and moan for what seems like hours. I realized I could have gone out, made a cup of tea, and come back to find them still at it. My watching companion feels they should have waxed his rear end before these scenes. There also scenes where the activity is obviously … well, let us resort to Private Eye’s 1960s way of avoiding the word: The practices of that Irish aristocratic lady Connie Lingus.

BUT … I will add that Regé-Jean Page has charisma, and is a very handsome chap (AUTHOR: reminds me very much of myself at that age EDITOR: No, he doesn’t). He is very good in the role. And in the necessary rolls, too.

Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor) is the perfect Disney princess. I’m not sure which one. But a wispy small white girl and a beefy hirsute chap might be Beauty & The Beast.

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LEFT: Daphne RIGHT: Belle (Beauty & The Beast)

Cinderella

It’s also Cinderella. The other family, the Featheringtons, have three daughters (sorry, very funny actresses … but they are meant to be the Ugly Sisters) and a pregnant ward, Marina, (Cinders) shoved up in the attic. Trouble is Dad has a gambling problem so is being pursued inevitably by The Brokers’ Men. The wicked step mother, Mrs F, will resort to forgery to ruin Marina’s dreams of marrying Troy Tempest (EDITOR: You are getting confused with the puppet Marina in Stingray. AUTHOR: Understandably).

Meanwhile Daphne has to choose between Prince Charming (The Duke of Hastings) and a real Prince Charming, Friedrich of Prussia with an iron cross hanging down from around his neck. (AUTHOR: spot the Bob Dylan lyric quote).

The twist is that a pregnant Marina seeks a fall guy to marry asap. Her military lover has gone to Spain to fight the French (something we often had to do so often we named a station after our greatest victory) and has left her in the family way / up the spout / in the pudding club. Mrs F pushes decrepit aristocrats in front of her, on the grounds that they probably wouldn’t remember whether they’d had sex with her or not, but she has decided on Colin Bridgerton. Unfortunately, Colin is too noble and rejects the chance of a pre-marital quickie. The roly-poly little Penelope Featherington is Colin’s friend from childhood and resents this dastardly ploy as she is secretly in love with him.

People of colour …

The premise and publicity is all based on the { 1) possibility 2) probability 3) fiction 4) fact } that the real Queen Charlotte, wife of mad George III had African ancestry (via the Portuguese Royal Family) so was black. Or rather light mauve often here.

Here’s the reasoning:

Historian Mario De Valdes y Cocom argues that Charlotte was directly descended from a Black branch of the Portuguese royal family: Alfonso III and his concubine, Ouruana, a Black Moor. In the 13th century, “Alfonso III of Portugal conquered a little town named Faro from the Moors, He demanded [the governor’s] daughter as a paramour. He had three children with her.

So, here, the Duke of Hastings has a very black dad and a white mum. Lots of characters are black. You stop thinking about it, just like most modern Shakespeare, it’s simply colour blind casting. But it’s not. In Episode 4, Hastings and his godmother discuss how George III made dukes out of ‘people of our colour.’ Not only Dukes then, but dukes with a long line of forbears living in an ancient ancestral palace. So that shifts it (uncomfortably and clumsily) I felt, from simply “colour blind” to confusingly “alternative reality.”

Victoria Coren Mitchell wrote hilariously about the sex scenes in last week’s Telegraph Review. This week she got to Episode 4. I’d written the paragraph above before I read it, but she noted actual lines:

In Episode 4 it is suddenly spelt out that George III created a raft of black aristocrats when he married Queen Charlotte (a real person who some say was of African descent). “We were separate societies divided by colour” explains the fictional Lady Danbury, “until a king fell in love with one of us.”
This caused a terribe traffic jam in my brain. Why does the Duke of Hasting’s father have a haughty, Norman-style obsession with the antiquity of the Hastings line if it only began with him? And what was he doing before?

We might add that 18th century monarchs did not “fall in love” but had arranged dynastic marriages.

The basic point is DO NOT EXPLAIN.When Paapa Essiedu played Hamlet at the RSC in 2016, no one thought fit to add a couple of lines explaining that Moorish pirates had raided Elsinore just nine months before his birth and that Gertrude took a fancy to the Moorish captain.

I thought it a great shame that King George III only got one scene with dialogue and another in the distance. He was played beautifully by James Fleet (Hugo Horton from The Vicar of Dibley).

Just to keep it PC …

Benedict pals up with the artist Lord Granville, and is invited to his house to paint naked women. I mean, PICTURES of naked woman. The next visit appears to be an orgy (heterosexual and naked) and Benedict dives in. Then he sees Lord Granville snogging with a bloke and realizes he is bisexual … fair enough, he’s a painter. What would you expect?

Our bare knuckle prize-fighter Will has a happy family life which the Duke of Hastings, his pal and sparring partner, is privileged to see. So we have a black boxer? A cliché?

The Bridgerton Boys

I must have missed this earlier, but right at the end of the last episode there is a reference to a first Bridgerton boy needing to have a name beginning with A. I was perplexed as to why but then it hit … Anthony, Benedict, Colin … ABC. And Daphne must be the fourth, and Eloise the fifth … A, B, C, D, E … and Hyacinth the 7th. There must be a Gary or a Gordon or a Graham in there that I failed to note. There was a young lad hanging about. (EDITOR: Gregory. Do look at the cast list you typed above). Well, all authors have a task choosing names for characters (I use The Guinness Book of Names) and alphabetical order is one way. The alphabet for names may be Julia Quinn’s (the original novelist)’s obsession … The Featheringtons are Portia, Phillipa, Prudence and Penelope. This is a bad idea. We had a friend who gave all her three sons names beginning with S. This was cute when they were kids, but problematic later when they start receiving letters addressed to ‘Mr S. (Jones)’.

I’m not alone in finding it hard to work out which brother is which, as they dress alike and genuinely look like brothers, what with all being the same colour.

So to clarify:

Anthony is the oldest. A school friend of the Duke of Hastings and is shagging an opera singer called Siena.
Benedict is next and is shagging the (apparently) French “Modiste” Madame Delacroix.
Colin is the youngest and isn’t shagging anyone but would like to shag Marina.

So … hang on … all the men are white … and all the girls are black. That’s a bit ante-bellum Deep South,isn’t it?

Good bits

Eloise Bridgerton and Penelope Featherington are friends, sub-plot characters, but both add a lot to the appeal- they both command the screen too:

The running theme throughout is that scandal is spread through a regular gossip pamphlet written by Lady Pinkwhistle (EDITOR: That’s an Enid Blyton character) or rather Lady Hornblower (EDITOR: And that’s a C.S. Forester character). Lady Whistleblower? (EDITOR: At last. Correct.) Queen Charlotte wishes to find who this gossipmonger is, as is Eloise. Many are suspected. We find out who it is in the last frame of the last episode. This may remove a major subplot from Series 2.

The ton

The Ton is the affectation used to describe “Society” as in “High Society.” It may be an effete way of saying “town” and rhymes with ON and CON not TUN.

History bits

Where do you begin? The anachronisms are partly deliberate.

We need to date it. It is 1813. This may be mentioned at the start, but I only noted it in Episode 8. George III reigned from 1760 to 1820. He was in an asylum from 1800 to 1820. We’re in this period. The real Charlotte died in 1818, and lived in Buckingham Palace which had been bought for her. That’s why it’s covered with scaffolding in the constant outside shots of a model palace everytime we go to the palace. She had fifteen children, thirteen of whom survived to adulthood. We hear nothing of any of them.

In 1813, Britain was ruled by the Prince Regent (hence Regency costumes and architecture). His social whirl was focussed on Brighton. We hear nary a word about him throughout. That was the court and society.

Pregnant Cinders is waiting daily for the post for a letter from Spain. Several letters arrive daily. At last one has SPAIN in the corner. Yes, there was a mail service, but post as we know it started in 1839. Did people write in capital letters where they were sending a letter FROM on the front?

While Marina’s lover is off in Spain fighting the French, the Napoleonic War does not otherwise intrude into the tale. That’s straight Jane Austen.

The clever feminist sister Eloise Bridgerton likes to sit and light up a cigarette from time to time and share it with her brother. Really? Cigarettes were introduced from France into England after 1830.

The music is deliberately modern material, though played in classical style by The Vitamin String Quartet. They use songs by Ariane Grande, Maroon 5, Taylor Swift and Billy Eilish. Even the very classical sounding waltz music is by Shostakovich, who died in 1975. I thought that was the strongest point of the whole thing.

The frocks are the stars

Costumes and locations are the central core of the series. Above story or acting. I’d say they’re all modern. I knew someone with an antique shop who would travel miles to buy fragments of 18th and 19th century dresses which she would then sell on to film companies who would copy the patterns for authentic costume drama, which would usually be Jane Austen. I assume this production is normal in that a film will duplicate (or triplicate) all the important costumes. You can’t stop filming because a dress gets ripped or muddy or has tea break coffee spilt down the front.

Some scenes took me back to my speculations on scantily-dressed girls in 1960s mini skirts (EDITOR: Where is this going?). One wondered if females had a different reaction to temperature to males. Whether in a garden or crowded ballroom, the women are perfectly comfortable in thin silk dresses with low cleavage (OK, I know it would be nylon) while the males like at least three layers … long boots, wool trousers, a sturdy jacket, a waistcoat and a shirt in the same climate.

Location, location, location

Most of the fun is spotting where it takes place in Bath – which is supposed to be London. It is iconically mostly Bath. Abbey Green the small square with market has the rear of the Roman Baths along one end. A lot is filmed near and around Sally Lunn’s tea rooms … Beauford Square, Barton Street, Trim Street. We thought the vegetarian restaurant a few doors away from Sally Lunn’s was a location from memory. A lot is at the Royal Crescent, though its current famous residents are not in view, maybe they failed the auditions. We once saw Nicolas Cage, with a huge cigar stuck in his mouth, pushing a child in a pushchair at the end of the Royal Crescent . Johnny Depp and Van Morrison are among famous Bath residents. The opera house interior looks like the Theatre Royal. The Bridgerton’s house though is in Greenwich. The stately homes include Wilton House near Salisbury and Somerley near Ringwood – I’ve been to a wedding reception there. Lancaster House in London stands in as Buckingham Palace interior, Hampton Court appears in some exteriors. They travel an awfully long way for the morning duel … into deep countryside. The local park was surely normal. Castle Howard in Yorkshire is the Hastings ancestral pad.

Series 2 …

Is already in preparation.