Creative Sensemaker: What to read, watch and listen to this weekend

Welcome to the latest Creative Sensemaker from Tortoise Media.

‘If ever there was a case of the right book at the right time, this book was it. Funny, frivolous, and sweepingly romantic, it was the perfect antidote to the long war years of hardship and austerity, providing an undernourished public with its favourite ingredients: love, childhood and the English upper classes.’ This is what Nancy Mitford’s biographer, Selina Hastings, wrote of her 1945 novel The Pursuit Of Love, now adapted by Emily Mortimer into a three-part series (BBC One, 9 May; all episodes on iPlayer), serving as an unlikely replacement for Line Of Duty in our Sunday night viewing schedule.

Set between the wars, the tale of Linda Radlett, her eccentric, aristocratic family and her restless quest for romance is beautifully rendered by a cast led by Lily James, Dominic West, Andrew Scott, and Emily Beecham.

For a debut director, Mortimer is impressively unconstrained by the usual rules of television dramatisation. This is much more than an upmarket version of Downton Abbey. Listen out, in particular, for the imaginative use of modern music (I spotted The Who, T.Rex, Le Tigre, and Marianne Faithfull) – a highlight being Andrew Scott’s outrageous, dream-like arrival at a dull debutante ball to the strains of ‘Dandy In The Underworld’.

Written in three months, Mitford’s original novel is a barely concealed account of the early life of her family. Now remembered only dimly, as a sort of fascist prototype for the Kardashians, the Mitford clan was indeed a diverse bunch of oddballs, artists and maniacs, ranging from deranged followers of Hitler to committed communists.

But it was Nancy who truly immortalised the family as its novelist-chronicler, spotting the apparently unquenchable English taste for snobbery and social categorisation. We kid ourselves that we live in a ‘classless society’, but – 76 years after the publication of The Pursuit Of Love – we are as addicted as ever to such classifications and their tribal meaning.

Do not be deceived into thinking that this is all aristo-jinks, hunting capers, and bright young things. There is a profound strain of stringency and darkness in The Pursuit Of Love, elevating it from a great comic novel to a 20th-century masterpiece, describing a world that is both long vanished and still etched deep in the English imagination. All this is perfectly captured in Mortimer’s adaptation. Miss it at your peril.

Here are this week’s recommendations:

Watch

Read

Listen