While this makes every effort to appear genuine to the period, it is a superficial experience. The realization comes in the third episode when Lady Cremone (Bisset) says of a party that it will be "fun". Anyone who has read Mitford or Waugh, and Gibbons in "Cold Comfort Farm", knows that 'fun' was a banished adjective among people of that class in that period. It's something that the writer ought to know.
And while the set design and costumes and overall production is glossy it's like a fashion shoot. That fact comes out in the lack of story and drama - nothing much happens and very slowly for a long time. It has a contrived and much smaller stamp to it. Certainly, it does not justify its time or structure. It might have been done much better in half the time.
The music which ought to be central is not and seems of a decade later; in arrangement, style and solo voicing, unconnected to the early 1930s, false when matched against recordings of that time.
As to the characters. They are standard TV fare, but only half-formed. They say things as ciphers in some mimicry of what real characters might have said in that period.
And while the set design and costumes and overall production is glossy it's like a fashion shoot. That fact comes out in the lack of story and drama - nothing much happens and very slowly for a long time. It has a contrived and much smaller stamp to it. Certainly, it does not justify its time or structure. It might have been done much better in half the time.
The music which ought to be central is not and seems of a decade later; in arrangement, style and solo voicing, unconnected to the early 1930s, false when matched against recordings of that time.
As to the characters. They are standard TV fare, but only half-formed. They say things as ciphers in some mimicry of what real characters might have said in that period.