This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 28th February 2015.
Indian
Summers: Sunday, Channel 4
Reginald
D. Hunter's Songs Of The South: Saturday,
BBC Two
Paul
Whitelaw
Thanks to a lifetime of constant
disappointment, I admit I'm prone to making massive, unfair
presumptions about things I haven't actually experienced for myself.
That's why, before I'd even seen it, I rashly presumed that 1930s
period piece Indian Summers would be a ponderous and starchy
affair: a prissy Merchant/Ivory knock-off. Actually, it's rather
engaging.
Hyped as Channel 4's most expensive
ever drama, and scheduled up against JK Rowling's similarly
class-focused The Casual Vacancy on BBC One, it can't afford
to fail. On the evidence of its first two episodes – there are ten
in total – it appears to be succeeding on its own intriguing,
languid terms.
Granted, certain characters haven't
quite clicked yet. Alice, the sister of smoothly chiselled Private
Secretary Ralph, is presumably intended as the moral, tender heart of
the series. So far this role has been defined by winsome glances and
little else. And Dalal, who last week took a bullet during a botched
assassination attempt on Ralph, feels rather limp for such a
prominent character.
Ralph himself is more interesting,
largely on account of his darker traits. A typical child of Empire in
his patrician attitudes towards the Indian people he's been sent to
govern – this week he was quick to dismiss Ghandi's peaceful
nationalist cause as a terrorist movement – he nevertheless adores
his adopted country. It would be all too easy to present these
toodle-pip colonialists as outright villains. But the underlying
political thrust of Indian Summers is more nuanced than that.
An effective note of intrigue was
maintained throughout the episode when it transpired that Ralph had a
prior relationship with his would-be assassin. Indian Summers
is rather adept at teasing such mysteries.
Practically everyone in the show is
nursing a secret of some sort. It remains to be seen whether their
revelations are worth the wait, but I'm particularly intrigued by
Julie Walters as the colourfully named Cynthia Coffin, a scheming,
fag-smoking East End matriarch and charismatic hostess who appears
to be ruling an entire subcontinent by pulling Ralph's strings. It's
an interesting reversal of the class system back home, where a woman
such as Cynthia would never be granted such authority. It's a ripe
old role for Dame Julie, and she tackles it with enigmatic relish.
Production-wise, Indian Summers
glistens with a sticky, inescapable heat. The chaste sex scenes may
be gently torn from the pages of Mills & Boon, but the show isn't
lacking in sun-kissed atmosphere. It's a promising saga.
The balminess continued in Reginald
D. Hunter's Songs Of The South, a thoughtful three-part
travelogue in which the droll African-American comic explores the
origins of American popular music.
To a wonderful soundtrack of
bluegrass and country, he began by travelling from Kentucky to
Tennessee. The highlight was his detour into the uncomfortable realm
of minstrelsy – white singers performing in blackface – where he
encountered the argument that Stephen Foster's minstrel standards,
which often sound offensive from a modern standpoint, were actually
fairly liberal and progressive for the time.
Hunter gently dismissed this theory
as a retrospective attempt to “lend dignity to a fiction created by
a white man”, while concluding that minstrelsy is an important,
albeit difficult, part of the American legacy and shouldn't be swept
under the carpet.
An avuncular and sanguine guide,
Hunter's almost poetic sincerity elevates this series beyond the
bland triviality of most celebrity travelogues.
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