Press Archive

The New Zealand Herald
19 February 2004

Powerpoint: A late night saga

Watching The Forsyte Saga is a rewarding trip down memory lane. Here is a leisurely paced drama where people have conversations. What’s more, these now rare transactions in telly drama take place while the proponents are sitting down, not running along corridors wielding weapons or defibrillators.

In an astonishing scene early in this ITV adaptation of the John Galsworthy novels, one side of a conversation was actually conducted entirely in facial expressions as the slimy solicitor Soames (Damian Lewis) makes clear with the merest flick of the eyes and twitch of the mouth exactly how much — or rather, how little — the Forsyte family patriarch should settle on his affianced daughter Winifred. Characters take time to look out of windows and give the impression that something that happened is worth reflecting on. They also take time to check each other out, making observations that tell us a lot about the social mores of this story, set in the heart of the Victorian era and its middle-class values.

For people over a certain age, The Forsyte Saga is a trip back in time in another way. The 1967 version, starring Eric Porter and Nyree Dawn Porter, is often fondly remembered as “the definitive small-screen drama” or, in more contemporary terms, as a pioneering cliffhanger drama, or piece of appointment, or watercooler TV. Can this remake measure up?

The ITV production certainly boasts a uniformly excellent cast in the form of Damian Lewis, Rupert Graves and Gina McKee as, respectively, the rich and repressed Soames, the Bohemian family outcast Jolyon and Soames’ reluctant object of desire, Irene.

While the plot moved along swiftly through the decade, characters were skilfully drawn and the drama’s theme of possession — financial and personal — was strongly established.

The dinner-party jokes remind us that obsession with real estate is not just the preserve of the age of My House, My Castle. “What shall it profit a man if he gain his own soul and lose all his property?” quotes a cackling dinner guest.

When Soames presses his suit to the unwilling but penniless and insecure Irene, he does not ask her to marry him, but rather, “Will you do me the honour of becoming mine?”

This production is a trip back in time in a more literal way, too. It screened in Britain in April, 2002 and was promised to us by TV One last year. Now that the channel has at last dusted it off, it is given the viewer-unfriendly slot of 10.20pm on a Saturday night.

The Forsyte Saga earned the kind of critical reception in Britain which surely should have merited screening in the channel’s prime time Sunday Theatre slot, the place, supposedly, for quality British drama. “Far from being a bog-standard tale from the time of buttoned-up women and repressed men, The Forsyte Saga has much to recommend it,” wrote the Guardian’s Gareth McLean, who also noted the “sharp and clever script”. Another Guardian critic said the opening chapter of the saga deserved its big ratings, and the Daily Mirror critic’s verdict was, “On the strength of this opening chapter, producer Sita Williams and director Christopher Menaul seem to have treated John Galsworthy’s epic with respect while making it relevant for today’s viewers.”

It’s the same slot where the channel recently hid the excellent Murder, starring Julie Walters in a Bafta-winning performance as a grieving mother determined to get justice for her murdered son.

Meanwhile, the flashy MI5 series Spooks provides an example of what a drama needs to make it into prime time: barely comprehensible plots, a wooden female lead in Keeley Hawes, characters so dispensable they can be knocked off in scenes of gratuitous nastiness.

No, The Forsyte Saga may be the kind of exploration of an era’s social mores which might lead us in turn to wonder how our own society will be regarded by future generations, but it can’t match torture and death by deep fryer.