Life In Squares

‘Torment, Maynard, of a most delectable kind,’ Lytton Strachey breathes to Keynes amid the half-light of a modish literary salon as they ogle the beautiful Duncan Grant, one evening in the very earliest days of the 20th century. Later that night, the following exchange: ‘Miss Stephen, might I trouble you for another of those remarkable buns?’ ‘Of course, Mr Bell.’ Soon Vanessa Stephen will be the wife of Clive Bell, for the names are hailing down in abundance as we are invited into that most refined and highbrow intellectual circle which quinoa-chomping socialists will forever cherish as the Bloomsbury set.

This being a BBC costume drama, Life In Squares (Monday 27, BBC Two, 9pm) cannot simply indulge in unalloyed nostalgia à la Downton. The cast is entrancing – the epicene men in particular boast dream-boy looks – and the costumes exquisitely tailored, while the names are, as established, shamelessly dropped: at one point a Bloomer pipes up, ‘The Asquiths are coming’, adding redundantly, ‘The Prime Minister and his wife?’ as if his listeners might not know.

But there are also worthy messages in abundance – corsets are tossed out of the window with proto-feminist aplomb, and with hindsight set to the full 20/20, the past is found wanting for its cruelly ignorant intolerance of unconventional sexuality. The conversation is refined and the cinematography exquisite, but do keep a notepad and slide ruler on hand if you want to have any chance at all of keeping up with the complex convolutions of the Bloomers’ bed-hopping couplings.

Lydia Leonard wisely plays it straight as the young Virginia Woolf: who could ever hope to compete with the prosthetic nose that won the Oscar for Best Actress in The Hours? What a treat, meanwhile, to see Eleanor Bron as a haughtily dismissive Aunt Mary. Even Downton’s Dowager Countess would tremble. Expect the gloom to descend in the second and then the final episode as we leap forward through the decades to Woolf’s depression and despair.

Picture this: seen from afar, a gangly teenage boy meets an elfin girl of uncommon confidence, though some years younger. Captured in an enchanting photo, this was the crucial early encounter, in July 1939, between Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip, at the Naval College in Dartmouth, the opening chapter in the royal fairytale.

But as Prince Philip: The Plot To Make A King (Thursday 30, Channel 4, 9pm) reminds us, there were twists and turns and dragons to slay before the couple could live happily ever after. While Earl Mountbatten schemed with the skill of a chess grandmaster to secure his nephew’s elevation, others in the court had their reservations about the match, to say the least. ‘I don’t know if I’m being very brave or very stupid with this wedding,’ the Earl’s daughter Patricia now recalls Philip confiding to her.

But after a wedding of glorious splendour seen in exquisite technicolour footage, you’d have to say the 68-year-long marriage suggests that Philip has very much had the final word. Have the doubters ever been overcome quite so definitively?

---

NOT TO BE MISSED

Animal Super Parents Fri 24, BBC1, 7pm
From penguin chicks to lion cubs, the parenting secrets of all creatures great and small are revealed.

The Pennine Way Mon 27, BBC2, 7.30pm
Adventurer Paul Rose laces up his hiking boots for the scenic trek from Derbyshire to the Scottish border.

Posh Pawn Wed 5 Aug, C4, 8pm
Diamond bracelets and rock-star guitars are being hocked in this inside look at a luxury pawnbrokers.