How To Be A Lady: An Elegant History

Michael Moran visits both ends of the social scale
Michael-Moran1I more or less had to tell you about How To Be A Lady: An Elegant History (BBC Four, 9pm on Tuesday) which is part of BBC Four’s Time Shift documentary strand. Not just because it celebrates the classic ladylike values that this magazine has long championed, but also because it’s presented by our former editor Rachel Johnson.

A documentary about how the changing economic climate and a reaction against the selfdestructive ‘ladette’ culture has led to a resurgence of enthusiasm for etiquette, deportment, and riding horses the hard way could so easily have been a dry, rather staid affair. Against all the odds Rachel injects humour into the proceedings, and imparts nuggets of knowledge that will stand all of us, debutantes or not, in good stead next time the cocktail party conversation flags.

There are guest pundits you might expect, such as deportment experts and sidesaddle- riding enthusiasts, and there are guest pundits you might not, notably feminist writer Bidisha. Throw into the mix some genuinely inspired music choices, including a fi lthy blues number and long-lost song about Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and you have a really first-class hour of television.

At the other end of the social scale to the debutantes appearing in How To Be A Lady, lives Molly Dawes, the protagonist of BBC One’s feature-length drama Our Girl (BBC One, 9pm on Sunday).

I can’t say I’ve had a lot of time for Lacey Turner’s work to date. I was never much of an EastEnders fan and Switch, the supernatural comedy-drama she made for ITV2 last year, was a bit on the silly side for me.

But in Our Girl she delivers a naturalistic but powerful performance, the equal of which we rarely see on TV. It’s the story of one of those ladettes that the well-bred ladies in Rachel’s programme don’t want to be. Molly Dawes (Turner) is on a predictable path to obscurity. She numbs herself with booze binges. She makes the best of a dead-end job. And her feckless father, who makes Frank Gallagher in Shameless look like a saint, is the blight of a singularly unedifying home life.

So she signs up for the Royal Army Medical Corps, seemingly on a whim. The rest of the 90 minutes shows her personality being forged anew in basic training. It’s a story we’ve seen dozens of times before, but when the story’s told with this much heart, it’s as if Full Metal Jacket or all those others never existed.

How To Be A Lady is a diverting, informative, often rather funny hour of television. Our Girl is the most powerfully affecting bit of drama I’ve seen so far this year.