The phrase "period costume drama" could have been invented for the purpose of damning with faint praise. As in: "Period costume dramas are what the BBC excels at"—a comment which often implies that since costume dramas are all the BBC does well, it is these that they should concentrate on, and that anyway they are not that hard to pull off. It's a remark often associated with anti-BBC sentiment. So when the corporation unveiled its Cranford series—based on the mid-19th century works of Elizabeth Gaskell—there were predictable mutterings that it was a safe, unsurprising production aimed at middle England. In fact, Cranford was a triumph: a complex creative challenge which took risks and was rewarded with a large audience.
The series was based on three of Gaskell's works—the novel Cranford, the long novella My Lady Ludlow ("the least regarded" of Gaskell's books, according to her biographer Jenny Uglow) and the short story "Mr Harrison's Confessions." Adapting them for television cannot have been easy. The books all have different narrators and there is no crossover of characters—"Mr Harrison's Confessions" was not even set in Cranford.
The novel Cranford started life as a serial in Charles Dickens's magazine Household Words in 1851. Some characters only lasted one instalment—notably Captain Brown, who appears in the first chapter and causes considerable disruption to Cranford both by behaving above himself and by being an employee of a railway company whose plan to build a railroad through the town is opposed by the locals. Brown has two daughters—the ill Mary and her sister Jessie, who looks after her. Captain Brown and Mary die in quick succession and Jessie marries her old flame, Major Gordon. All this happens in the first story in the Household Words series (something which Mrs Gaskell later claimed to regret, writing that she "killed Capt Brown very much against my will"). In the television series, Captain Brown appears in all the episodes. His daughter Mary pre-deceases him, he frustrates the? marriage of Jessie and it only gradually emerges that he is connected to the railway company.
In its Radio Times coverage of the series, the BBC emphasised the similarities between life in the Victorian period and today. But the real strength of the series was in showing how different it was. It has become fashionable recently to favourably re-examine the Victorian era. But there is hardly a scene in Cranford which makes you think that you would like to live in those times—they were brutish and hard. Take medical treatment. When a carpenter breaks his arm, it is expected that it will have to be amputated (this was the standard treatment of the day). But the radical Dr Harrison is determined to save the arm and therefore the man's livelihood by setting it. (Luckily he succeeds.) Criminal justice was far harsher then: a man could be transported to Australia for robbery and "may be sent to prison for being a vagabond; for no specific act, for his general mode of life." In terms of social mobility, the character Lady Ludlow, played by Francesca Annis, would never consider engaging a servant who can write, and opposes the establishment of a school for local children. Housing for the poor is "cottages built… of wattles and clay, and thatched with sods"—words from the book, graphically illustrated on screen. And throughout, we sense the suffocating pressure of convention, which oppresses women and keeps the workers in their place.
But one of the impressive things about Cranford was its success in drawing out the social and economic themes in Gaskell's work without losing any of the humour and, in the best sense of the word, sentimentality. The series was blessed by having a stellar cast—Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Michael Gambon, Jim Carter, Imelda Staunton and so on. Almost every member, it should be pointed out, is a product of British state-subsidised theatre. When people question why taxpayers' money should be used to support repertory theatres, this series is part of the answer. And Cranford was watched by almost 8m people each week; more viewers than I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here, even in multichannel homes, which are demographically skewed away from middle England. Broadcasters may treat the masses like idiots, but give us quality and we love it. It took producer Sue Birtwistle five years to get Cranford on to our television screens. Let's not wait so long for the next one.
