The Pursuit of Love

[NurseButtercup]

Oh the absolute irony of the words of the character played by Dominic West in this trailer!! Wasn't he start shagging Lily James when he was filming this TV series???

This will be on BBC from 9th May - looks good.

[Blogdog]

It was okay. Agree that the music didn’t work. And that Andrew Scott was wonderful, as always.

I couldn’t take Freddie Fox seriously though. It felt like he was channeling Lord Flashheart from Blackadder as inspiration.

[WithLoveFromMyselfToYourself]

I was so looking forward to this but uncharacteristically ditched it after half an hour. It just didn't gel at all for me and I found it uncomfortable .
I loved the book and Love in a Cold Climate.

[Zzelda]

@Butterbeers

How many women called Linda were around in 1920ish?

Presumably a reasonable number, given that that was the name Nancy Mitford chose and the book was heavily based on her own childhood.

[TracyBeakerSoYeah]

It's really good & I like it.

[EdwinPootsLovesArchaeology]

Interestingly Lucy Mangan, reviewing it in the Guardian, doesn't mention the music.

Rave review from her.

[JemimaTab]

@LWOTT

Emily Mortimer’s best friend, kids and mother are all in this. It is dripping with nepotism and that’s enough to have put me right off.

Oh but apparently they all auditioned and were all unbelievably good and therefore deserved their parts and got there on merit!!
(Which rather overlooks the fact that getting the audition in the first place is the difficult bit, and largely depends on having the right agent. Mummy/Daddy/Auntie etc. being well-connected really helps where this is concerned).
But TBH this is the least of their problems. I found it really flat and badly edited. No sense of fun or satire. And the casting was not that great either.

[LizzieSiddal]

It was all style over substance and too much looking longingly into the middle distance and not enough script.

And agree that Lily James is the new Keira Knightly. She’s beautiful but is an awful actor.

[longwayoff]

Its been Bridgertoned. Never thought I'd be feeling sorry for Nancy Mitford but she must be spinning in her grave at this travesty. It's so wrong. All nuance stripped out, its awful. Poor script and miscast. Sunday nights belong to Ted and the wee donkey. I'm heading for iplayer.

[bibliomania]

I quite liked it. Anachronistic music is cliche in its own right at this point, but can still be quite effective. I like Lily James, and I enjoyed the longed-for social events that turned out to be so disappointing. Not as original as it thinks it is, but lively enough.

[EuroTrashed]

@longwayoff it’s been made for stupid people with short attention spans. Quick flash of tit or are they/ aren’t they lesbianism hinted at every 5 minute to keep people interested, rather than subtlety and charm and dialogue. Utterly ham fisted.

[LyndaSnellsSniff]

I rather enjoyed it. I thought the bonkers-ness of Uncle Matthew came over very well but it was a bit icky watching DW play LJ’s dad.

The music was good but a bit Bridgerton.

My main complaints are that I could barely understand what Lilly James and Emily Beecham were saying and they were too old for the roles!

[AndreaMarteau]

I watched all 3 episodes. It was ok but I agree with most of the criticisms here. The second and third episodes were slightly better than the first. Sometimes having modern music works in a period piece (i.e Peaky Blinders) but I don't think it did here. It just seemed clunky, like they were signposting the modern parallels. I would have preferred period appropriate music, I think.

Also, I feel Linda is quite an unlikeable character on paper so whoever plays her needs to be someone out the ordinary, which I don't think Lily James is. It got a bit of hammering on Twitter because it was a drama about 'poshos' but I don't mind a bit of escapism. Seems odd that people absolutely love stuff like Downton, which is a rewriting of working class history to portray the upper class as a benevolent employer who treat their servants like pets, but something like this, written by someone who was there at the time, is apparently unacceptable.

[SoupDragon]

it’s been made for stupid people with short attention spans.

Rude.

[dayswithaY]

Didn't know what to expect but yes, I got 1980s pop video vibes from this. Or a perfume advert.

Lily James and the other one are far too old, why couldn't they find some talented unknowns aged 19 to play the leads? Uncle Matthew was so embarrassing I could barely watch - thundering around with that stupid voice like Brian Blessed.

All the giggling bath tub scenes and hints at lesbianism were very tiresome.

[butterpuffed]

I think BBC has missed the mark with this. They've always done quirky really well, but this all seemed so disjointed, flitting from one scene to another to another and so on, very annoying.

It's had pretty good reviews though by the journalists, so hey what do I know, I'm just a viewer, but then many others in here weren't keen either

[Mydogisagentleman]

I watched it when I came home from work.
I.t was just what I needed after a shitty day of seizures and blocked PEGs.
I’ll definitely watch the rest, I just wish Lily James wasn’t in it

[mermaidsariel]

@dayswithaY

Didn't know what to expect but yes, I got 1980s pop video vibes from this. Or a perfume advert.

Lily James and the other one are far too old, why couldn't they find some talented unknowns aged 19 to play the leads? Uncle Matthew was so embarrassing I could barely watch - thundering around with that stupid voice like Brian Blessed.

All the giggling bath tub scenes and hints at lesbianism were very tiresome.

Seems to be now that there have to be several stock ingredients to just about anything on TV now. Lesbianism, lots of gratuitous sex, preferably with multiple partners, covering all bases race
wise (which is good but not historically consistent in many cases), references to masturbation. Does anyone seriously believe a woman at that time of that class would even know what masturbation was , let alone discuss it?
I despair.

[MotherOfGodWeeFella]

I enjoyed it and am neither thick nor have a short attention span. Really don't understand how someone could say they didn't understand what was going on when it was narrated throughout by Fanny.

I've not read the novel, but do know a bit about the Mitford's and it was obvious to me a lot of it was based on Nancy's own childhood and family.

Lily James is a good actress so I disagree with some posters. I thought Emily Beecham was excellent in conveying the contrast between Fanny and Linda.

[dogsdinnerlady]

No hint of a lesbian attraction in the book, not masturbation I think. Agree LJ wrong for the part, I always imagined her as fair and Mitford mentions the Radletts' very blue eyes often. Fanny is depicted as a mousy little thing in the book so the actress here much too glamorous and pretty. I did think they did quite a good job fitting in some of the best lines and quotes though.

[Supersimkin2]

They’ve put a lot of effort in and some of the efforts are clever, borrowing from that Queen Anne film.

Doesn’t work. Pursuit is a satirical novel and you’re not supposed to like, let alone love, Linda. Pity, envy, maybe - but she’s not the most important point of it.

The joy is in the set group pieces with the Radletts, the romp, the social niceties, and the appeal of the various love interests, esp Gaston, the final one, who’s a portrait of Nancy’s one time boyfriend she loved for life.

They’ve binned the cracking class humour cos bbc even tho it’s still funny now. They’ve lost the portraits and dialogue from the minors - eg Davey the Definitive Health Nut - and turned it into a cheeky lesbo insta romp.

[Martinisarebetterdirty]

I found it very jerky and flat. Agree absolutely no subtlety. Reminded me of the time I took ex-DP to see an Oscar Wild play and he complained bitterly at the interval about how it was all posh people and he didn’t like it, he hadn’t realised it was satire . I feel that Emily Mortimer hasn’t understood the book.
I think Lily James is well cast though, she has the fragile self destructive air that I always feel Linda had, which surprises me as I don’t usually like her.

[Martinisarebetterdirty]

And yes, not enough Davy at all who I remember as a key character - maybe time to reread the book rather than watch it.

[OppsUpsSide]

It seemed to be a series of shots of LJ doing sex faces, I liked the other characters though I think I will try the book.

[Supersimkin2]

Show’s exactly what Nancy would have expected. She worked for Hollywood for a while after WW2 and left cos she couldn’t see why they thought massive sales had to mean massively stupid.

She revelled in how blithely dim yet opinionated actors were, was brilliantly bitchy.

[EuroTrashed]

@SoupDragon

it’s been made for stupid people with short attention spans.

Rude.

I rarely see a programme that has to print a card with each character’s name across the screen in order to let the viewer know who it is. That quick cut editing is also for the short of attention span. It’s like programming that has a 2 minute v/o catch up after each ad break . It really is dumbing down on the assumption that people can’t focus for longer than a tik tok clip. What makes you think they made a programme for people who managed to concentrate all through the book?