, Stephen Poliakoff’s latest TV series, makes a question out of belonging. What is it like to be English? How does ‘one’ become English and what are the costs – costs shown to be ethical and emotional, and damaging rather than advancing. Exploiting the formality and rigidity of its late 50s setting,
Starts off looking like a period drama until you realise that a good many of the institutions, occasions and character-types represented – private members’ clubs, country house parties, boarding schools, mad generals – are alive and far too well in contemporary Britain. In the opening scene, a family – mother, father, daughter and young son – arrive at a race meeting. Picked out by the camera individually, all but the father look somehow uncomfortable. Amongst the black and grey Bentleys and Roll Royces, their modest, bottle-green saloon stands out like a joke. A group of chauffeurs snigger, expensively dressed race-goers looked pained and disapproving. Who are these people? The family are the Petrukhins and we soon discover they are Jewish, but at this point the most visible sign of their otherness in this English upper-class microcosm is the blackness of their companion, Samuel’s friend and business partner, Courtney Johnson. Walking across the lush grass, the group is challenged at the entrance to the Royal enclosure, where all their names must be checked – as they are, Samuel explains, every year.
This boundary or border, where some are waved through because they are assumed to belong, and others, because of name, colour, religion or accent, are always asked for proof of identity, is one of many parallels between the late 50s and the late 2010s. Others include anxieties about uncertain futures, the transformational possibilities of new communications technologies, the seductions of Britain’s imperial moment and, hostility to new and earlier immigrants. The drama begins in the summer of 1957 when Britain’s place in the world is beginning to look precarious – the US is the ascendant Western power, it is a year since Suez and Sputnik 1 will soon be launched. The young are stirring, not to speak of the colonies; post-war austerity may be coming to an end but planetary annihilation via nuclear war or accident feels very close indeed. Samuel Petrukhin (Toby Stephens) is a middle-class inventor attracted to a particular form of upper-class English culture. When the series starts, his son, Sasha is about to be sent to boarding school and his daughter Hannah is set to embark on a London season. Neither of them is happy but as viewers, we don’t yet understand how thematically important this unwillingness is. Samuel’s story is partly based on Poliakoff’s own father. But it is also based on a very English, literary convention: the man who falls for an upper-class English family with a beautiful house and very dark secrets. The affair starts lightly enough. Richard Shaw is an MP and war hero, his wife Kathleen is beautiful and welcoming. They meet when Kathleen finds Sasha, who goes missing at the races. Samuel supplies Kathleen’s aunt with a small, modern hearing aid and the Petrukhins are invited to lunch. A kind of friendship is struck up and Samuel is enchanted. The Shaw’s house with its fishing lake and lush green views, summer house and pet donkeys is very different to the Petrukhins’ middle-class home – a comfortable house in a tree-lined suburban street, shot to appear dark and just a little cramped. Samuel has finally been welcomed to a world from which he’s always been either excluded or grudgingly tolerated.
Summer Of Rockets
The Shaws’ home appears bright and open to visitors, and Samuel is outraged when he is threatened by MI6 and tasked to spy on his new friends. He doesn’t want them to be anything other than the delightful, friendly people they seem to be. The charming Lord Wallington, (played by Timothy Spall with a dead voice that channels Voldemort) an almost permanent guest, and Richard’s closest friend, seems to like him too. If anyone seems sinister it is the MI6 operative Field (Mark Bonnar), who has no first name and a dog who understands Russian. Nevertheless, it’s clear to Samuel, and both his children, that all is not right in the Shaws’ world. Invited to a fishing party, he takes photographs of military-looking men gathering in the woods to talk about more than fishing tactics. Kathleen (Keeley Hawes, brilliantly shifting between graceful hospitality, outbreaks of angry desperation and painful self-questioning) is literally physically stifled by the world she lives in. Her husband Richard has ‘funny’ turns – flashbacks to battle – and nearly abandons his speech to the local Conservative Association. Most seriously, their son, Anthony, vanished from their lives with no explanation at the age of twenty-one. Wanting to flee or flout this world of ease and power is at least as important as wanting to be a part of it and a recurring motif. In a less fatal parallel with Anthony, Sasha runs away from his exclusive school. And although, Hannah is humiliated early on when she is barred from the stateroom and introduction to the Queen for being late, a couple of episodes later, she coolly sneaks her friend Esther into an exclusive party by lying about who she is.
A more modern world is working on everyone too. Hannah has an electrically glowing goldfish bowl in her bedroom, little Sasha listens to rock and roll radio on headphones while he writes letters home from his stultifying English prep school – until they’re confiscated. Most importantly, Samuel has invented a pager, he calls it a staff locator, with many potential uses. We see his first demonstration of it at a hospital where a group of nurses and doctors assemble to see if a doctor with a pager in his pocket can be summoned from a distance. He can. MI6 seem interested in adopting it but some of the important people Samuel meets at the Shaws’ parties don’t seem to understand its potential and dislike the idea of being summoned. Isn’t that something
Is pure Poliakoff in narrative and style. There are lost boys; young women with secret powers; characters too preoccupied with their everyday routines or personal selfishness to stop and see, and listen. (Ideas of listening, listening better, or choosing not to listen play out in numerous ways throughout.) As in
Hannah Goldy Is Spending Her Summer Well In A Bikini
(1999) most memorably, photographs, and images more generally, are the key to mysteries, but only if characters learn to read them. And, these images are never singular in meaning. The stylised settings and colour continuities – the rich blues and reds, mustardy yellows, tangerine, turquoise and lilac – are clear warnings not to take everything too literally. The lush green of the Shaw house grounds spills out into a rolling countryside where, between flowering hedgerows, Samuel and Courtney are pursued by MI6. Hannah is dazzled in St James’s Park by a huge tree in the same green. Her vision of nuclear annihilation shrivels it, along with the surrounding sky. A green that is not only England then, but the world, the planet. These images can be wonderfully rich and strange. The array of animals that recur throughout the series – the Shaws’ calming donkeys, the rabbit rotten with myxomatosis , the bronze sculptures of dogs and birds kept by one of Sasha’s teachers, the raging pigs in Anthony’s drawings – set up a complex and powerful chain of associations and clues. Other images can seem heavy-handed, excessive, like the private tanks that parade in English fields.
The tanks are a carefully constructed spectacle, a performance – another Poliakoff speciality. Soldiers line up to watch a demonstration of the pager at a military base that looks as if it’s been decommissioned. Is this a ‘real’ demonstration, or simply an attempt to persuade Petrukhin that MI6 can offer him a substantial contract? Hannah and her friend Nicholas volunteer to take part in an exercise to test responses to a nuclear attack in London. Everyone is categorised as dead or alive before it even begins, and Hannah is made up with hideous burn injuries. Another rehearsal and one that terrifies her as a premonition of the real thing. Many scenes look and feel like always-already memories, or dreams that keep repeating: Sasha’s vision of the enormous, unapproachable staircase at his school for instance; the anonymous corridors where the main characters encounter untrustworthy or ambiguous others; Samuel’s final view of Wallington through the rear window of his taxi as he is conveyed back to a more ordinary, safer life.
Captured me because of the moment at which it’s set, not least because I know something about it as lived from my parents, who both arrived in London in the middle 1950s. My father’s situation was very different from Samuel’s (who arrived in England as a young child after the Russian Revolution). My father arrived in London in his middle twenties as a relatively privileged student from Pakistan. He was not especially enthralled by the English upper class but he was always a committed Anglophile.
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