The Hardacres (Ch5) Rating: 4/5. You might feel time is flying faster these days. It's an illusion. Back in Victorian times, it shot by in a blur like a jet-propelled bicycle.
Poor Sam (Liam McMahon), pater familias of The Hardacres, woke up a bit creaky one morning, had a cough by lunchtime, and collapsed before it was time to dress for dinner. Such a rapid turn of events is not uncommon in this 1890s costume drama, so pell-mell that my knuckles turned white trying to hang on to the plot. It's daft but exhilarating fun.
Scenes frequently last a matter of seconds, with one or two lines of dialogue to blast the action ahead before switching to another storyline. It's a technique perfected by writer Julian Fellowes with Downton Abbey, but that was a gentle jog compared to the high-intensity workout of The Hardacres.
By the end of the next episode, Sam will probably be dead and buried, and his saintly widow Mary (Claire Cooper) will be remarried, widowed a second time, and have decided to emigrate to America, only to fall in love with the captain of the Onedin ocean liner and be married once again by the time they dock in New York. By Hardacre standards, that's a quiet week.
If 'pater familias' sounded a touch more educated than my usual crude prose, I've probably caught it off young brainbox Harry (Zak Ford-Williams). He's been cramming for his Oxford University entrance exams with trendy tutor Arthur Lewis (Edward Mitchell), who lures him away from his dusty books into the fresh air by scattering cryptic clues scribbled on envelopes in Ancient Greek.
Hardacres starts out in Yorkshire in the 1890s as a tale of rags-to-riches. Harry emerged blinking into the vegetable garden, where he discovered his grandmother and their twinkly, moustachio'd neighbour Lord George filling a wheelbarrow with rhubarb. Up popped Arthur with a valuable lesson in classical languages: 'Rhubarb,' he declared with a scholarly flourish, 'from the Latin rheubarbarum, and the Greek rhabarbaron.' Ma Hardacre (Julie Graham) was suitably impressed, in her coarse, no-nonsense way. Lord G (Owen Roe) glowed benignly, which is his speciality.
What his lordship was doing in the kitchen garden is anybody's guess, because his wife can't stand any of the Hardacre clan, but there's no time to question such details. Perhaps he was trying to escape his mother-in-law, Lady Imelda Hansen, who turned up last week and is making herself at home in Yorkshire society like a boa constrictor settling into a basket of kittens. She embraces everyone, then squeezes the life out of them.
Michele Dotrice, who plays Lady Imelda, is a marvel — sweetness and light, unless you catch a flash of her basilisk glare out of the corner of your eye. Then, you're turned to stone. (That's another classical reference. Blame Arthur Lewis.) It's more than 50 years since Miss Dotrice charmed us all as Frank Spencer's wife, Betty, in Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em. Why isn't she a dame yet?
