Crumpets and Tea?
Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.
Does anyone remember the British TV series Nanny, starring Wendy Craig, from the early 80’s? It follows a 1930’s nanny through her first year after graduation. She’s a divorced woman (scandalous!), a mature age student, and has been utterly spoiled by an introduction to Freud and other theories of psychology. Also, it turns out there are many handsome gentlemen with nanny complexes, who have to be beaten off with a stick! I bought the Season 1 DVD set on a whim a few months back, when ordering Sarah Jane from the UK, and have been wallowing delightedly in it this week.
Yes, it is all starched uniforms, nursery teas and horrid, horrid children. Plus, of course, a treatise on the many ways that everyone, from the upper crust through the middle clarses to the slum-dwellers, can all be appalling and inadequate parents. It’s 1980’s BBC drama, so everything is awfully slow and precise, and the outdoor sequences are all a bit lopsided. But it’s just so sweet and tidy, and it’s a good thing I’m indulging in it this month, because come April I’m going to have to go back to the bloodthirsty politics, fight scenes and excessive snogging of the Creature Court trilogy, and this would kill all those instincts dead.
There’s also the fun BBC drama game of spotting actors from other shows. So far I’ve spotted Portia from Rumpole of the Bailey and a very babycakes Gonch from Grange Hill. Nanny Gray also had a doomed romance with Count Grendel from the Androids of Tara (really, she should have known it wouldn’t work out).
Everyone dressed so nicely in the 1930’s! And when Nanny speaks sternly to you, even if you’re a little rotter of a child, you damn well do what she says! (so tempted now to go hunting Upstairs Downstairs and The House of Elliott DVDs)