Listen, I don’t want to ruin anyone’s day, but there’s something you should know. There are places… dear God, I hope you’re sitting down for this. There are places where the term “Guardian reader” isn’t a signifier of righteousness, jaunty Fair Trade Breton stripes or an appreciation of high-minded weekly TV columns, but is heavy with the weight of insult. Places such as Pagford, the setting for The Casual Vacancy (Sunday, 9pm, BBC1), the BBC and HBO adaptation of the hotly anticipated and tepidly received JK Rowling novel.
The Casual Vacancy is so called because parish councillor Barry Fairbrother pops his clogs halfway through the opening episode, creating a casual (ah!) vacancy (aahh!) on the board that runs the village. The political coda of whoever is elected will decide whether Sweetlove House – bequeathed to the village by a mutton-chopped philanthropist – should continue “for the enjoyment and betterment for the people of The Fields”, or be turned into a spa. And – lorks a lordy, wouldn’t you know it? – the vote is in mere weeks.
You might question how much drama the administrative details of a country house can really generate, but that would be to underestimate the Sweetlove House issue. So here’s where old JK gets tricksy. The Fields is a housing estate that borders Pagford, and which supplies Sweetlove House with a stream of methadone patients and foodbank users; the kind of people who offend the sensibilities of the chintzier villagers no end. “Those junkies and plebs streaming through our village? We must raise the drawbridge!” Howard Mollison (Michael Gambon, a highlight) says haughtily. And thus, The Casual Vacancy opens explorational avenues of poverty, class divides, crime, domestic violence and heroin addicts scratching their facial sores in picturesque surrounds. The upcoming election goes one further, and ignites the touchpaper on simmering familial resentment and unhappy marriages (“Tits, Miles, grab them!” “I’m going to watch the news”), not to mention all manner of fraught dinner parties. It is essentially a battle of liberal values v malevolent whimsy, in the style of a Werther’s Original-toned village drama, refereed by that “Ooh, those bloody Tories, eh?” vicar from Gogglebox. After due consideration, I’m going to pass on ringside tickets, if you don’t mind.
Over on C4, you can stuff yourself silly with the absurdity of holding on to the idea of the English idyll in Indian Summers (Sunday, 9pm, Channel 4). The drama shows the bizarre and insular lives of the civil servants, missionaries and businessmen in Simla, who kept the spluttering machine of empire ticking for the last few decades before partition. Channel 4 being a modern, forward-thinking, neon-ident kinda channel, there are nods towards the atrocities of British history and – suspend your lols for a moment – the several million dead brown people the empire swallowed up. This, I report in a totally breezy and impartial manner, is judged the right backdrop to weave tales of lovelorn toffs frolicking and pissed-up colonialists.
The difficulty with this drama, to which it’s compulsory to attach descriptions such as “lavish” and “opulent”, is that Britain’s patronising relationship with “the east” means that this icky part of history is seemingly always tangled up with the exoticism of the Raj, anointed with the heady oils of… excuse me. What I’m trying to say is that, like the undulating danger of the encroaching jungle, shimmering with… soz, done it again. What I mean is that the level of discomfort felt watching a drama that references imperial massacres yet is filmed through a cosy-glam filter is probably largely dependent on which side of the colonial rifle your forebears found themselves. There are some who feel that the true obscenity of imperialism could never be shown on television. There are others who are sure the subcontinent owes the west a debt of gratitude for chucking them a few trains. And there are more who are unaware that staking your claim in a story you don’t have the full rights to is erring towards “WTF are you even doing, it’s 2015”.
