Glorious 39

Stephen Poliakoff holds a hallowed, seemingly untouchable place in British TV. For years, he’s been gathering plaudits as the saviour of home-grown drama – with few seeming to notice, or care, that beneath the best casts and production design that BBC budgets can muster lies some ropey plotting and characterisation. His return to film could prove a long-deferred reality check.

Set on the brink of World War II but framed by a present-day revelatory narrative, starring Romola Garai and Juno Temple and centred on an upper crust family (headed by a politically involved patriarch and largely absent, gardening-obsessed mother) idling around their vast country pile, the ghost of Atonement looms peculiarly large over Glorious 39.

Such distracting parallels mostly just make you wish you were watching the better of the two films – though maybe they’re intended to throw us off the scent. That said, you’d have to have olfactory blindness not to sense that something fishy is up as soon as Bill Nighy’s Alexander Keyes appears, acting with far too much creepily placid paternal benevolence not to be a Grade A psycho. Other baddies can be spotted by looking out for the sinister narrowed eyes they cast across dinner tables and picnics. The eldest Keyes child, Anne (Garai), is slow to catch on, but after finding a record in an outhouse that plays government secrets she begins to sense that all is not well.

The increasingly camp air of menace is actually pretty enjoyable, and the conspiracy Anne finds herself at the heart of – involving an ultra-conservative British elite desperate to stave off war and preserve the status quo at any cost – is an interesting spin on pre-war Appeasement policy.

Honing in on this historical grey area makes a change from patriotic portrayals of wartime Britain, and while Poliakoff’s tale is clumsily unspooled, its telling is evocative. While Anne plays happy families and the war remains uncertain, the world and its inhabitants are bathed in inviting, autumnal colours and a prelapsarian glow; when the stage set of reality has been stripped back, “It’s like living on the moon,” as one character says, suddenly reflected in the chilling blue light like a walking corpse.

Sophie Ivan

Anticipation:

BBC period drama on steroids.

Enjoyment:

Pacy, pretty and well acted – with a faint air of the ridiculous.

In Retrospect:

Unlikely to have anyone rewriting the history books, but enjoyable enough.