Julian R

Nanny (1980s TV series)
An interwar-into-WW2 TV series following a single main character, Barbara, as she qualifies as a nanny and takes a series of jobs. This was fairly gentle TV to watch, following Barbara from one family and household to another and dealing with a wide variety of family issues ranging from bullying to bereavement and the complicated halfway between upstairs and downstairs nature of her position. Lots of period childcare details, lots of closeup looks at the social setups and status of families who employ nannies. Barbara sometimes stays with a family for only one episode, sometimes for an entire season of the show, which does mean that sometimes you get really involved in the details of particular characters' lives but then never see them again. And as well as her work there's her love life, her need to conceal the fact that she is a divorcee from many of her employers, her relationship with her elderly father, her eventual marriage and subsequent marital difficulties. Plus the outbreak of WW2 and all the social upheaval that involves and Barbara eventually moving on from nannying to a different kind of childcare career. There were some episodes that I wasn't so fond of (the one with the little girl with significant learning disabilities was almost unwatchable for me) but overall it was a very sweet show that deserves a bit more love. Might be a good one for anyone who likes both Call the Midwife and Upstairs Downstairs.


Berlin Station, season 1
A contemporary spy drama based around the American CIA station in Berlin, where a mysterious whistleblower keeps leaking their more unethical behaviour to the press. This was good in many ways, with lots of great Berlin scenery to entertain, but also more than a bit uphill and impenetrable as far as the plot went, and had an awful lot of identical middle-aged white guy spies, all of whom also had substance abuse problems, marital troubles, career troubles or all of the above, so I couldn't reliably tell them apart for the first half of the story. There was a lot of very confusing action and office politicking, and I spent most of the first half with only a vague idea of what plot might be happening. The main investigator character was pretty boring, but the (bi) antihero was a whole lot of fun and he managed to make the investigator a bit more engaging, so I persisted with it and I'm glad I did, because the plot did finally more or less come together, there were two deeply fraught queer romances, and at the end it got hugely iddy and decided to whump the character I particularly wanted whumped, ie the antihero: he was captured, drugged, questioned, forced to relive his worst memories, shot, went on the run with his erstwhile interrogator while shot... the storytellers were going for a bingo card there and I had zero problem with any of this. And if you're going to have a deeply melodramatic showdown scene, Teufelsberg is a pretty damn good site for it. I kind of want to rewatch it now to see if the plot makes more sense the second time around now, though I suspect only parts of it will; a lot was added as window dressing without the writers really caring what happened in it. I don't know why so many spy dramas feel they need to be completely impenetrable but I suspect the influence of Le Carre. It's not that their plots are inherently more complex than others, but you definitely get the sense that the storytellers feel it's important to tell them in the most obscure way possible. Still, I'd like to watch more of it but the other two seasons seem to be harder to get hold of here.


The House of Eliott, season 1-2
A TV series I've been meaning to get around to for ages but hesitated because all I knew about it was that it was about fashion and set in the 1920s. But I have finally got around to it. It started really strongly: our two heroines are Beatrice and Evangeline Eliott, two vaguely upper-class young women whose ultra-controlling father has just died leaving them with no friends, no education and no money, and a distant cousin who wants to be just as overbearing a guardian as their father was. Their one talent is dressmaking, and they try to find ways to use that talent to gain their independence and build lives for themselves. Most of the early episodes as they work their way through this situation were really good, their gradually growing circle of friends, their false starts and mistakes, but gradually the story became less centred on Bea and Evie overcoming adversity together and became more reliant on melodramatic miscommunications, characters making every conceivable bad romantic decision, and people instantly shouting at each other or storming off just as the other was about to tell them some plot-critical piece of information so that things immediately go wrong for lack of the information (this happened multiple times in rapid succession). But I was sufficiently fond of the characters and the nicely done 1920s setting and background that it's fun to watch despite the soapiness, and every so often the intelligent storytelling of the earlier episodes comes back. And of course the costumes are gorgeous. And there are even some period aeroplanes!

The Spyflyers, WE Johns (available on Faded Page here)
Finally got around to reading this one as other people are requesting it for Yuletide, and it was a fun WW1 spy adventure, and unusually for WEJ, it's a standalone - I was expecting to see Raymond show up to be our spymaster as he seems to in all of WEJ's other series regardless of whether there's any other overlap, but no, we have a different character in that role here. This is one of WEJ's earlier novels, 1933, and it does show - the set-piece scenes are good but the assembly is a bit hit and miss, it's all over the place in structure. You can also see bits WEJ has reused in later books - the entire opening chapter gets a reprise in Biggles in the Baltic - and the whole of it is WEJ trying out ideas that he puts together in a different and far far better way in Biggles Flies East. I don't think Flies East would be anywhere near as good a book if WEJ hadn't written this one first.

The gist of the story, without spoilers, is that our pilot-and-observer duo Rex and Tony are assigned to try to find double agents who are flying around in British aeroplanes causing problems in France in WW1. Rex and Tony are both fluent German speakers and to do this they are assigned a captured German aircraft and some German uniforms and have to land in German-occupied territory and investigate, and soon they encounter the mysterious Captain Fairfax who seems to be in more places than is reasonable for one person - and so we have a wonderful romp of everyone being undercover on the opposite side. And for all that the story is all over the place at the start, by the middle of the story WEJ starts to tighten up the adventure and the ending is great. And I have gone and requested it for Yuletide too now.

Now for spoilers - and I was surprised by several twists in this, so if you think you might read the book, read it first and enjoy the twists unspoiled, and then come back and chat about it with me.

spoilers

Perhaps because I was so primed by Major Sterne, I absolutely did not see Fairfax as a triple agent coming at all. He has all the dashing brilliance of EvS/El Shareef/Major Sterne in Flies East, and I assumed we were just getting WEJ's usual starry-eyed-ness about brilliant villains in all the loving descriptions of how clever he was and how impossible his feats were. So I was both stunned and delighted by the scene when he holds up the entire German mess to rescue Rex and Tony. And likewise, I had my suspicions of Trevor, but again I didn't expect it because WEJ never ever goes there in his other books: Biggles or Gimlet or Worrals or Steeley may meet all kinds of villains and traitors elsewhere, but there is never any question of Raymond being anything other than completely right and reliable. So having a high-level conspiracy and Rex and Tony being deliberately set up to fail by their traitorous commander was also a surprise - and using them as mules for transporting documents to the Germans was a great twist too. I didn't take strongly to either Rex or Tony, though perhaps I might like them more on a reread. I did like that while at the start they are outwitting the enemy entirely by accident, by the end they start doing it on purpose, but overall I felt like they were more reacting to the plot than driving it or making decisions about it. But I am absolutely and predictably taken by Fairfax and his secret identity as the best German spy.