Parade's End, liberalism and the Duchess of Cambridge

My wife and I have been watching Parade's End (known in the family, in deference to E M Forster, as Howard's Parade).  The BBC's adaptation of the Ford Madox Ford novel, with a script by Tom Stoppard and a stellar cast including Benedict Cumberbatch, Rebecca Hall and Roger Allam amongst many others, ought to have been compulsive viewing.  But we've been disappointed, finding a lot of it stodgy and garbled.  Some scenes that should have been electrifying (the dinner with the mad vicar) looked like a hasty run-through, and much though I love Cumberbatch, he hasn't made the decent but stubborn Tory MP Christopher Tietjens really likeable enough for us to care what happens to him.  Cumberbatch sticks his jaw out and looks stoic, trying out a new accent every week, but the script doesn't allow us to get inside the character.  Rupert Everett, doing a fine unobtrusive job as Tietjens' brother, is wasted.  Watching the first episode of the new Downton Abbey series on Sunday night reminded me what an effective screen-writer Julian Fellowes is: Downton is less ambitious, but Fellowes delivers in a way that Stoppard doesn't.

The Parade referred to is, presumably, the facade of Edwardian life, where the rich pretended all was well in front of the servants, women couldn't vote, and authoritarian generals looked blithely on while their men were butchered by the hundred thousand.  I haven't read Madox Ford's book (though I will), but the TV series invites us to look forward by comparison to our own time of emancipation, honesty in sexual relations and a more enlightened foreign policy.  This is much the same appeal Mad Men makes - we feel superior watching Don Draper and his cronies drink their sexist, racist and Republican way across New York in the same way as we pity Tietjens his loveless marriage and deplore the treatment of Suffragettes.

A couple of episodes in there was a scene in which Tietjens accidentally wandered into the bathroom while his wife was naked.  There must have been a dozen ways in which this information could have been communicated without actually showing Rebecca Hall's upper half, but the director nevertheless opted for the full frontal.  Now I have been a fan of Ms Hall since her fragrant turn in Woody Allen's Vicky, Christina, Barcelona, but I personally found her nakedness disconcerting to the extent that it rather overshadowed the point of the encounter (which was to underline the extent to which the couple were alienated from each other).

No matter: that is where the liberalism the series argues for has got us - whereas at the time Parade's End was written the only chance of seeing naked breasts was pretty much get married or go to Paris, by the 70s the adolescent male could enjoy a nano-second of Jenny Agutter jumping naked into a billabong (Walkabout, since you ask) and now the casual viewer can see Ms Hall's perky embonpoint adorning his living room at will.

And that is not to mention the inexhaustible reams of pornography available at the click of a mouse, now arriving chez nous without so much as a discussion in Parliament, let alone a vote by MPs.

Is this liberalism an advance?  I'm not sure.  For every piece of art that is improved by the explicit, I suspect there are many, many others made worse.  More generally, is it a freedom worth the price of its misuse?  As with all such things, those who argue for emancipation assume that people will use it wisely; I think that's a mistake.

Meanwhile, in an ironic meeting between the old world and the new, a French magazine prints topless pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge.  I have some sympathy for her, but I don't think she will be sunbathing topless again any time soon.