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W hat I didn’t want,” producer Verity
Lambert declared emphatically, “was a reverent BBC classic serial. Although it’s set before, during
and just after the Second World War, it shouldn’t be conventional costume drama as such.
“So,” explained Lambert, whose credits range from Dr Who to Jonathan Creek with the odd stopover in between as a respected film and televi- sion company mogul, “I was looking for a director who’d give it a contem- porary feel.”
She found him in Suri Krishnamma, whose award-winning 1998 four-parter A Respectable Trade, about slavery, was the perfect calling card. Fortunately Krishnamma, who’s directed for both TV (Dalziel And Pascoe etc) and cinema (New Year’s Day, A Man Of No Importance) “fell in love with the scripts.”
Originally, Lambert and her co- producer Joanna Lumley planned to use two directors for the project – a feature-length opener followed by four times 50 minutes – but “fortuitously, Suri ended up doing the whole thing,” she enthused.
The title will be instantly familiar to fans of Elizabeth Jane Howard whose quartet of 90s-penned books – The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion and Casting Off - comprise The Cazalet Chronicle, set between 1937 and 1947.
This adaptation, by Douglas Livingstone, covering just the first two books, ends in 1942, but it comes as
A CLASH OF GENERATIONS IN THE CAZALET CHRONICLE, A MAJOR NEW £5.5M BBC PERIOD FAMILY SAGA
no surprise to hear that plans are already in the pipeline to complete the saga in due course.
The story centres on three gener- ations of an upper middle class family enduring not just the war but also a time of huge social change. A familiar cast includes Stephen Dillane, Anna Chancellor, Lesley Manville, Frederick Treves, Hugh Bonneville, Paul Rhys and John McArdle. Key roles also go to Florence Hoath, Emma Griffiths-Mallon and Claudia Renton as the three Cazalet daughters who grow up before our very eyes.
“Love, loss, pain, passion and death in a Britain that will never be the same again,” gushes the accurate if enjoyably predictable blurb.
Lambert revealed how the project had first arisen in “an unusual way. I’d made an adaptation of PG Wodehouse’s Heavy Weather with Michael Wills. It turned out he’d optioned the books and then recom- mended them to me with the idea we’d do them together as well.
“Then he decided he was going off to become an MP instead and was elected in 1997. So he asked me if I’d be interested in taking over the whole project from him. Nothing was com- missioned at that stage. In fact when I started out properly on this about three years ago, the independent com- missioning group of the BBC didn’t want it so it went into a bit of a hiatus.
“Then suddenly one day, Elizabeth Jane Howard’s agent tele- phoned me saying that Joanna Lumley had made an inquiry about the rights. I had worked with Joanna on Class Act and rang her to say I’d got the rights.
A FAMILY IN
A FAMILY IN
Photos top: Director Suri Krishnamma at work; Producers Verity Lambert and Joanna Lumley on set at Bexhill-on-Sea; DP Robin Vidgeon at work
EXPOSURE • 10 & 11