The Cazalets - more of a foresight saga

By MICHELE HEWITSON

It's a sweeping family saga set between the wars, with a cast of characters caught up in clandestine affairs, problems with the children, troubles with the servants and lots of little family secrets.

The only wonder is that Elizabeth Jane Howard's trilogy about the Cazalet clan took this long to be made into a television series.

The Cazalets has had some serious money spent on it, and it shows in sumptuous costumes and stunning locations.

The story opens with the Cazalets about to gather for a long summer holiday at the Sussex holding where the patriarch, slightly loopy Brig, and the matriarch, long-suffering Duchy, hold the family fort.

He is writing a book called Woods of the World (the family firm deals in timber.) She is seeing cook about the day's meals and choosing not to notice the rifts and tiffs between various family members.

Still living at home is Rachel, the only daughter. Her role - being plain and obviously destined to become a much-loved maiden aunt - is to deal with the assignment of chamber pots and be hard-done-by in an uncomplaining way.

Rachel is in love, in a girly crush sort of way, with Sid, a music teacher who happens to be a woman. It is not unrequited love, but it is unconsummated, because Rachel's real role is to act as a sort of foil, a true innocent who is not just unaware of the desires of others but of her own.

The year is 1937; the port is from 1906. Women leave the table for the passing of the decanter, that ritual when menfolk discuss portentous events with stiff upper lips.

What they don't discuss is what a naughty boy second son Edward is. In fact he's quite a cad, carrying on with loose women and getting his daughter, Louise, drunk at her birthday dinner and pashing her in the hall.

Neither do they discuss first son Hugh's terrible headaches, the legacy of a bad war.

Third son Rupert's second wife, Zoe, is out-of-bounds too. She's a beautiful air-head who lives for good times and fancy holidays, and has instead inherited two sulky step-children and a husband who wants to be an artist when he could go into the family firm and make pots of money from woods of the world.

Tonight's episode has lots of frenzied coupling and potted introductions to that sprawling cast of characters. It looks as though it's going to be a hideous meeting of Aga-saga and updated Upstairs, Downstairs.

Howard's books are much better than this introductory offer implies - and it does get better. Once we've got the characters and their relationships in place (saga-based telly does rather rely on establishing couples by showing frenzied coupling), the subtleties of the times and a reflective unease at encroaching war begin to emerge.

It's worth sticking with, even if the first episode really is a load of pre-Second World War knickers.

* Prime, 9.35 pm