Period drama Outrageous taps into our continuing fascination with the Mitford family.
The story of the Mitford sisters exists in a peculiarly English mythology. They were the beautiful, charming, posh gals who were the daughters of a fading aristocracy. From the 1930s onward, they variously embraced fascism and its leaders, anti-Semitism, communism, socialism and high society scandal, though some still preferred horse riding, breeding chickens and restoring stately homes.
They – mostly novelist Nancy Mitford – distilled their upper-class lives into bestselling, legend-stoking books.
Tackling the sisters’ actual lives as a television series – as the new show Outrageous does – comes with challenges. Firstly, how those stranger-than-fiction existences make for you-couldn’t-make-this-stuff-up implausibility.
At the same time, any screen drama could face the wrath of Mitford aficionados armed with a pile of memoirs, biographies and letter collections.
And given the people they knew, a show about the Mitfords and their milieu might look like an overnight stocktake at Madame Tussauds.
They were related to Winston Churchill. Four of them and their mother met Aldolf Hitler – one of them, Unity, was a Führer groupie. Another one, Diana, left her first husband for British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, which landed him and her in prison as a threat to national security during World War II. A Holocaust denier who never repudiated Hitler, she was labelled the most hated woman in Britain, living much of her later years in Paris, where she died.
Other incidental characters in a full true-life Mitford dama might include Joseph Goebbels, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, Evelyn Waugh, Lytton Strachey, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Cecil Beaton, John F Kennedy, Maya Angelou and Lucian Freud.
Eldest sister Nancy’s best-known books The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate – both autobiographically inspired – have had regular television adaptations. The most recent was Pursuit in 2021, in an acclaimed BBC series written and directed by actress Emily Mortimer.
But tackling the untidy, glamorous, appalling, fascinating lives of the Mitfords themselves has finally been done in Outrageous. Its spirited first season is a start to what creator Sarah Williams hopes will be an ongoing series that takes the Mitfords through WWII and beyond.
Williams, whose credits include the Anne Hathaway-starring Jane Austen film Becoming Jane has been trying on and off to get the show made for 20 or so years, after being gifted Mary S Lovell’s 2003 biography The Sisters.
“I thought, wow, this is a story that’s got everything – it’s a family saga. It’s a kind of soap opera but it’s got this undertow of political unrest and turmoil and events in the world. These girls are connected to some of the most powerful people in the world and revolutionaries.” She wrote a treatment for it and started pitching it.
“Could. Not. Get. Arrested.”
Why was that? Too many Nazi aristocrats?
“Yes, there was a nervousness about fascism. But of course, they’re not all fascists, and one was a communist. I think people were nervous about that being too controversial and there was still a bit of a problem with six female character leads. Also, there had been a number of adaptations of Nancy’s novels which were loosely based on her life, and I think people thought they knew the story. But of course the truth is much more complex, much darker.”
The treatment was stuck in a drawer until the pandemic lockdown, when Firebird Pictures, a London production company with many former BBC drama staff on its team, asked what passion projects she had never got over the line. Coincidentally, the company included Matthew Mosley, a great-great grandson of Oswald who became a producer on Outrageous. Out came the draft script for another dust-off. But this time the story of a famous English family split by political beliefs resonated.
“We’d hit the moment in history where the far right is on the rise again in Europe, and Brexit in particular had torn families apart in this country. That was the key to it. It was a family saga. Can this family survive?”
Williams decided on making Nancy Mitford the narrator – an obvious choice as the eldest sister, the most moderate politically and as a writer, a natural observer.
Cast in the role is Bessie Carter, previously seen as Prudence Featherington in Bridgerton, and the daughter of Imelda Staunton and Downton Abbey star Jim Carter.
“When I saw her audition tape, I said, ‘That’s her. She’s got the perfect blend of humour, intelligence, self-deprecation. She was immediately relatable.”
The starting point for the story is, however, Diana Mitford leaving Bryan Guinness, heir to the Guinness fortune, for the aristocrat and former Conservative-then-Labour politician Mosley as he founded the British Union of Fascists. She lived as his mistress before they were eventually married in 1936, at the Berlin home of Nazi propaganda chief Goebbels, with Hitler present.
“It’s hard to overestimate what a scandalous move that was back then. It gave the other [sisters] who followed permission to maybe even go a step further: ‘Yeah, we can do what we like. We don’t have to be bound by society’s rules.’”
Williams says the Nazi factor in the Mitford story was the one she agonised over the most.
“It was things like, should we feature Hitler? Should we see a Nazi rally? How far should we go into those dark corners of politics? So you only ever really see the back of Hitler’s head. You only ever see a flash of the Nuremberg Rally and a lot of that is played on Unity’s face. We did give it a lot of thought.”
Despite being an ensemble piece, Williams wrote it by herself.
“In the end, it’s easier to do that yourself, even though it seems like a mammoth task to write six episodes. It needed a clarity of voice and once I’d got the tone right, it came together. The tone is crucial because it can be amusing, it can also be heartbreaking, and we had to tread carefully through the politics and make sure we’re not glossing over the bad bits.”
The sprightly tone of the show and its propulsive energy came with the decision to retitle it Outrageous.
“The previous 20 years, it had been called The Mitford Girls and I just thought, that’s a really shitty title. So when we came up with Outrageous, that crystallised a lot of our thinking about the whole piece.
“We had a lot to set up in a short period of time so it was, ‘Let’s make it very propulsive.’
“We’ve got a story about six women whose hormones are racing, who’ve got bags of energy and confidence. There’s six storylines you’re following and you’re really cutting from character to character. It’s full of energy. It’s very light on its feet.”
Having spent a couple of decades pondering the Mitfords, and now having made a show about them, does Williams have any theories about their enduring appeal?
“The girls had a lot of agency for those days. So, whether you love them or hate them – and two of them had really horrible politics – there were six of them, and all six of them were fearless, in a way. They had the courage of their convictions. They were rebellious. They refused to do what society wanted them to do, which was to be wives and mothers. Some of them wanted to change the world and had a good go at doing that. They were unapologetic.
“There’s a lovely quote from Diana: ‘Being hated means nothing to me.’ They didn’t have, ‘How many likes have I got?’”
Leading ladies
Outrageous screens on BBC First, 8.30pm, on Tuesdays from July 29, and streams on Neon from that date.