Television: Mr Selfridge high rolls on to TV1 again

Lin Ferguson

It's beautiful, it's another sumptuous British period-costume drama but it was still a little ponderous in the first programme of the second series.

Mr Selfridge is about Harry Gordon Selfridge, the flamboyant Chicago entrepreneur who transformed a stuffy old Chicago emporium into a modern department store then took off for London to give the inimitable Harrods a stiff run for their money by opening Selfridgesin opposition.

American actor Jeremy Piven gives us a cocksure, clipped and spruce Harry Selfridge, ever shoulders back and treading a determined stride throughout his glittering store. This new series, which is on TV One Thursday, 8.30pm, opens in the 1914 celebrating the store five years up, running and impressing London high rollers, titled lovies and those who love to be seen.

There were several plot lines all spinning intricate web-like structures which will develop well as the series moves on.

In the first programme there was the distinct whiff of upper echelon scandals lurking from American novelist Delphine Day's (Polly Walker) latest book urging women to look around and smell the ... men.

Delphine even runs a London night club which has a delicious free and easy atmosphere, a great source of fascination to the London social scene including, of course, the lovely Rose Selfridge, Harry's wife.

There were snippets of things to come but this first programme was a slow watch.

We had Selfridge's 15-year-old son Gordon telling his parents he'd had it with school and wanted to be with good old father at the coal face, the glistening and lavish department store. And dad, being the stickler for detail and all, told his boy that was fine but he needed to start at the bottom in the store's loading bay and work his way up.

This, of course, caused Mother Rose to flutter her lace-edged hankie and flee and son's bottom lip to plummet, but Dad was resolute so good lad Gordon traipsed in and helped in the stores.

And matrimonial trouble is simmering for the exquisitely petulant Lady Mae Loxley (Katherine Kelly, who was the fab, irascible Becky in Coronation Street).

Her snarling husband Lord Loxley (Aidan McArdle) arrives back in London unexpectedly and Mae overhears him trying to persuade and blackmail his way on to a Government military committee with the rumours of impending war.

He also ensured he publicly insulted his proud Lady Mae in the foyer amidst towering floral displays and the perfume counter in Selfridges store ... the Lady's ire was palpable but she contained herself with superb style ... I look forward to the next match.

So all the elements are lining up, it's just that I'm impatient. A British costume drama is not really a race track, I suppose.