Parade's End

Look, I'm usually a sucker for the stiff-upper-lip emotionally repressed English costume drama, but this one seems to be taking the mickey. Cumberbatch is faintly ridiculous, as is his trollop of a wife, while the young Suffragette with whom he is infatuated is scarcely adolescent and certainly not very characterful, which makes him seem more than a little creepy.

Parades end is an adaption of the tetralogy by Ford Madox Ford. It follows the love triangle between the old-fashioned Christopher Tiejens, His vindictive wife Sylvia and a young suffragette called Valentine Wannop during world war one, with Europe on the brink of change.

Superb acting, writing, directing and filming. Really well done.

I have not enjoyed a mini series or anything (come to think of it) as well as I have enjoyed this. Thoroughly addictive, with absorbing characters and compelling plot, I could not stop watching it.

I marveled over it in 2012, and am re-discovering it in September 2020. Quite simply the best thing I've ever seen.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall are probably the two most outstanding thespians of their generation so it was probably fated that they should appear together in a filmed version of a classic novel, even if Ford is a less well known author. The subject matter is a love triangle brought to life by the opposing personalities of the two leads and the deceit that lies at the heart of their relationship.

The first and final episodes in particular of this three part drama were very disjointed and confusing. There were a number of characters with moustaches who all looked very similar and became an indistinguishable blur.

I love BBC dramas so this TV series did'nt dissapoint me too.

I'm sure that HBO marketing execs were relieved that, if they were going to get behind a 5-part series based on Ford Madox Ford's complex and not terribly well known 20th-century masterpiece, at least some of it would be set in a stately home in the north of England, like that other show about the downtown abbey. Ford's a great one for interior monologue and multiple points of view and such, but Tom Stoppard's masterly adaptation channels the great muddy river of his prose into a lively, involving narrative—though there's still enough time-shifting and flashbacking, even some Eisenstein-style montage, to do honor to Ford's avant-garde intentions.