Womenswear and The Hour.

Previously:  Bel Rowley and Freddie Lyon & Menswear and The Hour.

As a kind of doomed swansong for The Hour's recent cancellation, here's the third and final part of my series of costume posts.

Marnie is absolutely the classic stereotype of 1950s womanhood. In season 1 she doesn't get much to do, but by season 2 Hector's terrible behaviour has shaken her up enough that she transforms into what I can only really describe as a 2010s-style ultra-femme liberated woman. Probably my favourite detail of this was the fact that she clearly had an affair at some point, but it was so subtle that we'll never really know who with. With any other character I'd dismiss this as meaning they didn't have enough time to include it onscreen, but with Marnie you know that it's because she's just so damn discreet -- unlike Hector, whose affairs are all an unmitigated disaster and end up splashed all over the tabloids.

Marnie dresses like confectionary every day of her life. She's terrifyingly put-together, at first because she's a rich young aristocrat and has nothing else to do except look good, and later because she'll be damned if she'll let things slide just because she's done the unthinkable and got herself a career. I particularly loved her super-coordinated pink swirling skirts and aprons for when she was appearing on television -- in black and white. In some ways Marnie can look a little cartoonish because of her permanent glossy smile and carefully arranged layers of brightly-coloured skirts and petticoats, but the fact is that the fashionable colour palette in the 1950s was a lot brighter than nowadays. Meaning that oddly enough, Marnie's candy-coloured costumes are actually more realistic than Bel's skin-tight businesswear.

Costume design and "The Hour": Bel Rowley and Freddie Lyon.

(N.B. This post is mostly about costumes so I've tried to keep it as spoiler-free as possible. There are a couple of minor characterisation spoilers, but nothing plot-related for either season.)

I recently mainlined the entire six-episode first season of The Hour, and it quickly rocketed to the top of my list of Best Historical Dramas Ever. Basically, it is flawless. I think it's fair to say that I'm pretty easy when it comes to overtly feminist historical dramas, but while The Bletchley Circle is great, The Hour goes a lot deeper than a three-episode crime show could ever manage. On top of working with the intriguing premise of the birth of TV journalism, the main characters are all beautifully three-dimensional and interact with the same levels of humour and emotional complexity as seen in The Good Wife. 
I love the way The Hour manages to integrate an obsessive attention to historical detail with a few necessary elements of romanticisation. They sourced period-specific pencils for the characters to use on set, but at the same time the basic concept of the show relies upon a 28-year-old woman being the producer of the BBC's flagship news programme. Obviously in 1956 this would be impossible but The Hour makes it effortlessly believable, and Bel's relationship with the two male leads -- Freddie the writer and Hector the presenter -- is the heart and soul of the show. As for historical detail, The Hour bears most of the hallmarks of a classic thriller about journalism, censorship and government conspiracies, and the topics Freddie and Bel investigate are very well chosen. The first season focuses on Cold War paranoia in London while the Suez Crisis rages on overseas, and I'm already obsessed with the amount of historical detail going in the background of season 2. Freddie, Bel and Hector are currently looking into corruption and vice in Soho, and we're already starting to see hints of Rachmanism and precursers to the Profumo Affair -- even though in 1957, all that was still unknown to the general public.

The Hollow Crown: Henry IV Part 2.

Previously: Henry IV Part 2.

This post is gonna be wayyyyy less in-depth than the one I wrote for Henry IV Part 1 because nothing happens in this play. I'm serious. Maybe there was some heavy editing going on or something but as far as I can tell the only things that happen in Henry IV Part 2: Electric Boogaloo are:

• Random soliloquays about how hard it is to be king.
• The world's greatest collection of Rude Mechanicals, indicating that "LOL, he's a women's tailor" is a joke that remains hilarious for 500 years.
• An extended sequence of Tom Hiddleston's oiled and gleaming torso.
• Sad Falstaff.
• The King is dead; long live the King.

"I just can't wait to be King!"

It was like one of those situations when there's a really awesome, successful movie, and then someone's like, "OK, let's get a sequel up in this joint!" except instead of writing a whole new story they just erase most of the character development from the first movie and try to do it all over again a second time. Although this time round there's little to no plot, and the supervillain was defeated at the end of the last movie so instead of a battle there's just an awful lot of tragicomedy scenes involving an old fat conman slowly sinking into gout, despair and failure along with his new collection of comedy sidekicks. I don't know much about the circumstances surrounding the writing of this play, but I can easily imagine Queen Elizabeth writing to Shakespeare all, "More of this Falstaff fellow, my man! He makes one LOL!" and Shakespeare sobbing into his inkwell as he tries in vain to think up something interesting that happened to Henry V in the years leading up to his coronation.

The Hollow Crown, Part 1: Richard II.

Caveat: I am no Shakespeare scholar. I come at Shakespeare from the perspective of a pop-culture nerd, meaning that when I lived in London I was the person getting weird looks from the ushers at the Globe Theatre because I'd be all like, "No, don't give me a programme! I don't want spoilers!" Spoilers for King Lear, that is. I get why some people like to read plays before they see them, but I wouldn't read the script of The Avengers before seeing that so why should Richard II be any different? Usually this works out fine as long as I pay attention to the performance, although I did have some trouble the other week when I went to see Alan Cumming's one-man Macbeth, which was kinda hard to follow because, you know, he was playing all the roles. Fortunately I'm Scottish, and all Scottish people are forced to memorise the plot of Macbeth while being beaten with birch twigs and standing on a blasted heath at midnight as a rite of passage, which certainly comes in very useful in situations like this.

The other problem facing me when embarking upon the first installment of the BBC's Hollow Crown series was a complete lack of knowledge about the Wars of the Roses. I'm pretty sure that the Wars of the Roses are a History class staple in England, but Scottish education system tends to concentrate more on the Reformation, mostly for practical reasons because people in Scotland still get into barfights on a semi-regular basis about things that happened during the Reformation. I watched Richard II with a group of Scots and even though we had at least one History degree among us, we still weren't 100% certain whether Richard II took place in the 14th or 15th century until we wikipedia'd it afterwards. (N.B. Watching Shakespeare's English History plays in a roomful of Scots is ideal because the entire plot revolves around English people killing each other, which gives us all a schadenfreude thrill.)
As soon as Richard showed up I knew I was going to love him. I'd never seen Ben Whishaw in anything before, but I can now go on record to say that he's my new #1 casting choice for any roles that require a slimy, effeminate dweeb to Gaius Baltar his way around all the other characters while flopping onto furniture and sobbing about how misunderstood he is. A+ KINGING, BEN WHISHAW.