CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews the weekend’s TV: Little Miss Heartbreak, Mr Shouty and how to save this flimsy satire
The Pursuit of Love
50 Years of Mr Men
Rating: 
Veins throbbing on his temples, eyes bulging from their sockets, Dominic West looks like a bullfrog that has sat on a compressed air-pump and is a split second from explosion.
‘An adulterous woman,’ he bellows at Lily James, ‘is the single most disgusting thing there is.’
Dominic is over-acting. But what choice does he have? Most of the characters in The Pursuit Of Love (BBC One) are riffs on a single note, cartoons without depth or meaning. Uncle Matthew (West) is always angry. Yes, he’s also racist, choleric, eccentric, domineering, but those traits don’t add dimensions to his personality — they are just different versions of his anger.
Most of the characters in The Pursuit Of Love (BBC One) are riffs on a single note, cartoons without depth or meaning
His daughter Linda (James) is a hopeless romantic. And that’s all she is — forever spouting about the overpowering importance of love, without ever showing an ounce of affection to anyone.
Lily is left with no option but to over-act madly too. She shrieks, she weeps, she gasps, she crumples. When she’s merely drawing breath, she heaves and pants. It’s exhausting. They’re both such melodramatic types, no wonder Lily and Dominic drew attention when they shared an innocent lunch together in Rome last year.
As the second episode began in this flimsy three-part adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s comic novel, Linda was marrying a Tory MP called Tony (Freddie Fox). We knew he was awful because, after delivering a speech in the Commons, he lounged on the parliamentary benches like Jacob Rees-Mogg. What a rotter.
Linda soon saw the error of her ways and ran away with a communist who popped up in her garden one day, like a Marxist-Leninist dandelion. They galloped off to fight in the Spanish Civil War, because this was the 1930s and it was expected of Left-wing aristocrats.
Before long, she was stranded at a Paris railway station, sobbing helplessly on her suitcase. I was getting emotional, too — I had a hideous premonition that Linda’s next pointless love interest was going to appear from nowhere.
And so he did, with a ludicrous slurred French accent, like Fred Sirieix after an evening on Le Plonk. The novel itself was lightweight trivia 60 years ago, a second-rate Evelyn Waugh satire on a class of people who had already ceased to exist.
Writer and director Emily Mortimer (who also co-stars as Uncle Matthew’s frightful sister-in-law, ‘The Bolter’) clearly realises the story is shallow and irrelevant.
In the hope of making it seem timeless, she flings in scenes from other eras, with a pop soundtrack. Andrew Scott, as the flamboyant Lord Merlin, painted his face with glitter and danced to T. Rex. Linda went nightclubbing under a 1970s mirrorball as Bryan Ferry crooned The In Crowd.
Mr Tickle and Little Miss Scatterbrain have been children’s favourites for generations, as Matt Lucas discovered in a jolly anniversary celebration, 50 Years Of Mr Men (C4)
If you were having trouble believing in the characters, or caring what happened to them, those misfitting musical interludes made it even harder.
Mortimer would do better to remake the show with the characters as Mr Men — Linda is Little Miss Heartbreak, Uncle Matthew is Mr Shouty.
At least that way, we might like them. Mr Tickle and Little Miss Scatterbrain have been children’s favourites for generations, as Matt Lucas discovered in a jolly anniversary celebration, 50 Years Of Mr Men (C4).
Matt read a story to primary school pupils and met some of the artists behind the books. He learned about merchandise.
But really, he was here to dress up as the characters. Getting ready to be Little Miss Sunshine, he practised her walk — ‘a bit like Cliff Richard would do, if he was coming on to sing Congratulations’. There’s nothing more sunshiney than a Eurovision hit.