After three straight episodes made up of mini-adventures on an ever-southward quest, viewers might expect to continue that way. But the two major geographical points of interest — the English Channel, and Paris — have both now been traversed, and there are no comparable obstacles in east-central France. The party is already halfway home, with 350 miles down, 380 to go. What are we to do with the nine, count them, nine remaining episodes?

The series often confounds our expectations, and never more so than now, when we have a run of three episodes abandoning the journey entirely. At something like 80 minutes of screen time, the Chateau Ricordeau story outweighs every other local incident by a country mile. For the longest time there’s no progress at all through fictional France, and not all that much through the book, either. The pace of the dramatisation halves: episodes 3 and 4 corresponded to whole chapters of The White Mountains, but episodes 5 to 8 get through only half a chapter each. First-time viewers must have begun this sequence without any idea that this would happen. They would have expected that, as with Rhymney or Calais or Paris, we’ll spend a picturesque half-episode at the castle and then move on. Somehow, perhaps with a different strategy for the titling cards at the start of the episodes, expectations could have been managed better. If episode 4 had been billed as “The Journey Begins — Part Four”, and episode 5 “Chateau Ricordeau — Part One”, it would have been easier to comprehend.

This second serial really does reverses the format of the first — it’s goodbye to exploration, sci-fi and landscape, hello to romance and family intrigue. As so often, this choice was imposed by the novel. The White Mountains isn’t so much about going to the Alps as about making the choice to go. The Chateau sequence is its central psychological event — the tempting of Will to abandon his quest. There is something a little C. S. Lewis-like about this parable, a warning to children against the apparent sophistication of adults.[1] And while we’re remembering that this all began as a children’s book, we might also think of role-reversal tales like The Prince and the Pauper, 1881,[2] or Little Lord Fauntleroy, 1886.[3] This may not be spatial exploration, but socially, Will enters a whole new world.

Television’s Will is a good bit older than Little Lord Fauntleroy, and is given more adult motivation in the form of a love story. This makes for a story-line oddly akin to Josephine Tey’s romantic thriller Brat Farrar, 1949.[4] In that novel, loosely based on a true story, a stranger masquerades his way into the landed gentry, winning the hearts of the family. Brat has an implacable enemy, but he wins through and is able to stay, just as readers have hoped all along. Watching Brat Farrar’s struggles — which the BBC televised just two years after The Tripods, transposing the events to the 1980s[5] — we’re willing him to succeed. But watching Will Parker’s struggles, we only want the hero to fail and to leave, which makes for more uncomfortable viewing. And in the mean time, what are the others doing? The character of Will may be well-serviced by the Chateau episodes, but Beanpole and Henry are heavily sidelined by them, and the cameraderie of our little band breaks down just when it had seemed the heart of the programme. That also pivots us away from what we thought we were getting.

But like the show as a whole, this second serial is best viewed for what it is and not for what it isn’t. There’s plenty to like about the Ricordeau serial. It draws us into an intricate social world with sumptuous locations and an excellent guest cast. And it brings us the first female characters since Will’s mother (episode 1) and Dorrie the barmaid (episode 2). As Episode 5 opens, not a single woman has spoken in this drama for over an hour of screen time. That is very much about to change.

Works cited:

  1. Most famously Edmund being offered Turkish Delight in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950); Wikipedia. But really any of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia or science fiction books would make the same point, as would The Screwtape Letters (1942); Wikipedia.
  2. The Prince and the Pauper (1881), by Mark Twain. Wikipedia.
  3. Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Wikipedia.
  4. Brat Farrar (1949), by Josephine Tey. Wikipedia.
  5. Brat Farrar (BBC, 6 × 30 minutes, 1986), produced by Terrance Dicks. IMDB.

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