One of the most delightful things I have learned in recent years is that Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner have dinner together every night, after which, as they told Jerry Seinfeld, they like to watch films in which a character yells “Secure the perimeter!” I hope that if I were older and widowed, I too would spend my evenings hanging out with a dear pal, although in my case it would involve watching anything in which a character cries, “We only have two days to create the entire collection!”
I suppose it all goes back to The House of Eliott. I was entranced by the BBC series when it aired back in the early 90s, largely because it combined my love of 1920s style and fascination with the fashion industry with a deliciously soapy plot and proto-feminist heroines. So of course I bought the DVDs when they were released in the early ‘00s, and it turned out that watching Bea and Evie working on their designs in their cosy flat and gazing at dressmakers in white coats creating gorgeous gowns was just as comforting as a twenty-something as it had been when I was a teenager. The programme was ridiculous, of course it was, but when I watched it I felt like all was right with my world.
So it’s not surprising that my interest was piqued a year or two ago when I discovered a Spanish series on Neflix called Velvet. It was set in a department store called Velvet that had its own in-house fashion brand! It had star-crossed lovers (who ironically turned out to be by far the least interesting members of the cast)! It had intrigue and secret weddings and secret babies and people coming back from the dead! It had wit and charm as well as melodrama! It had so much scheming! And most importantly, it had lots of scenes of women in a big workroom full of sewing machines wearing white coats over their gorgeous period garb!
<c>Rita, Ana and Luisa in the Velvet workroom, making me very happy.</c>
Unsurprisingly given all of the above, I absolutely love Velvet. The first few eps of the series were weighed down by all the exposition surrounding central romance between Velvet owner Alberto and his childhood sweetheart, seamstress Ana, who grew up in the store because her uncle, Don Emilio, is a senior staff member (oh yes, to make things even better, ALL THE SALES AND WORKROOM STAFF LIVE IN THE STORE which gives the show some extreme boarding school vibes, making it even better as far as I’m concerned).
But soon we get to know the other characters, who are all great, particularly Ana’s lovelorn best friend Rita and her excellent glasses, temperamental but kind-hearted design genius Raul de la Riva, and the on-off couple Clara and Mateo, whose screwball sparring has some real heat.
Watching Velvet gives me that same comforting feeling that House of Eliott used to give me. Every time I see bolts of fabric unrolling in the workroom, or the seamstresses gathering in their cosy bedrooms to gossip, I feel all the tension melt from my shoulders. Given all this, it’s not suprising that I started watching the other Spanish period dramas on Netflix made by Velvet creators Ramón Campos and Teresa Fernández-Valdés, whose Bambú Producciones specialises in extremely glossy, stylish, wildly entertaining period soaps.
My fave of the Bambú stable is Cable Girls/Las Chicas del Cable, the story of a group of women who start working at Madrid’s telephone exchange at the end of the 1920s. The cast are all ridiculously attractive, the clothes are amazing, the lighting and sets are divine, and the plots are outrageously dramatic (By the end of the fourth season there have been several murders, Spanish suffragettes, at least one kidnapping, a stolen baby, a fire, a feminist group that throws paint at misogynists, and one genuinely harrowing and powerful depiction of queer conversion therapy, 1929 style). It’s got several excellent romances including a complex queer love story. I mean, seriously, look at this poster for the fourth season. How can anyone resist?
Part one of the fifth and final season went up on Netflix a few weeks ago, and I haven’t watched it yet but I am very excited about it because, based on the trailer, the storyline jumps a few years, making the first of these Bambú Producciones shows to actually deal with the Spanish civil war, when one of the Chicas’ now-teenage daughter runs away to fight for the Republicans.
Covering the Spanish Civil War, as you’ll know if you’ve watched any of these shows before, is a big deal, regardless of how well or poorly they handle it. I genuinely have no idea how Cable Girls will do this - it would be totally out of character for any of our characters to be Falangists and two of them are active members of a clearly fairly progressive republican party in the 1931 election, but I wouldn’t put it past one of these programmes to remain weirdly neutral when it comes to the actual war.
And that’s because the extent to which these glossy period dramas totally ignore the Civil War is completely insane (though it does fit in with what a good friend of mine from Madrid, whose grandmother always said she couldn’t remember what side her family were on, says about Spanish public acknowledgement of the war and the Franco era that followed). In Velvet, no one ever referenced the Spanish Civil War even when they were talking about the late 1930s.
In Cable Girls, there have been sympathetic characters who are politically radical lefties, but the fact that their activities are taking place several years before the war allows the show to avoid taking a stance. Meanwhile, in another Bambú show, the hugely entertaining (actually you can take it for granted that all these shows are both hugely entertaining and beautiful to look at, because they are) High Seas, set in the late 1940s, characters are shocked and horrified to find their family business had close dealings with Nazi Germany. Hey ladies, I’ve got some news for you about your current government!
In fact, the only Spanish show I’ve watched that acknowledges and criticises Spain’s fascist past is the wonderful Ministry of Time (which isn’t made by Bambú), in which civil servants from different eras in history all work for a Spanish government department devoted to correcting historical blips. Alas this funny, thrilling and inventive show just disappeared from Netflix with no warning a few weeks ago, when I still had a series left to go - why, Netflix, why? Then again, Velvet left the service on Sunday, to my horror (I had been saving a whole series and a half to watch in a delicious binge), and then started streaming again yesterday, to my great relief. So the Ministerio could return at any minute.
Anyway, what with Cable Girls, Velvet, High Seas and Gran Hotel (my new Ramón Campos and Teresa Fernández-Valdés obsession, which features most of the cast of the other three shows), I am well supplied with beautifully costumed Spanish melodrama, which I am somehow able to binge without feeling any guilt because reading subtitles makes me feel as if I’m reading a sort of moving graphic novel rather than watching telly for two hours.
But the comforting enjoyment that I get from these lavish shows reminds me that with one exception - the glamorous Australian feminist charmer Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries - I can’t remember the last time I found an anglophone period drama that was any good, let alone actually fun. The likes of Poldark and Downton Abbey may seem melodramatic on paper, but in practice they’re just tedious.
Same goes for lots of shows that on paper looked exactly like my sort of thing - WW2 hotel drama The Halycon, WW2 drama World on Fire, the recent Christine Keeler biopic, literally everything Stephen Poliakoff has ever made, including Dancing on the Edge (how the fuck do you make that story boring, with that leading man?! You’d have to actually go out of your way to do it).
These programmes were neither fun melodramas nor good, complex dramas. They mostly didn’t tell us anything interesting or new about the periods in which they were set. They had good actors but weak characters. They were just dull. I was talking about with my television critic husband the other night and he suggested that like French cooking, British period drama is a prisoner of its own reputation, leading it to repeat itself and turn into stodge. Meanwhile, as well the glorious Spanish shenanigans, continental countries have been producing two of the best period dramas I’ve ever seen.
There’s the French WW2 show Un Village Francais, an incredibly complex portrait of a small French town situated right on the demarcation line between the occupied zone and the “zone libre” that’s one of the best programmes I’ve ever seen, full stop. Last year I was so obsessed with the Village, as it was known in my house, my husband joked that he was scared that when he returned from a work trip he’d find me dressing like them (so of course I ensured he came home to find me decked out in full ‘40s style, with ‘La Vie en Rose’ playing in the background).
It’s a genuinely superb programme, utterly unsentimental and unsparing in its portrayal of wartime France. Alas it is not available on any Irish or British streaming service, nor is it available on DVD with English subtitles but you know, I managed to watch it with subtiles, so if you’re ingenious you’ll figure something out.
The other excellent continental period drama is Babylon Berlin, which turned an okay-at-best German crime novel set in 1920s Germany into a gloriously atmospheric, labyrinthine mystery. Its depiction of Weimar Berlin, from seedily, gorgeously glamorous cabaret to grinding poverty, with something politically nasty seething in the background at all times, waiting for its opportunity to rise, is so extraordinarily vivid that watching it feels like time travel. Also it’s got possibly the most attractive pair of lead actors I’ve ever seen on telly, as well as the single best musical number in period drama history.
I may be biased on this one - I studied German at university, have always been fascinated by Weimar Berlin, and wrote my fourth year thesis on Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, a production of which, to my great delight, plays a crucial role in a particularly tense episode of Babylon Berlin. This also means this is the only one of all these dramas that I can actually understand without looking at the subtitles.
But I don’t think you need to understand German or have spent a chunk of your youth immersed in this feverish period to be gripped by the brilliant Babylon Berlin. It may leave you with an urge to bob your hair and wear a cloche though. The third series starts on Sky Atlantic on Friday 6th and is set in a Berlin film studio, so basically it was made just for me and I am very excited about it.
There may be hope for the anglophone period drama, however. For Netflix, Shonda Rhimes is adapting Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, a non-fiction account of the Great Migration of black Americans from the south of the country to the north that’s one of the most powerful, gripping books I’ve ever read. If anyone knows how to make sure something isn’t boring, it’s the queen of Shondaland. Netflix is also releasing Self-Made, a biopic of C.J. Walker, famously the first self-made female millionaire, starring the always wonderful Octavia Spencer. These are stories that haven’t been shown on screen a million times before, and that gives me hope.
But in the meantime, I’ll be settling back with the beautifully dressed Chicas del Cable as they immerse themselves in the war (lord knows how), with the maids and waiters and evil bosses of the Gran Hotel, with the staff of Velvet as they try to combine their extremely complicated romantic and professional lives. In fact, I’ll be prioritizing the latter for now. After all, they’ve only got two days to create a whole new collection!