Red letter day

Nothing equals the old-fashioned pleasure of receiving a physical letter

Last week, having tired of the endless police procedurals on every streaming service, I decided to retreat into the cozy world of Downtown Abbey. There was something so ineffably relaxing about the plush interiors, the verdant exteriors, the sumptuous costumes, and the sparkling dialogue that I had soon speeded through two whole seasons. 

 

But the one scene that stuck with me through my binge-watching was when the servants below stairs gathered around as the letters that arrived that morning were distributed to them. Those who recognized the handwriting on the envelopes were wreathed in smiles of anticipation; those who got an unexpected missive were giddy with excitement; and those who didn’t receive a single letter were crushed with the weight of their disappointment.

 

That one scene transported me back to my own childhood, when writing and receiving letters had such a peculiar joy of its own. I used to long for letters sent by my aunt (my mother’s elder sister) from her tea garden in Assam. Reading her letters transported me from my childhood bedroom to the green hillsides of Assam – where the tea pickers were hard at work collecting two leaves and a bud – so effectively that I could almost smell the distinctive smell of leaves being transformed into tea in the factory.

 

The other high point of my life used to be the weekly letters that would arrive from my aunt (my father’s younger sister) in London. These came tinged with the romance of a faraway country that I had yet to visit, though I felt that I knew it well anyway, thanks to my copious reading of Enid Blyton books. But my aunt’s London went beyond boarding schools, midnight feasts, scones and clotted cream. Those letters were my first window into the delights of punting in Cambridge, watching a play at Stratford-Upon-Avon, or just enjoying an ice lolly in a London park – all of which I longed to do once I was all grown up (spoiler alert: I did!)

 

Letters for me were a portal into another world. My uncle (my mother’s youngest brother), who had just been commissioned into the army, was one of my first correspondents. I would laboriously fill two pages of all that I had accomplished in school that week and send it off to him. And then I would wait impatiently for his reply to arrive, replete with details of his training regimen, his mess arrangements, and all the new friends he was making in his regiment.

As I grew older, my letter writing was extended beyond the family. During the holidays, my friends and I would write to each other, describing how we were spending our vacations. When I went on holiday with my family, I would write to my friends in the neighbourhood, keeping them abreast of all my adventures. And in my teenage years, I even acquired a pen pal (remember those?) in Germany, whose letters I found endlessly fascinating.

 

Which is why I can’t help but feel sorry for the young people of today who will never know the raw, unadulterated pleasure of having a letter delivered into your post-box at home, which transports you immediately into an entirely different universe. We are probably the last generation to enjoy that privilege. And more’s the pity!

The show must go on...

Until it finally doesn’t; and leaves all its fans in mourning

So, it’s official. The sixth season of Downton Abbey, which is currently being filmed, will also be the final season of the show. NBC Universal, which owns the production company that produces Downton, has sent out an internal memo to staff to say that the drama is ‘approaching its natural conclusion’. So the ‘difficult decision’ to ‘wrap up production while the show is still at its peak’ had been taken.

This will be the last year that we will be able to follow the fortunes of the Crawley family, headed by the somewhat wishy-washy Earl of Grantham. Maybe we’ll finally find out if his eldest daughter, the widowed Lady Mary Crawley, succeeds in her quest for true love (the second time round). Or if the eternally star-crossed couple below stairs, Mr and Mrs Bates, will get a happy ending of their own. As for myself, I will just be happy if Julian Fellowes desists from killing off the formidable Dowager Countess of Grantham – played to perfection by Maggie Smith – who is the best thing about the show. I still bear the emotional scars from seeing Matthew Crawley brutally dispatched in the Christmas special some years ago. (Christmas, I tell you! Is nothing sacred any more?)

Yes, I agree, the show is mostly sentimental hogwash, with its rosy-eyed view of post-Edwardian England, where the upper classes are always honourable and decent and the working classes know their place (well, mostly). But such lovely hogwash it is to watch! Those beautifully-lit interiors, the lush English countryside, the perfect recreation of the period around the Great War; it is no wonder that the show has become something of a global phenomenon (of course, the Americans persist in calling it Downtown Abbey; but then, they would, wouldn’t they?).

But that said, I will be sad to see it go, with its idealized evocation of a gentler age. It was escapist fare, but escapist fare at the best; and which of us doesn’t enjoy a bit of respite from the realities of life?

I feel just as sad about the imminent end of yet another – but very different – period drama. Mad Men is as different from Downton Abbey as it is possible to get, set in the urban landscape of Madison Avenue in New York. But what both have in common is the faithful recreation of a certain point of time when society was in flux, depicted through the stories of its characters.

In Downton, the passage of time in the political world is marked by such events as the sinking of the Titanic, the break-out of the First World War, the post-war period, with references thrown in to such cataclysmic events as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. In the domestic sphere, we see Mrs Patmore struggling to cope with new-fangled kitchen contraptions and Mr Carson trying to make do with just the two footmen. Social flux is marked by Lady Sybil marrying a chauffeur and Lady Rose marrying a Jew (both social calamities at the time!).

Mad Men, for its part, documents the end of the 50s, when the certainties of American society with its commuting husbands, its Stepford wives, its 2.5 children, were gradually breaking down and the spirit of the Swinging Sixties was beginning to infect the land. So, Don Draper who starts out as the resident genius at his ad agency in the 50s is beginning to look a little ‘square’ by the time the Beatles invade America. Robert Sterling – true to form – is getting into the spirit of things by experimenting with LSD. And both Joan Holloway and Peggy Olson have managed to carve out independent careers, despite the misogyny and sexism prevailing at their work place, heralding the shape of things to come.

But now it’s time for Don Draper to smoke his final cigarette and walk off into the sunset, looking as moody as ever. And I will miss him just as much I will the extended Crawley family. Or indeed, as much as I have missed Walter White ever since Breaking Bad went off our screens. The only bit of good news in all this is that Julian Fellowes is said to be working on a prequel to Downton Abbey, set in America, which will tell the story of Robert and Cora, who we know as the Earl and Countess of Grantham. And that a spin-off of Breaking Bad, titled Better Call Saul, is here to tell us the back story of that archetypal sleazy lawyer, Saul Goodman.

What is it about certain TV shows that they exert such a powerful force on our imagination? Why do we get so hooked on some series as if we were in the throes of a real addiction?

I still remember staying awake till 5 am watching the early series of 24, because I simply could not wait until the following evening to see what happened next. Homeland was another show that induced a serious attack of binge-watching as did House of Cards (it helped that the entire season was dumped on Netflix in one go). And I wasn’t the only fanatic; the whole world appeared to be in the grip of an edge-of-the-seat excitement. Why, even the President of America, Barack Obama, pleaded on Twitter that nobody should post any spoilers until he had watched the show.

I’ve thought long and hard about it, but I can’t put my finger on what exactly makes these shows so special. Maybe if I binge-watch the latest series of Homeland, I will get some ideas. I promise to get back to you if inspiration strikes.

Spoiler alert!

No matter how much you hate them, there is no avoiding spoilers in this age of social media

Like much of the rest of the world, I was hooked by the TV series, Game of Thrones, from the word go. I swallowed the entire first season in one greedy gulp, rushing back home every evening to get my fill of Ned Stark, Daenerys Targaryen, Khal Drogo and the evil Lannister twins, Cersei and Ser Jaime. The wait for the second season seemed interminable and once that was done the only thing that kept me going was the thought of season three and so on...

Only now that I have started on the original books written by George RR Martin, I am beginning to wish that I hadn't seen the TV series at all. The books are a cracking read (I have finished the first in the series and am nearly through the second) but only half as much fun as they might have been now that I already know what is coming next.

It's a bit like that old chestnut. What came first: the chicken or the egg? Only in this case, the question is which one should you dip into first: the book or the TV series based on it? And there really is no good answer. Because no matter which route you choose into the story, there will be spoilers galore.

And like the President of United States – and I am guessing, most of the free world – there is nothing I hate more. (Barack Obama famously tweeted on the day that season two of House Of Cards was released on Netflix, “'No spoilers please" to his many million followers.) So, whenever a brand new show is released, I force myself to stay off social media, avert my eyes from TV reviews and magazine articles, so that some spoilsport can't spoil my fun by giving the plot away.

But no matter how vigilant I am, there is always that one annoying idiot who reveals the big surprise and ruins it all. I remember being incandescent with rage when a friend casually let drop that Brody was hanged at the end of Homeland while I was still on the first episode. (And I don't think I have been forgiven by another friend to whom I thoughtlessly revealed that Matthew Crawley dies in the Christmas special of Downton Abbey. In my defence, I thought she had seen the episode when she said she was done with the second season.)

Even as I write this, I am trying my damnedest to stay away from every article, tweet, review, or even passing mention of Breaking Bad because I haven't seen the final season and I really do want to be surprised by what everyone assures me is a super-twisty end. (So, all of you who've already seen the damn thing, do shut up until I catch up.)

But to come back to the chicken-and-egg conundrum, what should you do? Read the book and then watch the TV series? Or vice versa?

Well, speaking for myself, I would much rather begin with the book. Every time a see a new remake of Pride and Prejudice or Emma, I am ever so grateful that I read Jane Austen's original before I came to the TV version. So it is with the Inspector Lynley mysteries on TV; the Elizabeth George books are so much more nuanced than the spin-off television series. And then, there are the endless Poirot and Miss Marple remakes, which lose none of their suspense and wonder even if you have the read the original book a hundred times over.

Sometimes of course, it is the TV series that sparks off interest in the books. I read Darkly Dreaming Dexter only after watching the series. But this was so much darker than the television version (for instance, Dexter kills off Lieutenant LaGuerta in the first book itself, whereas she survives much later in the TV series) that reading it was an entirely different experience.

Actually, come to think of it, I would never have picked up a George RR Martin book if it hadn’t been for a TV series called Game of Thrones. And the loss would have been entirely mine.

57 channels and nothin’ on…

Why can’t Indian TV give us the equivalent of Homeland, Newsroom, Mad Men or Modern Family?

As you may have gathered from my occasional references to my TV-viewing habits, I am a big fan of TV shows. Offer me a choice between a Hollywood/Bollywood blockbuster and a box-set of the most recent TV series and I will always plump for the latter. And every single time I spend the evening feasting on the best Western television has to offer, I set off for bed wondering why we can't do anything half as good in India. 

Why is it that we don't have an indigenous Homeland, the cracker of a TV show that had the entire world on tenterhooks for its two-season run? Even President Barack Obama - who presumably knows a thing or two about tackling terrorism - is a fan, going so far as to invite Nick Brody (British actor Damian Lewis) to the White House for an official banquet. It's not as if we are starved of inspiration given the number of terrorist attacks that have pummeled us over the last decade or so. And yet, we don't have a single TV show that brings this alive on the small screen. The best we can do, apparently, is to have Anil Kapoor threaten a re-make of 24, the thrill-a-minute Jack Bauer series which has already run its course.

Then there's Newsroom, the Aaron Sorkin show about prime-time news programming. Despite a weak (and much too wordy) start it took off after a couple of episodes, bringing the dilemma of TV news networks home to us. How do you keep your news judgement and your integrity intact and still score in the ratings while competing with hysterical, jingoistic anchors who fall back on hype and sensationalism. This is a subject that is bound to resonate with Indian viewers given the amount of sound and fury on our prime-time news shows. And yet, there isn't a single Indian TV show that has strayed into this territory. Everyone is busy making saas-bahu serials, the tried-and-tested family melodramas that have become such a staple of entertainment programming.

But even family shows can pack a punch, as anyone who has ever watched Modern Family knows all too well. The show has wit, charm, and some of the best one-liners on offer. But it also offers us the portrait of a modern family, the jumble of trophy wife, stepfamilies, gay parents, adopted Asian baby, stay-at-home Alpha mom, klutzy dad, teenager going off the rails, nerd kids, which really shouldn't work but in some mad, out-of-control way, simply does. In its own laugh-out-loud funny way it gives us an insight into the changing landscape of American society.

And what do we have in India? Oh, we do family shows, all right. But what do they show us? A regressive, patriarchal world populated by large, joint families who live in big, imposing mansions, and spend all their time plotting and scheming against one another. The women wake up in the morning wearing full make-up, swan around in Kanjeevaram saris, brandishing their oversized mangulsutras to prove that they are truly ‘pativrata naris’. Their clothes, their jewellery, their lives, nothing has anything in common with us. It is almost as if these shows are set in a different era altogether.

Not that I have anything against different eras. I am a huge fan of Downton Abbey and Mad Men, both of which skillfully recreate a bygone world. In Downton Abbey you get the sense of a decaying Edwardian England in which the old certainties are crumbling quietly, leaving disquiet and anxiety in their wake. Mad Men evokes the New York of late 50s and early 60s, when the advertising men of Madison Avenue ruled the world and didn’t quite know how to cope with the incipient feminism in the air. Can you think of anything remotely like this on Indian TV? No, me neither. And more’s the pity.