Despite Natasha McElhone's best efforts as hotel owner Bella, this one-dimensional opening episode was more panto than high-class drama
Despite Natasha McElhone’s best efforts as hotel owner Bella, this one-dimensional opening episode was more panto than high-class dramaIf you want to know why Julian Fellowes is worth his weight in gold, then compare his scripts forSet in 1926 and starring Natascha McElhone as Bella Ainsworth, the British owner of the titular Italian hotel, this is actually, but a pale imitation of both. Needless to say, a second series has already been commissioned and filmed.
There is the inevitable upstairs-downstairs scenario, with a homely north-country British cook who might as well have simply been called Mrs Patmore. Instead, the writers went to the effort of naming her Betty. She’s given to moaning about Italian beef’s inability to make good dripping and the waxiness of the local potatoes.
And then there’s the waspish aunt, Lady Latchmere, Anna Chancellor channelling Maggie Smith – although her put-downs are unmemorable compared to Violet Crawley’s. There was a stab at comedy in the first episode when the teetotal Lady Latchmere was served limoncello as a medicine, but Chancellor is so far generally underserved.
Bella has three marriageable children: two barely glimpsed daughters and a son, Lucian , who has artistic aspirations. Lucian’s romantic entanglements were one of the main plot drivers. His rotter of a father, the impecunious Cecil wanted to marry him off to the daughter of a wealthy old flame, a lemon-sucking snob who dismissed Bella as “the kind of woman who thinks nothing of running a hotel”. A trade, in other words.
But Lucian had thrown his net far and wide – the family’s nanny Constance inevitably catching his eye. And there was a nice Indian doctor , Anish . He treated a wounded Lucian in the trenches of the First World War and now yearned for his former patient. The homoerotic storyline was one of several straight out of the
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