Eighties TV Season: The Bagthorpe Saga

Continuing a series of posts about 1980s Tv series which haven't appeared here before. I was thinking of including The Bagthorpe Saga in my last post about coming-of-age dramas, but it is about the life of the Bagthorpe family rather than the characteristic transition from child to adult, so it deserves a post of its own.

It is a six-episode children's show from 1981, and despite not being a coming-of-age drama did have the same effect they have on me when first broadcast: in terms of impact it really really punches well above its weight. I was fascinated by the insane Bagthorpe family, who I considered very sophisticated at the time.

The series is based on a series of ten books (published between 1977 and 2001) by Helen Cresswell, also called the Bagthorpe Saga. They are about the eponymous family who are described in their Wikipedia article as 'eccentric, ultra-competitive, friendless, relentlessly self-absorbed and largely disloyal'. I was wondering how I was going to describe them for you if you haven't come across them and I can't think of a better description. You will readily see from that description that the family's life (which the Wikipedia contributor calls 'farcical, satirical and blackly comic') make the stories far more sophisticated than you get in most children's books or TV programmes. You can read or watch them as an adult and be suitably horrified, and read or watch them as a child and laugh your head off while completely missing the more dissocial aspects of the family life. For example it is most inappropriate to serve up a small child who keeps setting fire to the family house and whose parents make no attempt to stop her, as entertainment, which is what makes it entertaining. If you're reading them as a child you know the Bagthorpes do all the things you're not allowed to and reading them as an adult, you know they do all the things you would do if there weren't prisons.

I seem to be handing out homework a lot in this series of posts but once again your life would be better spent not reading this blog and watching the shows (all six episodes are on YouTube in their entirety) or reading the books.

Unusually the six episodes are divided into two parts of three episodes each. In a gift to the TV blogger, the two halves are respectively based on the first two books in the series, and even though there isn't that much about the show online I'm not going to have to describe the plot because helpfully the plots of the first two books are also in Wikipedia: here and here.

The eccentric stories are magnificently adapted to television, and in fact this series is one of the few times a TV series has provided the images for the stories in my head, rather than being different.

Also above the norm for most TV series of the time we are once again in the midst of some great talent. The grandmother (who magnificently starts a riot requiring police intervention when she plays bingo for the first time) is played by Phillada Sewell. Mrs Fosdyke the housekeeper (who is a master of the stuffed egg) by the legendary Dandy Nichols. Aunt Celia (who believes in one book she has been made pregnant by an angel), by Madeline Smith; and the mother (who is, hilariously, an agony aunt which seems to have no impact on her ability to solve her own family's problems), by Angela Thorne. I particularly like Angela Thorne in this; it's quite a different role for her from To The Manor Born, which may still appear in this series of posts.

Seriously, although this is deceptively a children's programme, it's another of those I think you should just go away and watch.

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