The Moth is actually where all this rigmarole got started in the first place: my friend Eileen, who knows from period pieces, brought The Moth over on a visit on a lark, thinking we’d watch it a little and then hang out and actually do something in New York. That was foolish, obviously, because as soon as we finished that one I was looking for the next one. Also, it turns out we accidentally started with the best one, which made the rest of the Catherine Cookson Experience sort of a slide downhill? Not that I hold that against Eileen at all; I think the only way to handle Cookson is to start with a nice one, because if you open with The Tide of Life the entire thing sort of becomes a non-starter.

However, that does nothing to diminish the fun of this puppy, where things are good and/or good to make fun of, which is the ideal combination for a great time in a Cookson, I feel.

Vital Stats:

Era: 1913.
Heroine: Robert Bradley and Sarah Thorman, who deserve equal billing here, I think. He’s a ship-builder who loves to read and feels social injustice keenly! She’s a lady of the manor with budding feminist feelings! Together, they fight crime.
Siblings that require looking-after: Millie, Sarah’s younger sister, who has Peculiar Yet Winsome on speed dial.
Illegitimate (Self or sibling): Somebody sure is!
Asshole Father?: This thing is an Asshole Father-Off, and competition is fieeerce.
Romantic interest(s): Each other! Marvelously. In a way that makes you want to bang their dolls together almost as much as they do.
Bairnsketballs: Check.
Fistfights: Oh gosh. Definitely a few fights, including one instance of someone getting attacked by a carpentry implement to the face.
Assaults: None! It’s a Christmas miracle!

Under this cut, endless glee. Also, endless pictures, sorry.

So, the setting for this one means that it covers a lot. There are pubs as the centers of political debate, the rise of industrial employment and urban living leading up to and during the war, and some low-level feminism. But mostly it’s an adorable love story, and some of the usual plot soup that Cookson does so much.

Also, as per usual, this is a DVD of a recording made when someone held a pin camera up to a VCR recording, so the quality of the screencaps is iffy, and occasionally there is just nothing doing in terms of legible screencaps. It’s all part of the charm of Cookson.

This is Robert Bradley, intellectual and forward-thinking ship builder!

And everyone in this picture will make his life miserable.

It’s his uncle, his aunt, and his cousin Carrie, who have come to help him bury his father, and to offer him a job in their country town far away from the bustle of the shipyards. For some reason, Robert thinks this is a good idea, even though his uncle is clearly a totalitarian religious nut who completely sucks and Robert is a man who can own property and has a perfectly decent living, and is generally not a dummy except when he has to have occasional lapses of judgment for plot purposes, I guess.

Upshot: Time to get some tweed and head for the country!

The lapses of judgment continue as he starts to date villager Nancy, despite the fact that when he meets her she is wearing this hat, which could not be a more up-front sign that something is terribly wrong.

But that subplot is almost immediately cast aside, when Robert goes for his nightly 35-mile constitutional and ends up at the right lake at the right time to meet a young lady who scares him shitless by just appearing out of the night like some asshole.

(She’s The Moth! I know it’s super tangential to the major plot, I didn’t name the thing.)

The young lady, Millie, is quickly discovered by stick-wielding butler Filch and Sarah, Millie’s older sister, who keeps Filch from getting into it with Robert and then informs him with Older Sister Face that he’s trespassing.

Robert’s like, “Yeah, I’m completely sorry for trespassing at Millie Scares The Pants Off You Bay.” Meanwhile, Sarah has realized that Robert is being played by Jack Davenport and is dreamy.

(Get used to this. They stare at each other A LOT.)

Once all the municipal land ordinances are settled, everyone returns to things as normal. Robert heads home to his awful family and the cousin whose extracurricular activities he has to cover for before his shithead uncle beats her to death.

Sarah, meanwhile, makes her way back to the big house and her milquetoast fiancé and nasty abusive-drunk father and doormat mother and a forced piano recital.

(Everyone in this picture will make her life miserable.)

In fact, they waste no time making her life worse – her mother succumbs to Lady-itis, leaving Sarah behind with her drunk-ass dad and a pile of letters she gives Sarah about how Millie isn’t her father’s daughter, but her mother’s LOVAH’S DAUGHTER.

(In case you couldn’t tell Sarah’s mom was unhappy, they had her cry in front of a window where it’s raining as she writes her letters, which all sound like, “My Dearest Darling, how I wish I was banging you instead of hanging out here amongst the landed gentry! Your illegitimate daughter continues well, and I love her way, WAY better than my older daughter. Kisses.”)

While Sarah is off dealing with things way better than could ever be expected and running the house and being cool, Robert is having kind of a time of it. Perhaps tired of her bizarre hat collection, he breaks up with Nancy:

They stand in front of that tractor business the entire time, and it runs the ENTIRE TIME, so that halfway through their breakup, as he’s shouting over the motor that he can’t be tied down, not by her or ANYONE, both of them are slowly engulfed in a thin grey film. Excellent planning, everyone!

However, Tractor Lung is the least of Robert’s problems, since when he comes home he finds out Carrie has a case of Bairnsketball and since he covered for her the night she was out late, he is Private Enemy Number One. He denies being the father, even as his aunt screams that he is, he is, can’t he stand up for his cousin, and you understand why, especially as Uncle Shithead gets more and more upset, but you also understand Robert’s need to extricate himself from this entire quagmire of awful choices, but not before Uncle Shithead gets him right in the brainpan with a chisel. (It’s even darker and blurrier than the rest of this miniseries, so screencaps were just not going to happen.)

When he recovers from Ye Olde Reality Showe, he realizes that in order to get work he’ll have to apply up at the Big House. (Also he thinks Sarah is pretty, but we’re not at a point where either of these jerks is going to admit something like that to themselves.)

Sarah is not super happy with him because something he offhandedly told Millie means Millie has been diving for invisible sixpence in the dirt and knocking over Sarah’s awful fiancé, etc. Robert, realizing he’s on thin ice, applies a little of the ol’ Davenport.

(It really is kind of delightful how Angry Butler is like WE DO NOT HAVE A JOB FOR LADY-MAKE-OUTERS and Sarah is like, “Make out, you say? Sure we do.” and Angry Butler is Not Pleased. This begins the leitmotif of supporting characters marveling at how much these two want to bang faces.)

Robert gets the job, and tries to settle in to being subservient in a household, when his carpentry skills have meant, in the past, that he can make his own terms. It’s interesting!

But, not as interesting as Sarah barging into her dad’s office demanding he sober up and stop buying jewelry for his mistress (of course) and pay this stack of bills already, at which point he cracks her across the face (of COURSE).

Robert, working nearby, does not think that was cool Whatsoever and checks in on her. Because he is the best and they are the best, he respects her wish to be left alone, and just lets the housekeeper, Mrs. Angry Butler, know what’s up, so that some half-decent parenting can happen.

The semi-happy family! (Mr. Angry Butler ends up going way off the rails, and it’s especially sad considering that at this point he and Mrs. Angry Butler are basically the only parents Sarah and Millie ever had, and even then they’re so powerless that Sarah is basically alone inside. Except for the hot new guy, but we’ll get there.)

To illustrate this even more sharply, Sarah decides that since the house is probably going under, she’s going to appeal to her fiancé to let her and Millie live on the cottage on his hunting grounds, take the surrogate parents with her, and get the hell out of this whole scene.

However, when she shows up at Downton Abbey, he’s playing tennis with some other woman! Being British, we all know what THAT means.

He tries to tell her she misinterpreted their friendship. She handles it as long as she can (Her: “James, we’ve been engaged for three years.” Him: “…”), but finally she flings his diamond ring at him so hard she cuts his mouth open (yikes), and heads out into the field for a nice primal scream and a breakdown.

Luckily, Robert is there to literally pick her off the ground and then hold her close to console her, like you do with that employer you haven’t known very long.

When Sarah informs the household that she’s not going to be relieving them of the burden of the one responsible person in the entire house, everyone’s thrilled.

Gormless brother Rupert Penry-Jones is especially thrilled.

Meanwhile, Robert becomes Millie’s best friend ever, and settles in with the downstairs folks, including sassy maid Maggie and grumpy stableman Greg, who also have crushes on each other and are like the kittens of people.

Things are fairly quiet until Drunk Dad decides Millie is the cause of all their problems and he should drown her (YIKES).

Luckily, Angry Butler is on the scene!

Look, an actual murder captured on film in a Cookson! He throws the guy into the river, and the guy dies! (This makes one of the very few Cooksons with direct cause-and-effect with regard to death. Usually butlers push people into rivers, and then piranhas attack them, and then they get pneumonia, and THEN they die.)

Robert shows up in time to be helpful, at which point he runs home and breaks the news to Sarah just the way you do to the employer you have and want to maintain appropriate relations with.

Her reaction is perfect (Angry Butler: “I’m sorry!” Her: “Don’t be.”), everything is covered up neatly, and things cruise along pleasantly at home while they wait for the financial anvil to fall.

That awkward moment where the guy you have a crush on is showing some other girl his workhorse, and it’s not a euphemism.

But tensions escalate, and when Rupert Penry Jones insults Maggie and Maggie cries about it, Sarah gets an attack of the Unreasonable Interference and barges in.

HOW TO HAVE A ROMANCE MOVIE ARGUMENT: A DIAGRAM

1. Barge in demanding explanations! Freeze on an inexplicably funny face.

2. Close the object of your affections in with you, manfully yet without excessive force.

3. …Because you’re saving the excessive force to press her up against a wall and explain yourself in a husky voice as she has Every Feeling All At Once.

4. Aim for Phantom of the Opera lighting, if at all possible.

5. Get some distance about halfway through so you can explain that Maggie was upset because Lord Gormless insulted Maggie’s looks. Add, “How would you like it if you heard that a man would have to be blindfolded before he could touch your body?” and move even closer than before to give her the old up-and-down.

6. Now that she’s had her sexual awakening, tell her you’re quitting, and then just let the awkwardness siiiink in.

But the awkwardness doesn’t last long, because the whole downstairs begs her to ask him to stay, and Millie begs her to ask him to stay, and because nothing gets your motor going like that dude who mildly menaced you in the barn. They have a long conversation, including things like education vs. intelligence, and then she asks him to stay, and he can’t even pretend to be hard to get any more, look at his face.

Two things here: one, they keep framing Sarah, Robert, and Millie like family, and two, basically you can assume from now on that when these two talk to each other they are hiding Super Emotions behind their voices because all they want to do is get five minutes alone so they can finally just neck.

Exhibit A: Actual Christmas present he gives her, actual reactions.

On the eve of the New Year, everyone gathers to dance to accordion music provided by someone who is either their gardener or a hostage.

But the party’s interrupted by Uncle Shithead, bringing news that since the death of Carrie and Carrie’s baby, Uncle Shithead owes him an apology, and also has pneumonia, so whoops. (Not shown: the scene where he probably says they should go ahead and just have fun without him, if they think that’s what the Lord would really want them to do, don’t worry about him, he’s just sitting here having pneumonia, he’ll be fine if the fluid drains, please, go ahead and keep dancing, those hostages are expensive, etc.)

Uncle Shithead soon perishes of his illness (yay!), and while Robert tries to balance his sizeable inheritance of land and business and money with the job he insists on keeping back at the house for no reason stop looking at him, he and Sarah are seriously not fooling anyone, including Greg in the background.

(Re: that last one – since they’re British and it’s the Edwardian era, we can assume she’s getting pregnant RIGHT NOW.)

Also not having it: Angry Butler, who’s getting a twitch like Daria’s history teacher just thinking about his darling Sarah lowering herself to chat with a Davenport:

He ends up writing a letter to her family friend Lady Noseypants, who stops by for one scene to remind everyone that if a woman lowers herself in marriage than everyone of good society vomits just thinking about it and also she’ll never be allowed to be forced to give them recitals ever again and we hope you are thinking about this, young lady. Sarah mostly deflects, except for the moment where she admits how alone she is, which is actually very sad except that we are pretty sure she will end up with a hottie hubs, if she can just hang in there.

But Angry Butler tries to pull an Uncle Shithead on Robert and concussion him right out of the house, and Robert has had enough of all this nonsense since he’s worth more than Lord Gormless as it is, and since he knows Sarah will never admit her feelings, he is peacing the hell out.

But what’s this? She’s saying she’ll miss him! Will he at least kiss her goodbye?

Girl, will he EVER.

(No joke, this kiss goes on for ages, and there’s inexplicable Lord of the Dance flutes, and a spinning camera, and the whole thing.)

And Matthew Crawley is not happy about it. Get out, Davenport! I SAID GET OUT.

And he does! And after some verbal abuse from her brother, who has rented out the estate to the army without asking anyone, she heads to Robert’s place to ask if she and Millie can live there, and if Robert will marry her. He agrees vociferously, and they blissfully make out some more, and everything is just the more adorable ever.

Back at the house, the situation is deteriorating.

(Angry Butler set the whole place on fire, which even Mrs. Angry Butler cannot get behind, especially when they realize that Millie was NOT in the garden, but instead chasing her puppy in the attic. Also, that puppy chills out for several very uncomfortable scenes of people carrying it while trying to smash windows, dodge open flames, etc. It is the world’s most uninterested dog. Oh, fire? That’s fine I guess.)

Angry Butler dies attempting to rescue Millie; Robert burns the living hell out of his hands actually rescuing Millie (and the puppy).

He tries to manfully break off their engagement, but Sarah is not having that, because she is in it for the duration no matter what it means, and she says she wants to marry him as soon as he can put the ring on her finger, and it’s all really adorable.

(Not shown: hilarious cut from “I want to marry you as soon as you can put the ring on my finger” to his super-bandaged mitt shoving a ring onto her finger, like as soon as he realized that marriage meant sex, he was down with WHATEVER.)

Honestly though, this is one of the few Cookson couples who you actively root for, and this is probably my favorite Cookson couple, because they have conversations about things besides each other, and they have in-jokes, and they get to know each other, and they are just the best, okay, people have feelings about things is all!

Just look how thrilled they are to be making out! (They also take a break from making out to laugh a little about her having to peel both their clothes off, which is a great and adorable ending even if it makes you wonder who exactly dressed him that morning and if that was awkward for him and Aunt Shithead or what.)

Basically, of all the Cooksons, this is the best-written, and one of the few not-awful Cooksons that rises above Cheeseball Fun (lookin’ at you, The Rag Nymph) to take a stab at Actually Good (lookin’ at you, The Wingless Bird). This is the one I saw first, and it will forever be my favorite Catherine Cookson Experience.

Because there is a thin line between hilariously terrible and normal-terrible, many of these Cooksons are not as fun as others. There are those whose cheese is appealing (The Rag Nymph), and those that are genuinely enjoyable (The Wingless Bird). Then there are those that are, say, The Round Tower.

Then there is The Fifteen Streets.

This dismal, awkward screenshot pretty much sums up The Fifteen Streets, which ostensibly follows a family of dockworkers from East Tynside and their class and religious issues, but really there’s just a Protestant mystic and a fair and a bunch of iffy child actors and a posse of idle neighbors that is always crowing the frame and two leads who do an indifferent job of things except when it comes to sucking face, which they are allllll over; of all the Cooksons, most of which seal the deal with a chaste peck, this is by far the sucking-face-est. Many of the plot points that end in tragedy (which is all of them, this whole thing is a tragedy) go sour as if to spite the two of them for having wandered onto a frigid beach to neck and not supervising anything else that’s going on.

Vital Stats:

Era: 1900-ish.
Heroine: John O’Brien, technically, though this whole thing is such a plot soup of terrible decisions that really, no one deserves to be considered heroic.
Siblings that require looking-after: Endless, confusing, nebulous siblings. Also Sean Bean.
Illegitimate (Self or sibling): Negative.
Asshole Father?: You know, technically yes, but that is the least of this Cookson’s problems.
Romantic interest(s): Anne of Avonlea.
Bairnsketballs: Two!
Fistfights: This entire effin’ thing is one big fistfight.
Assaults: Oh gosh. One offscreen, one bizarre piece of nonsense onscreen that we will get into when we get there.

Shall we?

So, these are the O’Briens! Some of them. You never really get them all in one frame, and because they’re all indifferent actors, it sort of turns into John, and Sean Bean, and four or seven indeterminate young people of limited acting ability who may be siblings or just neighbors or kids who wandered on to the set from elsewhere. No telling. (One of the youngsters who swans in and out again is Nancy. This is important later.)

As evidenced by the opening scene, Daddy O’Brien and son Sean Bean get drunk a lot and beat the shit out of each other and fling symbolic artwork from the windows.

They’re Catholic, by the way, in case you didn’t catch that.

And there’s about to be another O’Brien, because Mom’s pregnant, because Catholicism.

(In this scene, Sean is super drunk and she pulls his pants off and they discuss tea for a second and then sort of frown at the floor. No one in the scene seems to know exactly what’s going on here, and neither do I. This is a trend that continues throughout.)

But there is one decent son in the O’Brien clan, John, and one smart daughter, Smart Daughter. Smart Daughter is precocious and clearly doomed, but we’re still early in this disaster, and so she has to fulfill her plot purpose first and introduce John to his love interest:

Anne of Avonlea.

Here, the first meeting of two characters who already want to suck face, and the awkward child actress stuck in the middle.

But before they can hit those bases, life will get in their way! To highlight the many conflicts at work, back in the Fifteen Streets, the Cathoic and Protestant children gather in the streets to beat the shit out of each other.

In theory, disturbing and striking. In reality, it looks like an elementary school play about the Revolutionary War where some kid is like, “AND I AM GENERAL LAFAYETTE” and then picks his nose as the kid who plays his horse sort of shuffles into the fray.

However, the West Side Story reenactment comes to a halt when they see a stranger kid and decide, as one, to beat the shit out of him instead. They chase him all the way to the docks (foreshadowing for things I can’t even!) before John rescues him and takes him home.

When the kid’s guardian shows up alongside baffled and bewigged niece Jane Horrocks, he introduces himself as that Protestant mystic everyone’s heard of, and everyone in the house is frowning just about the way you’d expect when Father Catholic stops by for no reason just so he can see them hosting a Protestant mystic for tea.

Father has Opinions about all of this. He then tells them to stop hosting Protestants or they’ll go to hell. (Life lesson: never give a priest the key to your house or he’ll just show up and judge your guests all the time.)

The stress of it all sends Mom into labor with a bairnsketball we know is doomed, but that doesn’t stop the mystic from sitting right beside the bed and mystic-assisting with the birth, apparently by pooping.

(Actual facial expression.)

As the family tries to recover from all those leitmotifs, John comes by Anne of Avonlea’s place to point out that Random Younger Sister can’t afford to stay in school long enough to become a teacher, so she should stop telling her she’s smart in class, because it just raises her hopes. (Sad and accurate.) She’s like, “Well, then we’ll work out some way to pay for it!” and he’s like, “NOPE,” and just about then, the tea shows up and they have to pretend they’re not having a fight about class.

They’re thrilled.

Back at the Fifteen Streets, Sean Bean stops by Jane Horrocks’s place to assault her! Except he makes out with her for like ten seconds and then she’s like, “Quit it,” and he’s like, “GOD, WHAT is your DEAL?” and storms out, superoffended.

This whole subplot has the air of a scene exercise entrusted to two high school theatre students who just broke up and can’t even get through the staged reading without just throwing their promise rings at each other and calling it quits. The miniseries itself never acknowledges this scene again.

(Fun fact: The only thing I can think when I watch this scene is that they were in the “True Bride” episode of The Storyteller together, and how much more fun that must have been than this.)

Meanwhile, John and Anne Shirley run into each other in town and go on a date to the vaudeville show and become that couple at the movies that everyone hates because they bring their own extremely loud food and unwrap it slowly and then chew with their mouths open like they are purposely trying to drown out all the goodness in the world.

When she gets home, her parents inform her that they don’t like that she’s going on dates with a dockworker. She doesn’t care. When they push the issue, she says she’ll just take her meals in her own parlor, then, and that will show them! UPPER-MIDDLE-CLASS LEMON OUT.

Back at the Fifteen Streets, everyone is nosey and fractious and the worst, as per usual, and John gets elected to gaffer position at the docks, but no one cares except his father and Sean Bean, who drink eight gallons of beer to celebrate, and probably beat the shit out of each other offscreen for another twenty minutes.

But it’s also entirely possible that they get along fine, because this miniseries is happening in alternate realities and they’re in a pleasant one, because then the carnival comes to town, and Sean Bean and Jane Horrocks go hang out together and have a good time just like some normal non-rapist and a lady he’s never assaulted!

Giggles all around. I am so confused I look like the RCA dog.

Meanwhile, John and Anne have ditched this popsicle stand in search of any place desolate enough for them to skip all the awkward dialogue and just start sucking face already.

Awwww yeah.

But just as things are looking up for John, he’s confronted by Idle Neighbors who accuse him of impregnating “Simple Nancy” (charming!), and plan to beat him senseless.

He denies it, and there’s a whole huge scene where they try to put poor Nancy in an episode of The Closer and pile into a tiny room and shout a bunch of questions like “Why did John give you that sixpence that one time outside town?” because apparently that is an effective technique when dealing with frightened young women and it is just all extremely embarrassing and I am not even going to dignify this stuff with screencaps.

Upshot: John is clearly not the dad, but everyone thinks he is and they are just waiting to beat him to death about it.

John swears he won’t stay here to be insulted. He’ll go to America, is what he’ll do! His mom hears about this and prays fervently that something will happen to prevent him from going. (This gets awkward.)

Anne believes him, though, and when she hears of his trouble, she arranges to meet him at Tonsil Bay and tell him she supports him in his hour of need.

Pictured: a brief gasp of air so he can swear innocence about the whole Nancy thing, to which she replies “I KNOW” and shoves her tongue down his throat. Get it, Anne Shirley.

He swears he’ll go to America and set up there, and then they can be together over in America, where no one ever flies off the handle about anything based only on rumor!

But as per usual when John is absent from The Fifteen Streets for more than two seconds, everything is falling to shit.

Some plot aspect occurs that is probably directly Sean Bean’s fault! Now Jane Horrocks and the adorable precocious doomed sister have been chased out to the harbor for reasons! (I sort of tuned out some of this plot. I regret nothing.)

Now they’re in the harbor! Sean Bean is following them! They’re safely aboard a little boat! Somehow they are still terrified of the calm waters in their perfectly sound boat!

John arrives and tries to help by holding a small stick several hundred feet away from them!

Shockingly, this does not work. The calm water flips their boat, and they fall in and instantly perish. (This is odd for a Cookson, since normally their boat would flip over, and then a shark would attack them, and then they would get cholera, and THEN die.)

This shot is in case you thought they lived. They didn’t, OKAY? Or, they swam the fuck out of this miniseries and started a new, hatless life somewhere else, which I am also fine with.

(Meanwhile, when Mom hears the news that her smart daughter has perished, she has a super-awkward moment with the Lord.)

And when John realizes that this happened because something something Sean Bean’s fault something, it is ON.

(The Idle Neighbors help cover up the fight choreography. That’s probably just as well.)

After Sean is a bloody pulp, some men drag John away, and a distraught Nancy drops the bomb that the baby she’s carrying is, to absolutely no one’s surprise, actually Sean’s.

Whoops! Now this fight is SUPER happening!

Except what really happens is that the guys who were happy to beat John to death for maybe being the father tell John it’s unacceptable to beat his brother to death for being essentially the world’s worst person, and so they hide Sean Bean somewhere in The Fifteen Streets, so John has to knock on every door and ask “Is Sean there so I can finish beating him to death?” like some horrific trick or treat.

As it turns out, they put bleeding unconscious Sean on a horse cart and sneak him out of town to avoid being killed, even though everyone completely hates him and he has committed crimes on at least a third of them personally. Still, if Sean Bean does not die instantly at his brother’s hand, he’s still Sean Bean, and so we know he dies eventually. Bye, Sean!

But this is no comfort to John. He’s so despondent that when Anne calls him out to Tonsil Bay, he doesn’t even have the energy to make out with her.

Instead, he calls off their understanding! “It will never work, Anne! We’re too different! You live in a house with WALLS, okay?!”

He goes home and is despondent some more, as the neighborhood goes on around him. Dr. Strangelove leaves town, kid gangs get into adorable, poorly-choreographed fights, the neighbors continue to gather in large groups and stare blankly at whatever’s in frame, and life returns to normal.

Until!

Surprise! She’s thrown away her entire financial and social future to live near him and convince him she’s serious about their relationship, and the Idle Neighbors can’t wait to see how this goes.

How this goes: He says “Nooooooo” as if he’s live-action slow mo and storms out of her house as she shouts explanations after him. (Short version: “But now we can bang!”)

Outside, he spends a moment debating whether he should try to dictate her social status, or if he dares endorse this huge drop in her comfort, but it really only takes a second, because she really does finally has a place to herself, which means only one thing: All Systems Go.

They cut to credits almost immediately, but the actors are already rounding second base and well on their way to third by then.

The Fifteen Streets does bring up some compelling points – religious friction, class stratification, the difficulty of achieving the education necessary to raise oneself through said class system. However, that’s sort of like saying that one squirrel in your yard is our landscaper; if it is, it’s by accident. Overall, this Cookson is seriously lackluster; the acting is all over the map, there are entire subplots that come up and then slink away like a Protestant mystic in the middle of the night, and the majority of the interiors were lit by a single desk lamp, which doesn’t do much to make the thing more visually compelling.

However, if nothing else, it provides a nice, stark contrast to my next Cookson, in which I am treating myself and recapping the very best one (and my first Cookson ever!), The Moth.

I’m in excellent company, and am flattered and thrilled by the nomination.

*

The Catherine Cookson was not as thrilling. I am really trying to wrap this puppy up, but some of these are surprisingly ponderous. Not Dwelling Place bad, because how could you be, but pretty dull in their own special ways, including one I have watched twice where I literally cannot keep track of anything after about the one-hour mark because my eyes just glaze over, so when someone drowns in the river I think it’s the hero’s sister, but also there are like a dozen neighbors? We’ll see. It’s a journey.

(At least the screencaps will be slightly better than the ones from The Dwelling Place, whose screencaps I would redo except it would mean watching it again and some things are just not going to happen.)

For those who are new since my last one (welcome!), a bit about the Catherine Cookson Experience. Catherine Cookson, author of historical potboilers, enjoyed a magnificent heyday between about 1995 and 1997, in which the BBC went NUTS for her and filmed approximately eight hundred of her books in an attempt to employ every actor from Great Britain, Scotland, and Ireland it could get its hands on, and also to use up a lot of sawed-off basketballs they needed to use to simulate pregnancy.

More than a year ago, in a fit of good judgment, I embarked on a quest to watch every Catherine Cookson movie ever filmed. As it turns out, that is very difficult, partly because there are so many of them, and partly because some of them are just the worst ever and involve a lot of asshole dads and/or men getting romantically interested in a girl he met when she was nine and/or a complete lack of anyone making sense. (…a cave? Really?)

It has been a long, long time since my last one (the delightfully cheeseball The Rag Nymph), and I’m not sure why. All I know is that I sat down this weekend and found myself reaching for one of my favorite Cooksons, and the next thing I knew, I had 50 screencaps, so I guess I’m back on the wagon! Let’s do this thing.

Note to all: these entries are inevitably huge and image-heavy. I didn’t use all fifty screencaps, but there are certainly 30something of them under this cut.

This is The Wingless Bird.

It’s different from many of the Cooksons because of its central family’s position in life (firmly middle-class, prosperous shopkeepers) and the frank (for Cookson) examination of class differences. That said, someone still gets beaten with a shovel and someone else dies of consumption, so, Cookson ahoy!

Vital Stats:

Era: 1913 and some years after.
Heroine: Agnes
Siblings that require looking-after: Jessie, her younger sister, who is dumb as a box of hair.
Illegitimate (Self or sibling): Check! Jessie’s as illegitimate as her judgment is questionable.
Asshole Father?: Possibly one of the jerkiest patriarchs in all of Cookson. He spends most of his time doing a Malcom McDowell impression.
Romantic interest(s): Charles Farrier, his brother Reginald. WHOOPS.
Bairnsketballs: Yup.
Fistfights: A shovel-beating and a shooting. Also, World War I, so there’s that.
Assaults: Not one! PROGRESS.

Under the cut: candy-store porn.

We open in this Dickensian candy-store wonderland some night relatively close to Christmas, as our heroine Agnes is getting shit from her father. (Leitmotif!)

She’s not having it.

Side note: Agnes is one of my favorite Cookson heroines, because she’s smart as a whip and, unlike many other Cookson heroines, keeps a level head in all situations, and does not take any shit about anything, ever, including her awful, awful dad.

Also, every time I mention she speaks with her father, what I mean is, it goes like this:

Him: Have we ordered more sugar?
Her: I asked you if you wanted me to, and you said no. I can now, if you want
Him: Why, you insolent hussy! HOW DARE YOU!
Her: If you strike me I’ll leave here forever and then who will run both your candy store and your tobacco store?
Him: …ten pounds of sugar is probably good. Insolent hussy.

He’s a prize.

One night, he goes to his Very Important Poker Game Full of Men-Types and leaves Agnes in charge of the store, which, incidentally, is seriously delightful:

There are about eight metric tons of sugar consumed by all actors in this. They probably hated it. It looks good to me.

Just before closing, Agnes is visited by a very nice lady and her brother, Duncan Idaho the Human Golden Retriever, who spends every moment of his screen time being as adorable as it’s possible to be.

They take a shine to each other, which they demonstrate by having a silent “Who Can Smile More Awkwardly” competition.

Ah, Brits in love!

On her way upstairs for the night, Agnes finds out that her sister, Jessie, is making out with her dockhand boyfriend Robbie in the backyard of their house, in full view of their jerkwad father and their bitter mother and whoever’s staying in the guest house (they have a guest house, you know how candy shops do).

And in fact their poker-drunk dad does catch her sneaking back in. Not to worry, though – clever Jessie has an excuse at the ready!

Nice one, Secret Agent Jessie.

But Dad doesn’t have time to worry about his daughter consorting with the lower classes – he’s late for an appointment to yell at his wife for being frigid, as Agnes finds out when she wanders by.

(Check out Mom’s face; Agnes came by her bitchface honestly.)

Dad: Why don’t you want to do the nasty?
Mom: Because you’re a drunk on your way home from your mistress’s place?
Dad: But that’s just what happens on Thursdays!
Mom: And I had to raise her daughter Jessie like she was mine!
Dad: You get so touchy about the slightest things!
Mom: Also you raped me, which is why I have no desire to sleep with you!
Dad: Man, what is your DEAL?

That awkward breakfast after you realize you’re in a Cookson novel.

But it’s okay, because Duncan Idaho has a huge crush on Agnes and comes back to see her to buy some cigars for no reason!

Brits in love!

He’s seriously in love, too. He’s so in love that he goes home and sits super, super close to his sister to tell her about his feelings.

…for that sugar mouse, or for Agnes, whichever.

Also present, and not super thrilled to hear his high-class brother is consorting with the counter-tending kind, is his brother Reginald.

(He’s supposed to be a big ladies’ man. I…will take their word for it.)

But Duncan and Agnes aren’t the only star-crossed lovers here! Jessie, who caught a case of bairnsketball, tells Robbie! Robbie, who is upstanding and adorable, vows to marry her!

Not pictured: the moment Dad finds out his little girl wants to marry some dockworker, and attacks the dockworker with a huge-ass shovel.

Agnes heads down to inform Robbie’s family of what’s happened. They sort of hate her for about two minutes, but then they realize she’s actually awesome and things go fine.

(Clearly, Jessie is not marrying the cutest Felton, since there’s a proto-McAvoy up there just waiting to deploy some serious Yearning Face.)

Back at home, Mom has come up with the genius plan that Agnes should get dressed in her super-fancy frock and go beg their second cousin or great-aunt or someone else Agnes has never seen to raise Jessie’s child as her own, because that will totally work even though this distant relative is extremely posh and the baby is the illegitimate offspring of a shopgirl and a dockworker.

(Agnes came by her bitchface honestly; her smarts are clearly a mutation.)

But still she suits up and goes to town, and meets the aunt, who treats her so terribly before she even gets a word in that she turns around and goes right back to town to kill time before the train.

But you know who’s stalking her hanging around in the same location being super-sweet and completely dismissing deeply-ingrained ideas of class? Duncan Idaho the human golden retriever is who! He literally jumps out of a boat to see her. I can’t even.

Turns out he wants to break away from the family money and just write about architecture for a living! (Of COURSE he does; your first serious boyfriend ALWAYS does.) And he’s so, SO excited to be able to introduce Agnes to his brother Reginald so Reginald can get to know her, as a potential sister-in-law, just in a friend way! It’s going to go great!

Okay, slow start, but they’ll get familial any minute!

Yeah, that’s going to end wonderfully.

However, Agnes doesn’t have time to think about nice, sweet Duncan Idaho and his smokin’-moustached brother. She has a sister to think about, and thanks to Duncan’s advice and it only being 1913, she knows you can sneak away and get an emergency marriage with some forged signatures, so she gets Jessie the Slightly Dim and Robbie the Symbol of the Ambitious but Morally-Upright Lower Class to sneak out under her parents’ noses.

Done! Goes off without a hitch! Things look good!

Then her dad, doing a truly magnificent Malcom McDowell impression that I could not screencap, shows up at Robbie’s house, shoots Agnes right in the arm, then has a heart attack and dies.

(This is a surprisingly simple demise for a Cookson bad guy. Usually Duncan Idaho would have had to slap him so he could fall down a flight of stairs, and then be run over by a car, and then buried in simple syrup, and THEN die.)

The bad news is: not a damn thing. That guy was a raping, screaming drunk shovel-beater and everyone is pleased as punch that he’s dead.

The good news is: Agnes inherits everything! Now she owns both stores, the candy factory, and the random guest house in the back! She’s rich as crap!

And she got a snazzy black sling for her shooting injury! Bonus.

Also a bonus: Duncan Idaho, still with his Pining Levels set to 11, who comes by to condole and proposes while he’s at it, because it’s 1913 and getting back and forth from places is a pain. You just propose whenever you can.

They’re thrilled.

Double-thrilled are his parents, who just love knowing their son is going to be marrying the daughter of Batshit Conway of Shoot-’em-Up Lane.

You know who will be totally equally pissed about this for completely the same reasons and not at all have serious conflicts of interest about the whole thing?

The Reginator.

Here’s how that goes.

Reg: I know he loves you very much (just like meeee), but there are complications.
Agnes: You mean how his parents hate my guts for being middle-class and involved with the whole Shoot-’em-Up Lane thing?
Reg: That’s it. (Gosh I love you.)
Agnes: Well, I told him as much, so until he works that shit out, I’m not even considering marrying him.
Reg: You’re a smart girl (who I love desperately).

Things seem to be quieting down until Duncan gets consumption from living in the damp garrett he moved into to spite his parents. (Actually happens.) Agnes treats him well, and wins his parents’ grudging respect about being totally boss, so they get to be engaged, but eventually Duncan has to go live with a nice family on a farm.

While he’s recuperating, Agnes finds herself dealing with economic turmoil, and also Jessie and Robbie living in the guest house, which sounds like it turns into a huge subplot but really it’s just Robbie learning to make candy.

Meanwhile, World War I is breaking out, mostly via bad performance art projected all over Reg’s face.

I find this weird mostly because a lot of the rest of the treatment of war seems much less anvilicious (for Cookson). We’ll assume a first-year film student got into the editing room at the last second.

During leave, Reg comes to visit Agnes, because he can’t stand the idea of visiting his parents and pretending everything is okay.

She does the best she can to be sympathetic and not put words in his mouth, and as he leaves, he lays the world’s longest cheek-kiss on her.

Your brother, Reg. Seriously. Think of your golden retriever!

Speaking of which, how is Duncan?

Sadly, he and his inexplicable boyband haircut are not long for this world. But they do have time to get married, and have a brief honeymoon before his parents die in a car crash (yikes) and Reg’s bunker suffers a direct hit (yiiiikes).

Reg survives, but when Duncan and Agnes come to visit him at his request, they find out that he lost an arm, and his face got torn up, and he has no plans to accept his inheritance and be the next Lord Whatshisface. He wants Duncan to do it instead. Duncan, completely unaware that he is not long for the world, agrees.

Then Agnes comes in against Reg’s wishes, the one thing she does in this miniseries that is not cool.

Reg agrees with me.

It doesn’t go well – she tries to say that it doesn’t matter because he’s the same person on the inside, and he emphatically explains he is no such thing, and everyone parts feeling completely awkward and unhappy. It’s as realistic as Cookson gets, but it’s not what you’d call a fun scene.

Still, Agnes and Duncan try to keep the house cheerful, and there’s this nice scene with everyone gathered to celebrate the bairnsketball’s second birthday.

Moments later, Duncan Idaho succumbs to the Spice. (Or consumption. Whatever.) He is as adorable in sickness as he ever was in health, but since there’s only about 20 minutes of miniseries left everyone knows this time the illness is really serious, and Agnes summons Reg to Duncan’s deathbed.

Here, a touching scene taking place on the bed, that the camera is clearly not interested in capturing whatsoever, since it’s just focusing on this dresser and fainting couch like they’re going out of style. (In retrospect, this camera was probably right.)

Since the camera is not helping us out with this, here’s the gist:

Duncan: Reg, you’re my beloved brother, and Agnes, you’re my beloved wife. And I want you to love each other when I’m gone.
Reg, about to be overcome with joy: …wait, how, specifically?
Duncan: *urk*

OH, SNAP.

Cut to mumblemumble years later, when Reg makes a habitual visit to the great house, where Agnes is sitting around being awesome all by her lonesome.

She is overjoyed to see Reg in a way that is clearly warm for his form, but he seems determined not to admit he likes her back. (Britsinlooove.)

To prove it to himself, he suggests they toast to friendship, saying, “They say Friendship is Love without his Wings,” which would be completely jerkbaggy except that he’s got his Yearning Face on.

Agnes, who has more sense than everyone else in this entire miniseries put together, is like, “Oh, for – I can’t toast to that, because the bird has grown wings, because I love you, okay? Do you read?”

Oh, girl, he reads so much he’s a librarian.

(Awesomely, because British law didn’t allow a man to marry his brother’s widow, they just decide to live in sin forever. Get it, Agnes.)

This one was monstrously long, sorry. I just really like this Cookson; the next few will be some of my least favorites, and will be shorter, mostly so I can knock them out at a decent clip and then wrap with the best Cookson of all time.

I’m just going to cut to the chase. Here are nine things I am looking forward to this year, in no particular order.

1. This adorable tango couple serves double-duty. First, it’s part of a project I’m working on that I’m really enjoying; second, it’s a reminder that I actually used to dance this thing, and while I’m not looking for a large-scale return, I should attempt to go out and make a night of it at least once this year. Otherwise I have a serious collection of shoes gathering dust in a corner.

2. Southland. I have been a sucker for cop shows since my parents and I watched the pilot of Homicide back in the day. And ten thousand cop shows later, Southland still manages to compel me. When it was canceled after one season on NBC, I was bummed. TNT picked it up for a second season (yay!), and though ratings were modest, they greenlit a third, premiering Jan. 4. I really appreciate a network that gives great shows a chance, and I have set a Season Pass for this guy.

3. Another double-duty! This is a still from this year’s Jane Eyre, with Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassenbender (I LIKE MICHAEL FASSBENDER), which I will be writing up this week, complete with personal essays and movie-trailer picspam. It is also standing in for every downtrodden, bairnsketball-ridden Catherine Cookson heroine whose stories have yet to be documented in The Catherine Cookson Experience, which I intend to finish soon. I won’t cover them all (some of them are just not worth the time it takes to cap them), but I’ll try, and the best is yet to come.

4. The Borgias! Fancy costumes, Ham-Off scenery chewing, and bizarre sibling relationships. It’s like they made it just for me. Enthusiasm subject to change if this turns out to be as underwhelming as The Tudors, which also had every ingredient to make me love it, and somehow cooked up into a lump of No Thanks Casserole.

5. Books! Specifically, all the books I will be reading / that will be coming out this year written by friends of mine (you all know who you are). My wallet does not thank you, but gosh, it makes me smile.

6. Red Riding Hood. Either it will be glorious or it will be shitmazing. Either way, I’m there at midnight. (Let’s also pretend this thematically stands for Winter’s Bone, for whom I will be rooting loudly come Oscar time.)

7. Mechanique. My first novel comes out this year! You will be hearing more about it later. (Boy, will you EVER.)

8. Priest. SURPRISE PAUL BETTANY. When I reviewed Legion, I realized with horror that Paul Bettany had signed up for another movie with the same director that might be EVEN WORSE. This year, I find out if that was true. YOUR MOVE, TERRIBLE DIRECTOR. (Though Paul staring soulfully at Nikita’s Maggie Q would still probably have gotten my butt in the seat, and the director probably knew that.)

Obviously, this also represents all the other movies I will see this year knowing full well they are absolutely terrible. (I tried to make a mosaic of just those, but it blanketed the earth, so.)

9. Technically this is relevant to this year’s writing interests, but I think we all know that I’ve made one promise again and again and never delivered, and it’s time to get serious about my goals: 2011 is the year I go back in time and hang out with foxes in a turn-of-the-century photo studio.

Obviously these are not the only things I am looking forward to this year, but they are some of the most fun, and should put a pretty nice dent in my sleep cycle throughout 2011!