So I may have mentioned this before (and please don’t hit me): I was not a fan of Downton Abbey, as you might have guessed from the dearth of mentions of the show on this blog (though I did like the Evil Butlerfilms...) Truth be told, I don’t watch any television at all apart from DVDs because there’s just too much else to do (like read! and write!)
However, I may have to cave in
and get a decoder box (yeah, I told you I don’t watch TV) because of what’s
coming to Downtown Abbey’s time slot
on PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre next year: Victoria,
an eight-part miniseries that details the young queen’s life from her accession
in June 1837 at age 18 to her courtship and marriage to Prince Albert of
Saxe-Coburg in 1841.
Cue Marissa hyperventilating.
My hopes are pretty high that
this series might be reasonably historically accurate (and not throw in silly
assassination attempts like that one added into 2009’s The Young Victoria.) Since they list the role of Lady Flora
Hastings, I expect they’ll cover that whole episode (during which the young
queen did not show to her best advantage), and we can hope that the actor who
plays Sir John Conroy, Paul Rhys, will be suitably dastardly (‘coz honestly,
the guy pretty much was almost a classic storybook villain.) It looks like the actress who will play Victoria, Jenna Coleman, does a pretty good job of trying to look like Victoria, particularly her habit of keeping her mouth slightly open that can be seen in many of her portraits. We can hope she gets the fascinating mixture of childish enthusiasm and royal gravity that was the young queen. And hey, we’ll
almost definitely get beautiful sets and costumes to look at (just like Downton
Abbey, I’ll concede), so it sounds like a win to me.
Do you plan to watch
it? We may have to have more posts on this topic when it airs...
Oh, and happy birthday to my
favorite monarch: Queen Victoria is 197 today!!
1 comment:
I'll probably watch it at some point. Julian Fellows is also tackling Anthony Trollope with a new series on Amazon. I haven't had time to check it out yet. Our library network usually gets DVDs of Masterpiece productions. If yours doesn't have them, ask if they can get it through inter-library loan.
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