Outrageous: a Mitfords rehash too many

New Statesman​

18-06-2025

I feel about the Mitford industry a bit like I do about the Jane Austen industry. Read the books, I beg you. Enjoy them, learn from them if you can or must (though don't you dare say the word 'relatable' out loud if you're standing anywhere near me). But these endless spin-offs; these wild, parasitical imaginings. Around all of them, anachronisms, myths and clichés grow, like thorns in a fairy tale.
Outrageous, a series based on Mary S Lovell's 2001 biography of the six Mitford sisters, is the work of Sarah Williams, who also co-wrote Becoming Jane,a film about the early life of you-know-who, and its title alerts you (just like the peppy jazz trumpets on its soundtrack) to its sensibility. The siblings' vaunted eccentricity is very much to the fore, whether we're talking about the rat Unity Mitford (Shannon Watson) keeps in her evening bag on the night of her coming-out party, or the tin hat Decca (Zoe Brough) wears in her bedroom when she's pretending to be a revolutionary ducking hand grenades. It's cartoony and exaggerated and rather too determined to be modern and droll. The subtitles that explain locations read 'That Damp London Flat' and 'Diana's Country Pile', as if too much specificity might be off-putting – these rich people!
We take up the story in 1931. Our narrator is the oldest Mitford, Nancy (Bessie Carter), by this point the author of two funny, but slight, novels (her best books will come later). For the family, it's a time of relative innocence. Diana, married to the filthy rich Bryan Guinness, has yet to run off with Oswald Mosley (Joshua Sasse), the leader of the British Union of Fascists, and Unity has yet to develop her horrifying crush on Hitler. Pressing matters include the finances of their parents, aka Farve (James Purefoy) and Muv (Anna Chancellor), which threaten their allowances, and Nancy's ongoing status as a spinster (she's a perilous 29). On the rebound, soon she'll marry the utterly unreliable Peter Rodd (Jamie Blackley).
So far, so good. I adore Carter as Nancy Mitford, at this point in life an unlikely combination of innocence and cynicism, and all the performances are deft: galumphing, scary Unity with her Nazi eyes; stout, scrunch-faced, farm-loving Pamela (Isobel Jesper Jones); Deborah (Orla Hill), the youngest, who sits on staircases at parties, nosy-parkering at the Champagne-fuelled glamour below (one day, she'll be a duchess). If you want houses and clothes and jewellery, your eyes won't hurt at all. But still, I wonder who this is for. If you're interested in the Mitfords, and have read lots about them, this is a primer of which you've no need. If you're not interested, you'll be baffled as to what the hell all the fuss is about.
Is Outrageous a soap? A slightly more plausible Downton Abbey? Context, by necessity (because there's so much to get through), has been peeled away. Things happen so suddenly – Diana and Unity's little away day to Nuremberg, to take just one example – they seem outlandish. Nancy's cleverness and wit, or Decca's unlikely left-wing politics, cannot be fully explored, or even much revealed, which renders them little more than daffy, privileged aristos with a nice line in turquoise earrings and Fair Isle tank tops.
Behind all this, I sense a low-level buzz of anxiety on the part of the producers. Are the Mitfords dodgy, or heroic, or both? Are we allowed to like them, or not, and what will it mean for the drama's chances of success if we don't? On the soundtrack, the trumpet players stick mutes in their instruments, but even then the newcomer may be uncertain as to what she or he is supposed to feel (possibly nothing). For my part, I was caught between admiring its stars and production values, and a kind of proprietorial irritation at its rapidly moving parts.
If I hadn't read most of them already, Outrageous wouldn't send me to the novels, letters, diaries, or even to the many excellent biographies that have been written about the Mitfords. But then, I was also convalescing after a medical emergency. I looked down at my dressing gown – not to boast, but it's just the kind of thing Nancy might have worn the morning after a big night at Quaglino's – and decided to stick with them all just a little while longer. Let's see.
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