Times Literary Supplement, December 12, 1980, by Thomas Blaikie
"Packing it in"
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Two of Nancy Mitford's novels have been beaten together by 
Simon Raven to make this serial. It ws a mistake. Nothing 
will disguise the fact that the principal events of *The 
Pursuit of Love* are a string of unspectacular lunches and 
balls. *Love in a Cold Climate*, with its generally superior 
organization and individual moments--the brillianty timed 
arrival of Cedric, the outrageous heir to the vice-regal 
Montdores--is spoiled by the contact.

There are some inspired additions in the dramatization 
(barbarous Uncle Matthews only just prevented from stoning 
the Montdores' Rolls, and the trumpeting of a fast young man 
which transforms the Alconleigh ball) and the messy second 
half of *The Pursuit* is tidied up. There are also two 
memorable scenes: the Bolter, trying to remember her 
husbands, and Davey's rhapsody on the store cupboard. But 
the main problems remain. Raven has compensated for the loss 
of Fanny's comic narrative, and the characterization it 
makes possible, by giving characters their own stock 
phrases, which is ineffective; elsewhere, he does not 
compensate at all, allowing, for instance, an inappropriate 
seriousness to settle when Lady Patricia dies--an event 
treated comically in the novel. A number of important 
explanations are left out and only those who know the 
stories will follow some developments.

Even so, opportunities offered by the script are missed. In 
the first episode, the troupe of child actors fail to convey 
that Uncle Matthew's children are clever aristocratic 
savages, although Tiggey Foster is calmly lunatic as Jassy. 
Lucy Gutteridge as the temperamental heroine who finds love 
and dies, can't avoid a soppiness out of key with the 
novel's claims for the girl's bewitching originality. On the 
other hand the spectacle of Lady Montdore (Vivian Pickles) 
devouring her own image in a hand mirror is unforgettable, 
and Michael Aldridge is an effectively explosive Uncle 
Matthews.

All the performances are threatened by being placed in a 
kind of crowded auction room of period detail, not all of it 
prompted by the stories. Too much close-up makes the 
interiors look like doll's houses: no hope of Lady Montdore 
briging off her expansive gestures,("But when you have all 
this...") here.



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