Maude Nificent#watching #Outrageous (britbox) — limited series about the #Mitford sisters
for those of us endlessly fascinated by the Mitford family,
—-(2nd Baron Redesdale, Lady Redesdale, and their children Nancy, Pamela, Thomas, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah) ——
no one book or show can do them justice — there is just too much to know about each of the personalities to cram into any single story.
The Mitford sisters’ lives show blood is not really thicker than water. Personalities will always trump nurture or blood, and if a relo has disagreeable values, best just go off and live separate lives, I reckon.
(Father was a bigot, mother was an anti-vaxxer, Nancy was a writer, Diana a fascist, Jessica a socialist, Unity a Nazi, and Tom refused to fight against germany in world war II).
perhaps they are an early example of sell-air-brity; people famous for being famous, but also complete whack jobs and thus incidentally deserving of the label “interesting”
“Outrageous” approaches the mitford sisters’ story in a fluffy and light-hearted way.
Imagine, if you will, aristocrats in England having to tighten their belts because it’s 1931. Poor buggers.
England was never a nation of geniuses, or even a “nation of shopkeepers”. Really, for centuries it has been a country ruled by privileged people monopolising enormous wealth and resources but who were constantly going broke. To survive, they roamed the planet, robbing people blind, or looking for rich heiresses to marry so they could carry on as always, without having to face up to their own incompetence.
(Churchill was not a mitford, but as a member of the aristocracy he seems to have had the same level of entitled cluelessness, mixed with the same great sense of personal destiny)
What is quickly sketched for us in Outrageous is the idea that several people might all have a different idea of what a better world might look like, and then will further disagree on the means to achieve that vision.
Even arseholes can see themselves as invested in something bigger than themselves — they are not necessarily driven by narcisism.
Okay, now i’m just sounding heavy and pedestrian, whereas the show (so far) is really light and fluffy. But that is the point of this family, i think: a prompt to sit and ponder the mysteries of life.
(or, at the very least, far more interesting than the problems of the not-even-an-opposition remnants if the liberal party)
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