Daphne, BBC Two, Saturday

On Saturday the BBC dreamt of Manderley, a reverie inspired, as BBC reveries so often are, by an anniversary. Daphne du Maurier, the author of Rebecca and of its famous first sentence, would have been 100 this weekend. She would no doubt have been chuffed that BBC Two was showing the Hitchcock Rebecca yet again and that Rick Stein, who has succeeded her as Cornwall’s most famous adopted citizen, next explored “du Maurier” country. Whether she would have been so delighted by Daphne is another matter, although it was a delightful enough experience for viewers with a taste for costumes, scenery and classy period acting. It helped, too, if you knew the Hitchcock movie and realised that, stylistically, Daphne pastiched it.

As for content, Amy Jenkins’s drama maintained that while her readers were dreaming of Manderley, the Cornish home of Rebecca’s anonymous heroine, its author was dreaming of Venice, “Venetian tendencies” being her code for lesbianism. Not that she considered herself one of the “L people”. Her unrequited lust for her publisher’s wife, Ellen Doubleday, existed, she persuaded herself, on a higher plane. Admittedly, there was room for confusion. When she met Ellen, played by the luminous American actor Elizabeth McGovern, on an ocean liner to New York, she symbolised the glamour that postwar England had given up on. The Doubledays’ mansion in Long Island was all restrained opulence, white surfaces and black maids. In contrast Menabilly, the du Mauriers’ home (and Manderley model), was austere, grey and locked in perma-frost although it beat Long Island in the crashing waves department.

Eventually, Daphne stopped overintellectualising and succumbed to Noël Coward’s earthier chum Gertrude Lawrence. Gertie was more Norwich than Venice, if you know what I mean, but even Daphne realised belatedly that requited love is the only type worth having. Playing the novelist, Geraldine Somerville had to struggle to convince us that she was a woman worth loving. A part-time mother and neglectful wife, she talked a good game about love but did little to demonstrate it. As the silk-gowned Gertie, Janet McTeer was exactly the dose of bracing but effervescent medicine tweedy-pants Daphne needed.

After the disaster of her Christmas revival of This Life, Amy Jenkins redeemed herself with this film. Her theme that every marriage, like every work of art, has its secrets was coherent, even if she overegged it with Pathé newsreels announcing: “There’s nothing sinister about the life of this happy wife” and a band that repeatedly struck up I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now. Another favoured song on the soundtrack contained the couplet “Everyone was gay, It was at the start of their holiday”. At one point Gertie even morphed into Ellen before our eyes. Still, du Maurier’s ghost cannot complain about a lack of balance from the BBC. An hour before, Rick Stein assured us: “She was heterosexual.”

Gavin and Stacey, BBC Three, Sunday

Stacey, the heroine of BBC Three’s gem of a new sitcom, Gavin and Stacey, had no need to wrestle metaphysically with the meanings of love. After a telephone courtship, she bedded Gavin on their first date. Stacey lives in Barry Island in South Wales, a miners’ resort whose slots have seen better days, Gavin in Billericay, the Essex town made infamous by Ian Dury; the course of the M4, we may be sure, never did run smooth. Refreshingly, however, there was little sneering at either town’s expense in Sunday’s two opening episodes, even if Alison Steadman, as Gavin’s mum, having previously pushed the envelope with her Essex Woman caricatures, now delivers them so broad that they could push Jiffy bags.

Gavin and Stacey were, in contrast, played with gentle affection by Matthew Horne and Joanna Page. Neither may be very bright, but the lovers gain dignity and innocence through comparison with their best friends. These are, respectively, Smithy, a plumber with eating, drinking and shagging issues, and Nessa, who has a body like a wrestler, a mouth like a scaffolder and who, as a precautionary measure, hates men on principle before sexually assaulting them (in Smithy’s case with a loo brush). Smithy and Nessa got the best lines last night, which was not a huge surprise a) because grotesques always do and b) because James Corden, who plays Smithy, and Ruth Jones, who plays Nessa, write the series.

Back from the dead . . .

When falling ratings recalled Bobby Ewing from the dead on Dallas, his wife, Pam, found him in the shower and realised the entire past season of the soap had been a “dream”. Now the creators of the US sci-fi series Stargate Atlantis need to work on a way back for the show’s Scottish physician Dr Beckett. Fans deluged the studio with protest letters and even held a rally outside its gates in Vancouver when they heard he was being killed off. So he’s back. OK, now, think: who else do we want brought back from the grave?

Mitchell sisters sweet as Sugar

As if the Mitchell brothers were not terrifying enough, the Mitchell sisters are joining EastEnders. Actresses Samantha Janus and Rita Simons are to play the cousins of Phil and Grant. Diederick Santer, the soap’s new boss, warns they’ll possess the Mitchell’s “unique moral code”. Janus recently starred in the gangster musical Guys and Dolls in the West End but it is the qualities Simons may bring to her part that scare me – she’s the niece of Sir Alan Sugar.

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

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