I hadn’t been expecting much of Consuming Passion (BBC4, Sunday) — after all, women’s romantic fiction is hardly my sort of thing. But along with Mark’s recommendation, the cast list spurred me to watch: after all, I had just enjoyed Jodie Whittaker in ITV1’s Wired, and Olivia Colman is just superb in BBC2’s Beautiful People.
It turned out to be a great little play, telling the stories of three women decades apart whose lives are impacted upon by the infamous range of bodice rippers. The highlight, though, was Colman’s dual role as dowdy 1970s aspiring writer Janet, who escapes from her mundane life into her own fictional world where doctors are smouldering sex gods, and Nurse Violetta, the heroine of her own Mills & Boon-style romance. View the clip above for an example of what I mean.
Less satisfying was the modern-day strand, with Emilia Fox as an English lecturer who assigns the history of Mills and Boon as a project to her students. While the direction her brief affair with student O T Fagbenle took mirrors the direction the novels themselves seem to have taken — cruder and more graphic than Colman’s romantic fantasy — it also served to highlight how much less interesting material gets when it relies on pornographic content for its thrills.
Consuming Passion is repeated throughout the week on BBC4, and also currently available on iPlayer.
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