Always on Sunday: Lark Rise to Candleford

Sundays feature a movie review. The column's title is a play on the title of Jules Dassin's 1960 film, Never on Sunday.

My wife and I haven't missed an episode of Lark Rise to Candleford, which is currently being broadcast by UNC-TV at 7 p.m. each Sunday.
    Here's the basic scoop:

Lark Rise to Candleford (BBC TV 2008-11, 40 episodes) [Wikipedia: A British television costume drama series, adapted by the BBC from Flora Thompson's trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels about the English countryside, published between 1939 and 1943...Set in the small Oxfordshire hamlet of Lark Rise and the wealthier neighbouring market town of Candleford towards the end of the 19th century. The series chronicles the daily lives of farm workers, craftsmen, and gentry, observing the characters in loving, boisterous, and competing communities of families, rivals, friends, and neighbours. The narrative is seen through the eyes of a teenage girl, Laura Timmins (Olivia Hallinan [see photograph]), as she leaves Lark Rise to start a new life under the wing of her cousin, the independent and effervescent Dorcas Lane (Julia Sawalha), who is postmistress in Candleford.] [E]

    We're looking forward to the sixteenth episode (Episode 6 of Season 2) this evening. We love it. As one reviewer wrote on the Internet Movie Database website (IMDb.com):

Granted, it's a fairy tale, but it's a mighty pleasant one. And after all, what's so bad about having one show on television that actually leaves you feeling better about people?

I realize that syrupy recommendations like that get old fast. In fact, I read only a fraction of IMDb's viewer reviews. But here's another one:

This series is beautifully made with wonderful actors, it's wonderful Sunday night viewing. It is not complicated but is very addictive. Week by week you seem to grow to love the characters and the places more. It reminds me in a funny way of "Darling Buds of May," with its gentle pace and lovely scenery and a glimpse of a different bygone era, which although it probably never existed it is still nice to watch and imagine it did. And anything with the lovely Brendan Coyle in it gets my vote! [He plays Laura Timmins's father, Robert.]

    If the name Brendan Coyle seems familiar, he plays Lord Grantham's valet, John Bates, in the current BBC series, Downton Abbey, which I noticed in Woodstock, Vermont this week the public library is exploiting to raise money; they're selling "Watch Downton Abbey" bumper stickers or something.
    But Lark Rise to Candleford reminds me too of The Darling Buds of May (1991-93, with Catherine Zeta-Jones). We enjoyed that as well, spotted it in the Mebane public library's TV collection. It features the fine comic and dramatic actor David Jason (as the father of the Zeta-Jones character), whose1992-2010 detective series, A Touch of Frost, is reliably, suspensefully entertaining. We watched all of its forty-two episodes in (I swear) less than a month (by way of Netflix instant download).
    Another viewer reported something perhaps surprising about Lark Rise to Candleford:

There are many story lines yet they all link into one, the acting is superb and hilarious [?], an extremely worthwhile period drama and I am very pleased to say that my cousins who are 15 and 17 year old males, are absolutely obsessed[emphasis mine]. Who knows, we could have them watching Jane Austen next!

The writing, too, I think, is superb. For example, in the last episode we watched (Season 2, Episode 5), the postman Thomas Brown, played by Mark Heap, is feeling lots of pressure to marry Miss Ellison (Sandy McDade), who has made it clear that she very much wants to have children. Thomas, however, who is a punctillious Christian with a well-thumbed Bible, is horrified by the thought of being a father, despite his being manifestly very good at soothing the Timmins's new baby, whom the postmistress (Dorcas Lane) is taking care of for a few weeks to give Laura's mother a rest. He has even gone so far as to protest that God has made it very clear to him that he is not cut out for fatherhood. Dorcas shrewdly leads Thomas to question why, then, is he so good with the baby? Shortly, Thomas realizes that he is being shown signs and wonders and readily relents, to everyone's delight.
    "How true to the man's character," said my wife.