South Riding BBC Series 2011

I wouldn’t normally put fiction in the blog but I thought I’d make an exception in this case as its apt for the current economic climate and South Riding must be below the East Riding (South Yorkshire) right? This is the 3rd remake of the book the first being a film made in 1937 and the second being a thirteen part YTV production on ITV from 1974, this version won four awards.

Re-issued to coincide with Andrew Davies's new BBC television adaptation, Winifred Holtby's 1935 novel South Riding rings with timely parallels. Set in the early 1930s, it concerns the dilemmas facing a fictional northern council. Presented with new austerity measures, the local dignitaries must decide whether to slash spending on welfare, or adopt a bold programme of public works to stimulate economic recovery. It's Holtby's genius that a novel about local government should make such an extraordinary and absorbing read.

Ever a champion of the forward-looking "spinster", Holtby creates as her engaging heroine Sarah Burton, who is every much a woman of her times. Having lost her fiancé in the trenches, this 39-year-old teacher decides to return from London and apply for the headship of a local girls' grammar school. Her appointment divides the council and local opinion, though sufficient prove willing to back the local "lass" who wants to put something back into the community.

Chief among Sarah's detractors is Robert Carne, a gentleman farmer and horse-breeder, who by rights should be the book's romantic hero - if only Holtby believed in such figures. There are, however, no happy endings in store for the flame-haired headmistress and the "big heavy handsome unhappy-looking man". Success and satisfaction are destined to arrive in different guises - as was true for so many of Holtby's generation, whose hopes of marriage and family were dashed by war.

Rich in humour and worldly insight, Holtby's novel was largely inspired by the working life of her own mother, Alice Holtby, the first woman alderman to serve on the East Riding County Council. In an introduction addressed to her mother, Holtby pays tribute to a system of local government that she saw as "the essence of first line defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies - poverty, sickness, ignorance, isolation, mental derangement and social maladjustment."

Holtby, a close friend and one time flatmate of the writer and pacifist Vera Brittain, died aged 37, just months before the publication of what was to become her best known novel. This panoramic story of local politics stands as testament not only to Holtby's strong belief in public service, but her affection for the people and "rain-rinsed green" landscapes of her native Yorkshire.

From: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/south-riding-by-winfred-holtby-2171918.html#

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South Riding is a new three-part adaptation of the novel by Winifred Holtby, by Andrew Davies, for BBC One. This 20th-century classic is a rich and panoramic portrait of a Yorkshire community in the Thirties that carries surprising and refreshing echoes of our own time.

In the long aftermath of the First World War, Sarah Burton (Anna Maxwell Martin), comes home from London to Yorkshire. Having lost her chance of marriage and motherhood with her fiancé's death in the trenches, Sarah has become a very modern career woman, one of the "surplus two million" identified by the Daily Mail in 1920 as women who were unlikely to marry since their generation of men had been wiped out by war.

Now in her thirties, Sarah has come home to take up the position of headmistress at a struggling Yorkshire high school for girls. She is the very image of a modern woman, much more recognisable to her sisters in 2010 than she would have been to her contemporaries in 1935, full of ambition, passion and fire to take her life into her own hands and live it to the very limit of her strength.

But love has not finished with Sarah Burton – before the end of the story she must choose between the career she has fought for and the man least likely to have won her heart.

As Britain emerges from the Great Depression, Robert Carne (David Morrissey) finds he is an unlikely victim of a financial disaster. His family has farmed the South Riding for hundreds of years and he ought to be able to ride out the agricultural depression, cushioned by generations of family wealth.

But Carne is a man haunted by love, and he has spent most of the farm's income over the past 20 years trying to wipe out the guilt he still feels for the woman he believes he destroyed.

Past and present collide when Sarah Burton returns to the South Riding and clashes with the handsome haunted gentleman farmer. Their story is only one strand of a rich skein which tells the story of a small town community instantly recognisable to any age and in any part of the country.

Full of humour, pathos and tragedy, South Riding also tells the story of Lydia Holly (Charlie Clark), a 14-year-old girl with a difficult home life whose education is in jeopardy when her mother dies and she slips through society's safety net.

Shaun Dooley is Lydia's feckless father, Mr Holly; Miss Sigglesthwaite (Brid Brennan) is the incompetent science mistress of the high school who struggles to instil order over her pupils; Midge Carne (Katherine McGolpin), is the delicate and troubled daughter of Robert and his ill-starred first wife; Councillor Huggins (John Henshaw), by turns noble and ludicrous, is a methodist preacher much troubled by lustful thoughts who becomes embroiled in a game of political corruption way beyond his understanding; Alderman Mrs Beddows (Penelope Wilton), is the county's first woman Alderman whose sensible and competent demeanour belies a girlish heart that has inconveniently fallen in love with an unsuitable man; and Joe Astell (Douglas Henshall), is the Riding's only socialist councillor and rival to Carne for Sarah's affections.

South Riding is a rich, compassionate and humane story of politics in small places and, in the end, the indestructibility of the human spirit.

Made by BBC Drama Production North for BBC One, South Riding is currently filming in Leeds for transmission later this year and is written by Andrew Davies.

From: http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/comingup/south-riding/