Although I would have enjoyed seeing some out gay characters pursuing relationships, for 1985, this was a pretty decent step seeing the gay characters of Georgie and Irene take their place in the ensemble. Very enjoyable.
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Raze-1, read the books; they're wonderful. You'll find that although nobody has sex in the books, Benson makes no bones about Georgie and Irene. He doesn't come out and say it, but a great writer doesn't need to stoop to that. But he does make it obvious.
"Don't worry. I'm not on the side of the saints yet."
I rather thought that Mr. Georgie was intended by the author to be more asexual than homosexual. No doubt about Irene though.
shareCompared to EF Benson's own family, his fictional characters are boringly conventional.
We always think of Victorians as being very straightlaced, but I can't imagine what would happen if any 21st Century Archbishop of Canterbury's family behaved like this lot.
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I thought Georgie was temperamental in terms of his love life. He was completely in love with Olga for a bit!
You must be here to fix the cable
I'm reading the books in chronological order and I'm only on the second one at the moment. They were written between 1920 and 1939. It is true that in the first book, Georgie falls in love with Olga, but I'm expecting Benson (who was gay himself) to recant later. Clearly Irene is gay, and I wonder about Lucia, since she is happy to marry Georgie as long as there's no physical contact, and she and Irene are emotionally very close in the TV version (although they balls up the final episode).
shareI'm engaged in watching the 1985 Mapp and Lucia, after seeing the newer and shorter version. You're right that the depiction of the gay characters is quite normalizing and frank. They are very much themselves and unselfconscious.
I've been trying to understand Lucia and Georgy, separately and together. Lucia seems to me rather asexual and worldly wise, and Georgy so softly childlike as played by Nigel Hawthorne that sexuality seems not to exist for him. That he suggests marriage to Lucia seems to me (not having read the books) out of left field. That she accepts without much discussion is surprising, except for the fact they are such excellent and close friends.
Irene being so put out at Lucia's marrying Georgy surprised me. Irene seems close to Georgy as well as Lucia, and she's worldly enough to know that her passion for Lucia will probably come to nothing. She must realize that the marriage is a companionate one, and that Georgy and Lucia will continue to be in her life as before.
At any rate, a very strange and colorful world that I had never seen before.
Irene may know that intellectually, but it still had the power to hurt her emotionally. Emotions can catch people by surprise if they're not emotionally aware.
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