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See a whole new side of the ‘fascist' Mitford sisters in this Outrageous TV drama
The title says it all: a TV drama about the Mitford sisters – based on Mary Lovell's definitive biography of the 1930s aristocratic brood – Outrageous is exactly that, the ne plus ultra of frothing family sagas that just happens to be true. With a cast including Bessie Carter, Joanna Vanderham, Anna Chancellor and James Purefoy, it's a tale of six siblings who, between them, turned interwar societal rebellion and scandal-mongering into a fine art.
To take one example, on set just south of Oxford, deep in Mitford country, Toby Regbo – who plays Tom, the single Mitford brother, killed in Burma late in the war – and Diana (Vanderham) are discussing her forthcoming wedding… to one Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader. It is grim to hear Diana singing the praises and potential of the party her fiancé represents.
But it is also grimly fascinating, and reminds me of one of Diana's most famous lines, written in a letter to her sister Deborah in 1985. 'I must admit,' she said, ''The Mitfords' would madden me if I didn't chance to be one. How ghastly [they] all sound…'
That's the thing with any Mitford drama – see the word 'Mitford', and all kinds of ghastly preconceptions spring to mind. Yet, all of the sisters led remarkable lives (see right), and their stories keep resurfacing: it was only in January this year that they were in the headlines once again, with the discovery of youngest sibling Unity's diaries that revealed her relationship with Hitler, whom she idolised.
But according to the Bafta-nominated The Long Song screenwriter Sarah Williams, who has adapted Lovell's biography for this new series, even what we know is not the half of it.
'I was really blown away by the true story,' she says, as we sit for lunch at The Duke of Monmouth pub, half an hour from Asthall Manor, where the Mitfords grew up. 'It seemed to me more dramatic, more exciting than Nancy's novels [both The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate contain fictionalised accounts of the family's lives]. I knew they were semi-autobiographical, but they were all done in a kind of jovial tone.'
Williams wanted to remove that blithe spirit and get back to the facts, but when she first went to pitch to TV executives in 2005, she says that she encountered the same problem – people thought they already knew the family's story.
'I would say, 'No, you don't. The real story is so much more gripping.' But six women on a TV show was perhaps a harder nut to crack than it is now. I think everyone was a bit wary of it, saying, 'Hmm, they were all fascists, weren't they?''
Of course, the Mitfords weren't all fascists.
'That's the fascinating thing,' says Williams. 'They offer up such a broad, diverse picture of politics at the time.'
It wasn't until Williams came up with the title that she says she started to believe her passion project might get greenlit.
'Outrageous: not a dry historical look at the 1930s, but something about a group of rebellious, transgressive women. And that felt commissionable.'
The drama's tone is as punkish as the title demands, but its plot is still linear. It tells the Mitford story by focusing on each of the sisters in turn, giving all of them, their lives and their marriages, due screentime and context. Nancy, played by Bessie Carter (Jim Carter and Imelda Staunton's daughter), is the narrator, but that's because she is the primary writer of the group.
'Nancy wrote under her own name,' says Carter, speaking to me later in London, 'which at that time was pretty revolutionary. And yes, she was the eldest of this brood of six who were all incredibly different and unique. They all took very, very different paths, let's say!'
Beginning in September 1931, the series is set in the shadow of the Wall Street Crash and charts the family's fortunes through the interwar period. It is a time of great unrest, old certainties crumbling and new forms emerging. Although it introduces the Mitfords at their country seat, it stresses how their aristocratic parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale, were suffering financially. As the Depression cast a pall over the West and the spectre of fascism grew in its wake, the world was about to shift. And then, as Carter adds: 'On to that scene plunge these six rebellious, headstrong, passionate sisters who were very hungry to change the world in their own ways.'
'It kind of reminded me of Succession,' she continues. 'Although I know it's sacrilege to mention another show when you're talking about your own. It has that thing Succession captured brilliantly about a family dynamic being played out on a global scale. I'm an only child, but I think that sibling rivalry explains some of the Mitfords' thinking – if your sister is going to go that way, you're probably quite likely to head in the opposite direction.'
It's a story of ideological divergence that was best told by Mary Lovell, the author of The Mitford Girls on which Outrageous is based. Lovell met four of the Mitfords researching her 2001 book and got to know 'Debo' (The Duchess of Devonshire) particularly well. She joins Williams and me at lunch. What, I ask, made this one family such a hotbed of scandal, like a better-educated, literary Kardashians?
'They just didn't recognise walls,' says Lovell, who points out that the Mitfords found a fierce intellectual independence from their home-schooling. They saw the world differently and acted accordingly.
Lovell is 83 and terrific company. She has first-hand experience of the political fault lines that split the Mitford family just as they divided the world. 'I grew up during the war and I felt the fallout of what those sisters were arguing about,' she says.
'I mean, in the 1930s, there was a worldwide depression and so you had two possible solutions... or what they thought were solutions. One was fascism – and, don't forget, they had a very good model that fascism worked in what Hitler had done to Germany. We can forget about Hitler being the big bad wolf, because at the time he wasn't, he was just a politician with an extreme right-wing view.'
At the other end of the spectrum, Lovell says: 'You had what Dad, or Favre [as the Mitfords named their father], called 'the Bolshies'. It was only a few years before they had actually murdered the Tsar and his family. I should think the upper-classes in England were shaking in their boots at the thought that communism would come to their country, as it had swept the continent. I think that's the reason why a lot of aristocrats were hoping that Hitler and fascism were the answer.'
With that context, no matter how uncomfortable, it's not hard to discern why the arguments of the 1930s are once again replete with relevance.
'Life was just polarised,' says Lovell. 'In the same way that in 2016 we had Brexit. I don't know about you, but I lost friends over that. People were really fired up one way or the other. It's a minor thing, of course, compared with what they were arguing about in the 1930s, but people were forced to take a side.'
The irony, and a bizarre coda for Outrageous, is that it is produced by Matthew Mosley. As his name suggests, he is the great-grandson of Oswald Mosley, who married the fourth Mitford sibling, Diana.
'I did almost meet Diana once in Paris, but it didn't happen in the end,' says Matthew Mosley, speaking in the production office as the grips busy themselves with the Diana and Tom scene on set. 'It's a very strange inheritance because, obviously, he [Oswald] is such a national hate figure. And rightly so, as he was peddling terrible ideas. For my generation, it's so far away, it's almost like he was someone from a different planet. But for my father's generation and my grandfather, it was a big thing to grapple with.'
It may be far away, but today it is, oddly, also very close – just minutes from the production truck, Vanderham, as Diana, soon to be Mosley, is discussing her nuptials. And this being the Mitfords, there is always a drama to come: the wedding is to take place in Joseph Goebbels's home in Berlin – with Hitler as one of the guests.
'Maybe this will be something of a cautionary tale about the allure of the far Right,' says Williams. 'I would like to think that might be the case.'
