In 1927, Winston Churchill wrote to his wife Clementine, “I am becoming a film fan.” He had projection equipment installed at Chequers, the country home of British prime ministers, in 1943, and at his family home Chartwell in 1946. “Churchill and the Movies” is the fourth and final event of the Center for Constructive Alternatives in the 2018-19 academic year. We will view and discuss two films widely regarded as Churchill’s favorites, and two Churchill biographic movies in their historical context.

Hillsdale’s Center for Constructive Alternatives (CCA) is the sponsor of one of the largest college lecture series in America. CCA seminars are held four times each year. Students are required to complete one CCA seminar during their undergraduate years. They may elect to enroll in more. Lectures are open to the public, and out-of-town guests are welcomed. There is no registration fee and the program includes dinners and lunches. “Churchill and the Movies” is now sold out, and up to 400 guests are expected plus students. Watch this space for the web stream video locations.

Partial Schedule:

Sunday 24 March

4:00pm Showing of That Hamilton Woman (1941, 125 minutes). Produced and directed by Alexander Korda, this was Winston Churchill’s clear favorite among movies. It stars two actors he vastly admired, Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.

8:00 p.m. Filmmaker John Fleet: “Churchill and Alexander Korda.”  Mr. Fleet has made a study of their long and fruitful relationship might have produced several more epic movies, had not World War II intervened.

Monday 25 March

10:00 a.m. “Assault on Churchill”: John Miller interviews Richard Langworth on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 fm. The station will offer an audio stream.

4:00 p.m. Showing of Henry V (1944, 137 mins.) Arguably runner-up in Churchill’s affections was the 1944 British Technicolor adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” The on-screen title is “The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agin Court in France” (derived from the title of the 1600 quarto edition). It stars WSC’s longtime friend Laurence Olivier, who also directed.

“The Play’s the Thing…”

8:00 p.m. Richard Langworth: “Churchill, Shakespeare, and Henry V.”  Excerpt:

How well did Churchill know Shakespeare? Well enough, I think, to ace a Hillsdale Shakespeare course. Both by formal quotations, and by well-known phrases almost hidden in his text, Churchill draws allusions and understanding from sixteen Shakespeare plays, from Macbeth to A Midsummer Night’s Dream—though not, surprisingly, the sonnets.

The producer Marlo Lewis says Henry V introduces us “to urgent problems of statesmanship and, through them, to questions of political philosophy….the delicate matters of legitimacy and the founding of regimes.” I think that is an aspect, but not the most important aspect. Above that and first, the importance of Henry V is what it teaches about leadership.

Churchill wrote in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples that when one of Henry’s officers “deplored the fact that they had ‘but one ten thousand of those men in England that do no work to-day,’ the King rebuked him and revived his spirits in a speech to which Shakespeare has given an immortal form: ‘If we are marked to die, we are enough To do our country loss; and if to live, The fewer men, the greater share of honour.’” Compare that to Churchill’s greatest speech, 18 June 1940: “If the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

Tuesday 26 March

4:00 p.m. Showing of Young Winston (1972, 143 mins.)

8:00 p.m. “Young Winston and My Early Life,” with James W. Muller, University of Alaska Anchorage. An expert on Churchill’s autobiography, Professor Muller is well qualified to survey of this remarkable 1972 biopic, starring Simon Ward as Young Winston. The cast was sensational. Anne Bancroft as Lady Randolph, is leered at by Lloyd George (Anthony Hopkins). Robert Shaw is Lord Randolph (remember “Quint” in Jaws?). Young Winston’s evil headmaster at St. George’s School is the great Robert Hardy, who would memorably play Churchill many times in later years.

Wednesday 27 March

2:00 p.m. Richard Langworth: “Current Contentions- Winston Churchill and the Invasion of the Idiots.” A review of the virulent attacks on Churchill in the wake of Gary Oldman’s Oscar for his role as WSC in Darkest Hour. We will discuss four slanders in detail: Fake history in the television series The Crown. Churchill’s alleged 1930s “secret affair” with Lady Castlerosse. The continuing fable that Churchill exacerbated the 1943-44 Bengal Famine. And a renewed “golden oldie” beloved of socialists for a century: the Tonypandy riots of 1910. Excerpt:

Netflix’s The Crown is a not-so-crowning-achievement about the present Queen’s ascent to the throne and her first years as monarch. It starts off well enough. Claire Foy is an honest Elizabeth II.  Matt Smith is a gaudy Prince Philip, acting the foolish playboy. Dame Harriet Walter plays a graceful Clementine Churchill.

John Lithgow as Churchill is good on the voice and mannerisms, minimizing his 6-foot-4 stature with a stoop, and by sitting down a lot. But the script gives him a cartoonish image, far from reality. All too quickly, Lithgow becomes a wheezing old gaffer, clinging stubbornly to power. Productions like The Crown suggest that truth and accuracy matter less than style and perception; that reality must bend to fit the creator’s mindset.

* * *

4:00 p.m. Showing of The Gathering Storm (2002, 96 mins.) Stars the late Albert Finney as Churchill and Vanessa Redgrave as Clementine. This is one of the better World War II biographical movies. Even in a cynical and anti-hero age, filmmakers still can avoid reducing Churchill to a flawed burlesque or a godlike caricature. Except for huge gap in the story line, The Gathering Storm is outstanding. (The gap is Munich, because the film skips it in the rush to war.)

8:00 p.m. Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arnn: “Churchill as War Leader.” Dr. Arnn is co-editor with Martin Gilbert of The Churchill Documents. Few scholars have devoted more time over the years to studying Churchill’s statesmanship; his remarks stand to be the outstanding feature of this event.

Thursday 28 March

4:00 p.m. Faculty Round Table: Daniel Coupland, James Brandon, Darryl Hart, David Stewart

Excerpted from a review for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.

PBS and ITV have succeeded where many failed. They offer a Churchill documentary with a minimum of dramatic license, reasonably faithful to history (as much as we know of it). Churchill’s Secret limns the pathos, humor, hope and trauma of a little-known episode: Churchill’s stroke on 23 June 1953, and his miraculous recovery. For weeks afterward, his faithful lieutenants in secret ran the government. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, the film is worth seeing, and worth going to see.

Sadness attends our mortality, death comes to us all. Sir Winston teetered in 1953; only his inner circle knew how close he had come. The “secret” has been public now for fifty years, since publication of his doctor’s diaries in 1966. But at the time it was a secret. Not a word leaked, thanks to family, staff, and three press barons—Beaverbrook, Bracken and Camrose. Private secretary John Colville wrote: “They achieved the all but incredible, and in peace-time possibly unique, success of gagging Fleet Street, something they would have done for nobody but Churchill.”

Secret Pathos

Exactly how ill the Prime Minister really was I leave to experts. At the time, many close to him thought he would die. Colville wrote: “he went downhill badly, losing the use of his left arm and left leg.” In the film Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran (Bill Paterson), summoned to Downing Street, finds the PM singing incoherently: “I’m forever blowing bubbles.” Great heavens, I thought, they are going to link this to Marigold….

“Bubbles” was the favorite song of a 2 1/2-year-old daughter who died in 1921. Rarely mentioned, Marigold was buried in a corner of their hearts. With poignant flashbacks, the film unfolds their memories of the loss they still deeply felt. In a moving scene, Clementine tearfully recounts Marigold’s story to her husband’s nurse. As a device for portraying her and Winston’s humanity, this is a touch of genius.

The nurse, Millie Appleyard (Romola Garai) is the film’s only fictional character. She is meant to represent “the help”—too numerous to catalogue in the space of a short film. Millie has a Yorkshire accent but her father, she tells Churchill, was Welsh: “and no fan of yours.” (WSC once allowed deployment of troops during the Welsh miners strike in 1910.) Devoted to his recovery, but always her own woman, Millie sees the job through. Confronting all challengers, she’s a perfect foil for Churchill, his wife, and their sometimes obstreperous family.

Expert Casting

Critics who say PBS dotes on British drama forget that UK theatre offers unequalled depths of talent. There are so many exceptional actors that casting lookalikes for a historical film is a relative breeze. In Churchill’s Secret, the casting is superb.

Michael Gambon is an excellent Churchill: more drawn, less cherubic, but perfect in his mannerisms and bearing. Lindsay Duncan as Clementine is almost up to the standard set by Vanessa Redgrave, brilliant alongside Albert Finney’s Churchill in “The Gathering Storm” (2002)—and far superior to Sian Phillips, the great Robert Hardy’s opposite number in “The Wilderness Years” (1981).

Supporting actors are outstanding. Colville (Patrick Kennedy) and Christopher Soames (Christian McKay)—who bore the burden of state in those anxious days—could not be more lifelike. R.A. “Rab” Butler (Chris Larkin)—a Chamberlainite who had never liked and hoped to replace Churchill, whom he had hoped would retire since 1945—is the same weak reed he was in life. “I hope you don’t think of me as an enemy,” says Rab to a rapidly recovering Churchill in August. The Prime Minister replies: “I don’t think of you at all, Rab.” 

The portrayal of the Churchill children, boozing and bickering (correctly excepting Mary), is over-emphasized. These scenes are admittedly fiction. No one alive knows what really happened at Chartwell in those secret weeks. The family and staff I talked to never mentioned rows during those weeks. The film strives however to represent how the three elder children must have felt, and certainly acted, at one time or another. They had grown up under a great shadow in trying times. As Moran (perhaps wise before the fact) is made to remark: “There’s a price to pay for greatness, but the great seldom pay it themselves.” 

What Good’s a Constitution?

More time could have been spent on how Colville and Soames held the fort while the boss recovered.  Churchill once wrote a famous article, “What Good’s a Constitution?” In 1953, they must have asked themselves that question.

Today it would be impossible to keep a lid on such a secret. What they did might indeed be thought unconstitutional. Yet the nation owed a debt to those responsible lieutenants, who acted only when they knew the PM would approve. As Colville remembered:

…the administration continued to function as if he were in full control. We realised that however well we knew his policy and the way his thoughts were likely to move. We had to be careful not to allow our own judgment to be given Prime Ministerial effect. To have done so, as we could without too great difficulty, would have been a constitutional outrage. It was an extraordinary, indeed perhaps an unprecedented, situation….Before the end of July the Prime Minister was sufficiently restored to take an intelligent interest in affairs of state and express his own decisive views. Christopher and I then returned to the fringes of power, having for a time been drawn perilously close to the centre.

K.B.O.

While the testimony of insiders certainly suggests a close call, many were confident that Churchill would recover. The morning after the stroke, wrote Mary Soames, he “amazingly presided at a Cabinet meeting, where none of his colleagues thought anything was amiss.” She quoted Harold Macmillan: “I certainly noticed nothing beyond the fact that he was very white. He spoke little, but quite distinctly.” By the time he arrived at Chartwell on the 25th, he was at rock bottom. Yet a month later he was well enough to be driven the three-hour journey to Chequers, the PM’s official country house, and was resuming his literary and political work.

Churchill’s Secret is replete with Sir Winston’s famous admonition in the face of misfortune, K.B.O. (Keep Buggering On.) Amid growing calls for his retirement, he was determined to stay—long enough at least for one more try at his final goal: a permanent peace. The film is not clear about how much time elapsed between the stroke and the “test” Churchill set for himself. That was the Conservative Party Conference at Margate. There on October 10th he would have to make a major, fifty-minute speech. It was do or die: We are rushed through the weeks to Margate, actually almost four months after he was stricken.

Of course he brought the house down. Jock Colville noted: “He had been nervous of the ordeal: his first public appearance since his stroke and a fifty-minute speech at that; but personally I had no fears as he always rises to occasions. In the event one could see but little difference, as far as his oratory went, since before his illness.”

“See them off, Winston”

Some observers have faulted the portrayal of Clementine in Churchill’s Secret—not for Lindsay Duncan’s skillful acting, but for the words the script has her say. To some she seems a whiny, self-centered neurotic, the very picture given in recent biography.

I honestly didn’t have that impression. At Margate Clementine tells him firmly: “See them off, Winston.” Their daughter told me Clementine had thought in June that his life was ending. The film suggests that Lady Churchill had many regrets; and she did. She genuinely believed—and had for a long time—that he had stayed too long. “Clementine bore the brunt of all this,” Mary wrote, “and her anxiety concerning his political intentions was great.”

The film establishes a reasonably accurate picture of Lady Churchill. “None of us would be here without him,” one of his children says, “And he wouldn’t be here without you.” Winston himself tells her: “I shall face anything with you, the Tories, the Russians—even death itself.”

Unlike certain frothy popular accounts, Churchill’s Secret makes it clear that come what may, Clementine was the rock on which he depended. As he said of her on many occasions: “Here firm, though all be drifting.”

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods…”
—“Horatius,” stanza XXVII in Lays of Ancient Rome, by Thomas Babbington Macaulay. Recited at the beginning and at the end of “Into the Storm.”

Here is a TV docudrama packing exceptional honesty. At an age when most men retire (or in his time die), Churchill gets command of his nation when no one else wants it. It is Britain’s greatest crisis in history. They fight alone, save for their kith and kin.  And they win—only to see the old man dismissed in the moment of victory.

Gleeson at his Churchilllian best

The opening scene is Hendaye, France, July 1945, where Churchill, his wife and daughter Mary spend a week’s break. It is between polling-day in the British General Election and the start of the Potsdam Conference. Anxious for election returns, Churchill relives the past five years in a series of flashbacks. This is the film’s one jarring element. The back-and-forth occurs without obvious transition. You have to remind yourself whether you are in the past or present. It is the only fault worth noting. The story is massive, the action real, the history honest, the dialogue convincing. The scenes are artful, the acting superb.

Brendan Gleeson, who in life speaks with a heavy Irish brogue, is the best Churchill since Robert Hardy. He falls into none of the usual traps. Most Churchill impersonators overdo the accent or the famous lisp. They repeat the V-sign, toilet scenes and siren suits. These are caricatures painted by Lord Moran or Alanbrooke. Gleeson’s work was praised by WSC’s daughter Lady Soames, the sternest of critics.

Good scriptwriting

Hugh Whitemore was sensitive scriptwriter of Scott’s preceding film, “The Gathering Storm.” Again he helps by not loading the dialogue with soaring rhetoric. “Papa spoke in private,” his daughter says, “much as he did in public.” And here is the private Churchill, with doubts about winning, fears of the future, and faults of his own—for he was as human as anyone, freely admitted it, and often apologized for it, especially to his wife.

Several quotes, though real enough, are taken out of time or context. But Whitemore blends them flawlessly into the story, and the student of Churchill’s words doesn’t mind. Several scenes—the famous “naked encounter” with Roosevelt is one—didn’t happen that way, but are so seamlessly integrated and well acted as to make them believable and acceptable. Churchill’s habits—like the mandatory siesta which enabled him to work into the wee hours—are deftly conveyed in a line of dialogue. There is no bending of history for the sake of drama. Only the advanced pedant can object to the film’s artistic license.

Janet McTeer is no Vanessa Redgrave, the archetypal Clementine in “The Gathering Storm.” She doesn’t even look like Clementine, falling short of the character described by her daughter Mary’s biography. Though she gives WSC good advice, she seems more of a neurotic scold than a pillar of strength. It doesn’t matter because Gleeson, “throws himself into the character and completely owns him,” as Daniel Carlson writes, “from the nonstop cigars to the famous cadence of his speeches. Gleeson is believably tough but doesn’t make Churchill a warmonger or bully; if anything, he’s burdened by the thought of the boys he has sent to die.”

Pros and cons

Carlson has his finger on the outstanding quality of this film: its sensitivity to Churchill’s true persona. Despite many opportunities for ignorant political posturing—the leveling of German cities, for example—Scott and Whitemore always have Churchill saying what he truly believed—culled in this case from My Early Life (1930): “War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid.”

Into the Storm packs less depth than “The Gathering Storm”—like the persecution of Ralph Wigram for sending WSC secret reports on German rearmament, and the bravery of his wife Ava during threats against their family. But too much is going on for sidebars. This is World War II, remember: the French debacle, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, Pearl Harbor, Singapore, the fraught meetings with Roosevelt (Len Cariou) and Stalin (Alexy Patrenko), the all-or-nothing assault on Normandy. Leadership is the plot, sub-plot and sidebar.

Better a sequel?

Some Churchillians have asked why Ridley Scott couldn’t have stopped at Pearl Harbor, and done a third film later; why there couldn’t be multiple parts; why it wasn’t a Churchill version of Lord of the Rings. Indeed, I criticized The Gathering Storm for skipping over Neville Chamberlain and Munich. But the best editor I ever worked for said: “A bore is someone who tells everything.” And we are not filmmakers. We have no idea what constraints the producers labored under. We do know that Ridley Scott had ninety minutes. And what he does to portray the real Winston Churchill is a work of genius.

My enduring impression of “Into the Storm” is of an old man, realizing after the most heroic chapter in his country’s history that history itself has passed him by, the Britain he loved vanished before his eyes. “The palmy days of Queen Victoria and a settled world order,” as Churchill put it in 1947, are gone forever. The war is won, the country lost in a Socialist dream. Hardly, alas, unfamiliar: a signal message in 2009.

Modern reflections

A lot of us who grew up in Churchill’s time feel the way Churchill does at the end of this film, as he reads a sympathetic post-election note from his old friend Jack Seely: “I feel our world slipping away.” Churchill thinks back: “I met him in South Africa, riding across the veldt. He was Col. Seely then. I saw him at the head of a column of British cavalry, riding twenty yards in front, on a black horse. I thought of him as the very symbol of Imperial power.”

Watching this film, I had the odd sensation that it was well Britain chose World War II for what John Charmley called “The End of Glory.” British power and faith, focused one last time by a leader steeped in history and language, held the fort “till those who hitherto had been half blind were half ready.” Better to go out in a flash of light than face the long decline that seems now to attend another superpower. “The proud American will go down into his slavery without a fight,” Pravda (astonishingly) declared, “beating his chest and proclaiming to the world how free he really is.” That will take years. For Britain the End of Glory came in months.

“Yes, I’ve worked very hard and achieved a great deal,” Churchill reflected at the end of his long life, “only to achieve nothing in the end.” A life that rose to the heights of fame, the honors of the world showered upon him—for what? “I feel,” he said, “like an aeroplane at the end of its flight, in the dusk, with the petrol running out, in search of a safe landing.”

Not only he.

Churchill films seldom engender unanimity. But everyone who watched the preview, by kind invitation of the British Consul in Boston, had the same reaction. “The Gathering Storm” is really good. Even in a cynical and anti-hero age, filmmakers still can avoid reducing Churchill to a flawed burlesque or a godlike caricature. Except for huge gap in the story line, “The Gathering Storm” is outstanding.

Best performances

The two greatest supporting roles are female. Clementine Churchill was misplayed by Sian Phillips in the “Wilderness Years” documentary. But here Clemmie gets justice at the hands of Vanessa Redgrave.

Redgrave not only looks the part—grandson Winston Churchill, who should know, told me the resemblance is uncanny. But scriptwriter Hugh Whitemore has also provided her with exactly the right lines as she cajoles, scolds, wheedles and encourages her husband. “I often put myself in Clemmie’s shoes,” wrote Lady Diana Cooper. “And often felt how they pinched and rubbed till I kicked them off, heroic soles and all, and begged my husband to rest and be careful. Fortunately, Clemmie was a mortal of another clay.”

Ava Wigram

Equally compelling is Ava (Lena Headey), the beautiful wife of Ralph Wigram (Linus Roache). As Martin Gilbert revealed in the official biography, Wigram risked his career to bring Churchill secrets on German rearmament. Devotedly, Ava bears her husband’s strain, their deep concern for their young, autistic son. And the worst that politics can throw at her.

Angered by Wigram’s aid to Churchill, the government reacts. A toady named Pettifer (actually Board of Trade President Walter Runciman) visits Ava with a threat. If her husband doesn’t stop helping Churchill he will be transferred abroad, leaving Ava and the boy alone in London. She tells him to do his worst and throws him out.

This is an overdue tribute to a little-known heroine. Ava Bodley married Ralph Wigram in 1925. After Ralph’s premature death in 1936 she wrote to Churchill… “He adored you so & always said you were the greatest Englishman alive.” In 1941 she married John Anderson, Viscount Waverly, Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was he for whom the Anderson Shelter was named. Churchill was devoted to Ava all his life. When Anderson died in 1958, Churchill telephoned her from Chartwell. “After commiserating with her on Lord Waverly’s death he was silent for a while,” writes Martin Gilbert. Then he said “with what sounded like tears in his voice, ‘For Ralph Wigram grieve.'”

Finney and supporting cast

Albert Finney as Churchill is ten or fifteen years too old and looks more like WSC’s nephew Peregrine. But his mannerisms and pale blue eyes are right, and he grows on you, despite unnecessary toilet scenes and red velvet siren suits worn round the clock. Finney overplays the role—every Churchill impersonator does, except the inimitable Robert Hardy. But he is all right. Again Whitemore’s script comes through. Here and there is a snatch of words Churchill spoke in later or different contexts. (A 1939 broadcast to America is recast as a Commons speech in 1936.) But the flow is so seamless that only the determined critic will notice.

The rest of the casting is good—not as physically exact as in “The Wilderness Years,” but convincing and finely directed by Richard Loncraine. Sarah Churchill should have had a flame red wig to hide that mousy hair, and Brendan Bracken also starts too dark-haired, though his mop reddens as the crisis mounts! Randolph Churchill is too young and silly. Nigel Havers was a better Randolph in the 1982 version. Derek Jacobi makes a lifelike Stanley Baldwin. Sir Robert Vansittart (Tom Wilkinson) is the uneasy Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, balancing loyalty to his government with fear for his country, saying of Churchill, “he demands total loyalty,” and implying that it’s worth it.

Fine scenes with a major gap

The opening scenes at Chartwell in 1934 play like William Manchester’s prologue to his second volume of The Last Lion, providing a penetrating look at the household down to “Mr. Accountant Woods,” who on cue pronounces Winston’s finances a shambles. Winston’s hobbies—painting, bricklaying, feeding his fish, watching his pigs (the famous pig line is de rigueur)—are nicely done, though the fishpond is not the one at Chartwell. Mary Churchill (now Lady Soames) looks more like a young Chelsea Clinton than the beautiful Mary. Ronnie Barker is almost ideal as Inches, the long-suffering and devoted butler, but Barker is too English; as his grandson advises me (see comments), Inches was a Scot.

If this film were not so good, the gap in the story line would be unforgivable: After 1936 and Baldwin’s retirement as Prime Minister, we skip ahead to the war and Churchill’s arrival at the Admiralty. How can a film entitled “The Gathering Storm” ignore the premiership of Neville Chamberlain and Munich?

Granted, there are only ninety minutes, and one can understand the omission of, say, the Abdication Crisis. But without Munich the story falls short of its dramatic potential. Sadly too, Churchill in Commons mainly utters only banal statistics about aircraft production (too often to an empty House—most times he packed the place). By devoting fewer minutes to India and aircraft, they could have allowed Finney to tackle that most famous prewar oration, after Munich: “I have watched this famous island descending the stairway which leads to a dark gulf.”

Final thoughts

A minor flaw is the failure to identify all the characters. Modern audiences would benefit from seeing the credits before the film, the actors portrayed alongside a few lines identifying the characters they represent. But there’s little else to criticize, and what’s missing in 1937-39 is balanced by what’s included in 1934-36. Perhaps they’ve left room for a sequel?

The essence of this film is not so much the urgency of the hour, the naiveté of Britain’s leaders, their refusal to act “until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong,” Churchill’s defiant warnings when nobody would listen (his true finest hour, many think)—and the relevance of Britain’s inertia to our growing lethargy today, in the face of equally perilous threats. All that is there—but primarily this is a love story.

The intensity of Winston and Clementine’s devotion to one another permeates the tale. From their spats over money to their rapid reconciliations; from Winston’s chagrin at Clemmie’s four-month sojourn in the South Seas (“If it weren’t for Mary I’d be awfully miserable”), to his impromptu romp through his fishpond upon her return; to his touching tribute as he heads for the Admiralty (“thank you for loving me”), the film exudes the emotional ties that all marriages should have, and theirs did. Churchill once described his marriage: “Here firm, though all be drifting.” Fortunately for him, it really was. Give BBC and HBO a tip of the hat.