Renting out your house to strangers is a guaranteed recipe for conflict. In Mapp and Lucia (29-31 December) it also proved a reliable source of humour.This is not the first television adaptation of E.F. Benson’s novels. Channel 4 made a celebrated series of them in the late 1980s, starring Geraldine McEwan and Prunella Scales. There have also been radio versions. This time the spinster Elizabeth Mapp was played by Miranda Richardson, while the widow Emmeline “Lucia” Lucas was portrayed by Anna Chancellor. The script was by Steve Pemberton, who also took on the co-starring role of Lucia’s camp companion Georgie Pillson.The action, set in an untroubled moment in the 1930s, was not complex: in the pretty south coast village of Tilling, where the population did little
30 December 2014, The Tablet
Pointed ladies
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