Lark Rise to Candleford, BBC One

Few would dispute the supremacy of Cranford and Lark Rise to Candleford among the BBC’s current fleet of costume dramas. Measured, domestic and infinitely gentle, there are no Machiavellian footmen or illicit trysts here, just wholesome country adventures championing those unfashionable values of honesty, neighbourliness and hard work. The lamentable histrionics of the recent Upstairs Downstairs could have done well to note these successes, adapting material free from obvious drama (and in the case of Flora Thompson’s autobiographical trilogy, almost entirely without plot) and fashioning from it something credible and engaging. Lark Rise has its saccharine-sincere faults, but there’s no denying that with its characters back in the Sunday-night television slot, all somehow feels right with the world again.

Setting the ambitious townsfolk of Candleford against the dwellers of nearby farming hamlet Lark Rise at the turn of the century, the series features a collection of splendidly unremarkable characters. A God-fearing postman and his timid wife, a pair of spinster seamstresses and a stone mason and his large family between them somehow generate enough narrative tension to keep a nation gripped – testimony to the delicate skill of writer Bill Gallagher. Struggling to sustain traditional ways in the face of progress and technological change, the characters of Lark Rise may not have the shadow of war to throw their actions into dramatic relief, but exist at every bit as extreme a social watershed, their economic and social balance more genuinely precarious than any of Downton’s dukes and duchesses.

“From now on I will live and let live. Whatever may befall my neighbours I will not interfere.” Anyone familiar with Candleford postmistress Dorcas Lane’s (Julia Sawalha) penchant for “meddling” (truly her “one weakness”) will have little doubt that the resolution with which this fourth series opens cannot last long, and sure enough before the closing credits she is once again up to her elbows in the affairs of others, rescuing strays, bringing order to disarray, and generally fulfilling a role that sits somewhere between fairy godmother and cinematic auteur.

The darting eyes and quick retort to ingénue Laura Timmins’s (Olivia Hallinan) sleepy gaze and West Country burr, Dorcas Lane makes for a deliciously flawed heroine, surely Gallagher’s most attractive embellishment of the original books, and a bold choice for the focus not only of the series’s dramatic but also romantic narrative. This latest episode sees the introduction of an appropriately brooding suitor-in-waiting in the form of Gabriel Cochrane (Richard Harrington), a dispossessed foundry owner with “a certain presence about him” who takes on the running of Candleford Forge. Though his (recently widowed) arrival is engineered with all the subtlety and artifice of a combine harvester, the character brings the promise of plotlines to come, and might finally see Brendan Coyle (Robert Timmins, pictured right with Claudie Blakley as Emma Timmins) challenged for masculine authority.

A well-trodden criticism of Lark Rise is its tendency towards soft focus, rounding the sharper edges of late-Victorian hardship. Bleaker than many, this series opener went some way towards answering such attacks, banishing moral keystone Robert Timmins to Oxford and leaving his family fragile and exposed to the dangers softened in series one by the comedic plight of feckless Caroline Arless (Dawn French, reportedly due for a return this season). A gentle homily on “human frailty” ensued, whose implications couldn’t hide behind any amount of lighter subplot or resolution.

Providing much of the show’s humour are postman Thomas Brown (played by Green Wing’s comedic genius Mark Heap) and ineffectual housemaid Minnie (Ruby Bentall, pictured left). Though only peripherally present in this first episode, much could and should be said of their work across the previous series – British character acting at its understated best, blending physical comedy, pathos and outright silliness into a concoction that has come to typify BBC productions.

With Gallagher departing at the end of the current series and Sawalha promising a fitting resolution to Post Office plotlines, the fate of Lark Rise to Candleford currently seems as precarious as that of its Oxfordshire villagers. I can only hope that good sense and ratings prevail, and that this decorous gem of a drama doesn’t get jettisoned for the fashionable new ready-meal plots and woeful anachronisms of Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs. Sedate it may be, but I’d take an hour in the solid, charming company of Candleford folk over the over-egged histrionics of its rivals any day. For those who disagree, there’s always EastEnders.

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