Tuesday 23 July 2019

|Gentleman Jack - BBC / VIDEO: How do you dress a 19th Century lesbian?




Gentleman Jack is a historical drama television series created by Sally Wainwright.Set in the year 1832 in Yorkshire, it stars Suranne Jones as landowner and industrialist Anne Lister. The series is based on the collected diaries of Lister, which contain over four million words and are written largely in secret code, documenting a lifetime of lesbian relationships.

Gentleman Jack is a BBC One and HBO co-production. The series premiered on 22 April 2019 in the United States, and in the United Kingdom on 19 May 2019. It was renewed for a second season by BBC One on 23 May 2019.

Set in 1832, the brilliant, endearing Miss Anne Lister leaves Paris brokenhearted and heads to the lush landscape of Halifax, West Yorkshire, England to restore her uncle's estate which she has inherited. This newly instated, androgynous and unusual lady landowner and landlord, encounters a potentially blossoming and dangerous romance with the fairer sex, which she records in a cryptic diary that no-one can decode.

In November 2016, screenwriter Sally Wainwright was awarded the £30,000 screenwriting fellowship grant from the charitable organisation the Wellcome Trust, in partnership with Film4 and the British Film Institute.[19] Wainwright disclosed to the media that she was writing a drama series about the landowner, industrialist, and intellectual Anne Lister and would use the grant to further her research.[20] In March 2017, it was announced that BBC One and American network HBO had commissioned the eight-part series, provisionally titled "Shibden Hall", after Lister's ancestral home of the same name.[4] Wainwright was announced as the series' director, and executive producer together with Piers Wenger and Faith Penhale.[4] A native of Yorkshire, Wainwright had grown up in the environs of Shibden Hall and had had ambitions to write a drama based on Anne Lister for over 20 years.[4][21] She described Lister as "a gift to a dramatist" and "one of the most exuberant, thrilling and brilliant women in British history".[4]

In July 2017, the series was renamed Gentleman Jack and Suranne Jones was announced in the protagonist role of Lister. Wainwright, who had previously worked with Jones in Scott and Bailey and Unforgiven, deemed her capable of embodying the "boldness, subtlety, energy and humour" required to depict Lister. In April 2018, Sophie Rundle joined the production as Ann Walker, Lister's intended spouse.

In November 2018, Katherine Kelly was cast in the role of Ann Walker's sister, Elizabeth Sutherland, Sofie Gråbøl as Queen Marie of Denmark and Tom Lewis as Thomas Sowden.

The series' ending theme song "Gentleman Jack" was written, and is performed, by O'Hooley & Tidow. It was first released in 2012.

Location shooting took place in Yorkshire and surrounding areas, including Shibden Hall as Anne Lister's home and Sutton Park, Yorkshire as Ann Walker's home.

BBC One released a teaser trailer for the series on 8 March 2019, followed by the first official trailer on 18 March 2019. The first trailer from HBO was also released on 18 March 2019.

Gentleman Jack premiered first in the US on 22 April 2019; followed by the UK premiere on 19 May 2019. The series premiered in Australia on Fox Showcase on 19 May 2019.

The Hollywood Reporter described Gentleman Jack as a "funny, smart, and touching story" which at times has the main character talk to the camera to explain her inner thoughts, allowing aspects of Lister's diary to be used. The Guardian review said "Suranne Jones rocks Halifax as the first modern lesbian...Anne Lister's diary [becomes] a thrilling coal-town romp that flirts with parody, so maybe it's Queer Brontë." Variety pointed up the drama's uniqueness: "Wainwright makes an intriguing choice that sets up a decidedly adult romance about devotion, trust and partnership that is rare for TV in general, let alone for lesbian characters in a period piece."

The series tie-in paperback was released on 25 April 2019 by BBC Books in the United Kingdom under the title Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister; and on 4 June 2019 in the United States by Penguin Random House as Gentleman Jack: The Diaries of Anne Lister. The book is authored by Anne Choma, who served as the historical adviser for the series.


Gentleman Jack is a true TV marvel – romantic, raw and totally radical

The wonder of Sally Wainwright’s lesbian period drama is the way it mixed the traditional with the groundbreaking – all while pulling in millions of fans

Rebecca Nicholson
Mon 8 Jul 2019 13.57 BST Last modified on Mon 8 Jul 2019 13.58 BST

Like Anne Lister herself, the Gentleman Jack finale strode its way to a happy ending with plenty of charm to spare. It galloped through its best episode yet with enough pace to put its quick-footed heroine in the shade. It was a shameless crowd-pleaser, and as a drama, it seemed as if the show had found its confidence and its stride. There will be another season, and though the marriage (of sorts) wrapped everything up in as traditional a manner as possible, it left the impression that there are plenty of adventures to come for the happy couple, and some of those will involve the surprisingly gripping world of early 19th-century coal mining.

As always, Gentleman Jack balanced sly humour and subtle pain. Lister gambolled around Copenhagen wooing aristocracy and royalty, when she finally worked out who the queen was (if only the queen had been wearing her Faroese jumper), even casting off her mournful black for a white and uncharacteristically exuberant concoction. Sofie Gråbøl’s mischievous “Time you got over it, perhaps?” burst Anne’s self-indulgently doomy bubble, and was much needed. For most of the series, Anne has been tightly wound and driven, barely able to relax in the company of Ann Walker. It was a joy to see her dancing so freely at the birthday ball, embracing her role as a provocateur. Suranne Jones has been excellent at conveying Anne’s more fractious side – poor Marian, who only wants someone to pay attention to her – but at last we got a real sense of her famous charisma, too.

It was a pity the Danish excursion had to end so soon, but both Anne and Ann were being rushed towards home. Miss Walker’s miserable Scottish confinement came to an end, with Ann presumably having had enough of staring into the sea swathed in the contents of an Edinburgh Woollen Mill sale basket. Sally Wainwright always writes sisters into her shows, and here, it was a beautiful act of self-sacrifice that set Ann back on the right path. Elizabeth (a brilliant, too-brief appearance from Katherine Kelly) realised that her sister might never recover if her own dastardly husband married her off to his broke and dishonest cousin and attempted to cure her mental troubles with motherhood. Elizabeth, no doubt, will suffer the consequences, but it allowed Ann to find her autonomy at last. As Ann finally insisted that she would deal with Captain Sutherland, and then she did, it was a gentle and deserved moment of defiance.

The episode was full of these delicate twists and turns. By the time Anne and Ann were reunited, it was the seemingly weaker woman who had found her strength, while the stronger had found humility in defeat. When Anne howled into the air, with a scream that might come to rival Meryl Streep’s Big Little Lies roar, it was she who was about to be rescued, not the other way round, as it might have seemed at the start of the series. Just as we had seen Anne liberated in Copenhagen, back in Halifax, she was fragile and vulnerable. “Don’t hurt me. I’m not as strong as you think I am,” she said, sweetly, before adding with predictable bluntness: “Well, I am, obviously.” Though it has been willing to follow its heart at times, Gentleman Jack has always resisted excess sentiment.

When the strings began to swell on that hillside kiss, though, I found myself taking a moment to marvel that a lesbian storyline so unapologetically romantic has been managing to pull in six million or so viewers every week, in one of the most prestigious primetime slots on television. LGBTQ+ audiences usually have to settle for seeing themselves as minor characters or in what scraps of subtext they can find, and there’s a long history of gay characters meeting premature endings (the lamentable “bury your gays” trope, which even Wainwright fell into when she killed Kate in Last Tango in Halifax; she later said she regretted the storyline).

What is wonderful about Gentleman Jack is how cleverly it manages to hold contradictory ideas true at once. This is the story of two women committing to a romantic relationship in 1832, well aware that they have already been gossiped about and condemned, and that the full extent of their companionship must now be kept secret from the wider world. And yet, as a series, it is also simply a romantic period drama that just happens to have two women at the centre. Its ending is either as traditional as it is radical, or as radical as it is traditional. The gender of the two protagonists is both everything and nothing. It is a complex balancing act, and Gentleman Jack has made it look easy.


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