Review: Love in a Cold Climate (TV)

Name: Love in a Cold Climate

Starring: Rosamund Pike, Elisabeth Dermot Walsh, Megan Dodds, Javier Alcina

Length: 2 hours 30 mins, over two episodes

Year: 2002

I’ve cheated! Love in a Cold Climate is still on my to-read list, but it is also on Netflix. After a busy weekend earlier this month, I conked out on the sofa, tuned into this mini-series and made a Christmas pom-pom.

The BBC adaptation of Love in a Cold Climate

Three upper-class girls in the 1930s are looking for love, and maybe even marriage. After a fairly dowdy coming-out ball, things start to get interesting for them. Our narrator, Fanny (Rosamund Pike), is constantly being compared to her mother, the infamous ‘Bolter’, a woman of – shall we say – a loose moral persuasion, according to the rigid standards of the time. I read about a real-life Bolter a few years ago in a book by Francis Osborne, and Idina Sackville was apparently the inspiration for Fanny's mother.

Polly, Fanny’s beautiful friend, has to endure ball after ball while her snobbish mother, Lady Montdore, waxes lyrical over her daughter’s apparent ambivalence to romance. It is Polly who questions, on returning from Imperial India, how love will differ in a cold climate. The secrets of her heart are revealed when she marries her uncle, her mother’s lover, the promiscuous ‘Boy’, scandalising society and officially cutting ties with the outraged Lady Montdore.

Fanny’s cousin, Linda (Elizabeth Dermot Walsh), defies her father by marrying a German man, and in doing so appears to fall on her feet, having both of the boxes ‘marriage’ and ‘love’ ticked. That is, until it goes pear-shaped when Linda’s head and heart are turned by a communist speaker in Hyde Park. Her story was my favourite, as her pursuit of true love takes her around the world and back again, ending in England during the Blitz.

This TV adaptation combines both Love in a Cold Climate and Pursuit of Love, so I’m not one hundred percent sure where one story began and the other ended. All the more reason to read the books! The show was pacy and depicted the girls' spirit as they navigated life, love and society in the changing world between the wars. The characters around them were eccentric and not always that likeable, which made Fanny, Polly and Linda all the more endearing.

One for a rainy Sunday afternoon!