‘There’s going to be a war! What the heck do Sophy’s knickers matter?” What indeed, Felicity Kendal. This week marks the 30th anniversary of The Camomile Lawn, a bosom-heaving period drama that broke ratings records back in spring 1992. All is fair in love, war and lingerie.
Revisiting it, the hammier-than-Peppa-Pig five-parter often feels like a spoof. And wow, there’s a lot of sex and swearing in it. No wonder it was known as “The Camomile Porn” by the popular press. This is Game of Thrones with gravy-painted legs. Or perhaps Euphoria with a ration book.
All ravishing Cornish coastlines and lip-quivering passion, Channel 4’s starry adaptation of Mary Wesley’s beloved semi-autobiographical novel came as a welcome burst of nostalgic sunshine in PM John Major’s grey, boring Britain. It was written nearly a decade earlier when Wesley was 70 – part of a remarkable burst of creativity in her twilight years. This late bloomer only turned to her typewriter as a way to earn some cash after she was left impoverished by the death of her second husband. She proceeded to bash out 10 bestsellers in the last 20 years of her life.
The sumptuous miniseries was directed by theatre titan Peter Hall – who cast his daughter Rebecca as orphaned Sophy, the soul of the story. It’s an astonishingly accomplished turn from nine-year-old Hall, who radiates star quality in her first professional role. Wesley’s text was faithfully adapted by screenwriter Ken Taylor, who had previously turned Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown into a prime-time blockbuster.
Pulling in more than 7 million viewers, The Camomile Lawn became Channel 4’s top-rated drama ever – a record it still holds, with only robo-thriller Humans and Russell T Davies’s It’s a Sin coming close. At a time when most homes had only four channels, The Camomile Lawn’s potboiler plot and tabloid notoriety meant it attracted one-third of the total TV audience.
The handsome saga traced the intertwining lives of three genteel families. As storm clouds gathered over Europe in 1939, four teenage cousins visited a clifftop country pile in Cornwall for one last idyllic holiday. Their lives, as dramatic convention dictates, would never be the same again.
Wartime sequences were intercut with scenes from a family funeral four decades later, as the characters were reunited at a graveside. But who had died? Who had married who and were they being faithful? Who was a famous novelist and who had grown “fat and respectable”? And who was about to call a fellow mourner the C-word and throw a punch? This was an upmarket soap in the vein of Downton or Bridgerton.
A major draw was the pan-generational ensemble cast. Kendal starred as matriarch Helena Cuthbertson, owner of the enviable Cornish mansion with its eponymous fragrant lawn. It was Helena’s reminiscences in her dotage – with Kendal wearing a ropey wig, even ropier ageing makeup and slugging single malt from a silver hip flask – which framed the story.
Youngsters were played by Jennifer Ehle (the flighty, ludicrously named Calypso) and Toby Stephens (her brooding suitor Oliver), both making their screen debuts. Helena’s harrumphing husband Richard was winningly played by Paul Eddington. A clever piece of casting, since he and Kendal’s characters always had an unrequited vibe in The Good Life. The older Calypso was played by Rosemary Harris, Ehle’s real-life mother. Claire Bloom took over as midlife Sophy.
The family were joined by identical brothers from the local rectory, only ever referred to as “the twins”, along with Max and Monika Erstweiler, a Jewish refugee couple from Austria. Max became a famous violinist and, despite his ’Allo ’Allo accent and Einstein-esque grey fright wig, somehow managed to seduce pretty much every female. “You open the legs, ja?” he purred to one paramour.
However, it was mainly Calypso who put the phwoar-time into wartime. We followed her transformation from prissy virgin into prolific saucepot – a metaphor for how the war swept aside traditional morality. As Wesley herself said: “We were a flighty generation. We’d been brought up so repressed. War freed us. We felt if we didn’t do it now, we might never get another chance. It got to the stage where one woke up in the morning, reached across the pillow and thought, ‘Let’s see, who is it this time?’”
Wesley poured those memories into The Camomile Lawn, which saw all manner of bed-hopping and “raunchy romping”, as it was termed in tabloidese. Ehle’s screen career was launched with a string of nude scenes. “I haven’t done any nudity since and never will again,” she later said. “I didn’t realise there would be so much of it, but no one forced me to do it. The first time I felt really shocked – then came a whole day of naked scenes. I went home and was physically sick. I had forgotten that I’d be seen naked in a lot of living rooms.”
Predictably, there was lots of female flesh on display, with just the odd male buttock as a nod to equal opportunities nudity.
One memorable scene saw Calypso go into labour under a kitchen table during the blitz, with schoolgirl Sophy acting as midwife. As furniture fell and plaster crumbled around them, Calpyso screamed, “Fuck Hitler! Bugger that bomb!” while she gave birth to a son.
Cousin Polly (Tara Fitzgerald) formed a proto-throuple with the twins. She had their children but nobody knew who fathered which. Felicity Kendal, a pin-up for men of a certain age, steamed up their spectacles with a woodland sex scene that wouldn’t look out of place in current period romps Poldark or Outlander. Even the seemingly stuffy Richard and Helena swapped partners with Max and Monika. “May I fuck you now?” asked another character who was “fearfully randy”. Oliver demanded his “comforts” whenever he returned home from military postings, at one point telling Calypso: “I’ve got an erection. I want to poke it into you.” Steady on, old chap.
It all gave pensioner Wesley a reputation as a purveyor of posh smut. Her style was described as “arsenic without the old lace” and “Jane Austen with sex”. Her family disapproved of this late-career pivot. Her brother called her novels “filth”, while her estranged sister strongly objected to The Camomile Lawn, claiming some characters were based on their parents.
It wasn’t until the last year of her life that Wesley collaborated with biographer Patrick Marnham on an authorised memoir, Wild Mary. The title referenced her childhood nickname and her liberated sex life. Wesley shared her memories from her sickbed, saying: “Have you any idea of the pleasure of lying in bed for six months, talking about yourself to a very intelligent man? My deepest regret was that I was too old and ill to take him into bed with me.”
Nowadays The Camomile Lawn comes with a warning, not just about strong language and sexual scenes but “offensive, racist language and attitudes”. These were indeed different times. Racial slurs were bandied about, as was the word “Bitch!” (mainly on the rare occasions when women declined an invitation to bed).
Blimpish old gents in crumpled cream suits blustered that “concentration camps must be splendid places”. Calypso boasted about meeting “awfully nice” Nazis while skiing. Uncle Richard admitted an unhealthy interest in young girls, with references to him “groping” his nieces – which everyone dismissed as a harmless eccentricity. At one point, a coastguard flashed “his pink snake” at 10-year-old Sophy and ended up being pushed off a cliff for his trouble.
It’s a tale of toffs who are so pampered they don’t just own separate town and country houses – some have town and country spouses, too. Everyone goes “up to Oxford” from boarding school, dines at the Ritz or the Savoy, drinks like dehydrated sailors and demands kedgeree for breakfast. Uncle Richard nearly cops it when he ventures outside during a bombing raid to rescue a case of vintage claret.
The Camomile Lawn is like a time capsule. A relic of a lost England. It’s Brideshead Revisited meets Ian McEwan’s Atonement, with Jilly Cooper drafted in to sex things up. The acting is stiff, stagy and laughably plummy, like a bad Radio 4 audio play. Stephens’ attempts to emote are often reminiscent of a parody by Victoria Wood or French and Saunders.
Fittingly, proceedings climax in typically absurd fashion. There’s the sort of unconvincing, hysterically shrill laughter that might precede the credits of a bad sitcom, before Wesley’s nice-but-dim nymphos find themselves facing something truly dreadful. Something guaranteed to send a shiver down the spine of any right-thinking toff. As the series closes, some ghastly parvenu is overheard discussing his plans to dig up the camomile lawn and replace it with a swimming pool. Bally typical.
The Camomile Lawn is available for streaming on All 4 and BritBox
