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Mitford fans recognise each other; they’re the people in any bookshop hovering by the M shelf, picking up anything new about the endlessly fascinating Mitford sisters. A rabble of uneducated but dazzlingly posh girls, the six Mitford sisters (and their one brother) grew up between the wars in a succession of English country houses, raising bizarre animals, swapping cutting witticisms in languages they invented and pursuing whatever interests they could drum up in the absence of schooling. They were also scandalous. A century later, their fans remain legion.
Twenty-five years ago, scriptwriter and Mitford fan Sarah Williams read a new biography of the family by Mary Lovell, The Mitford Girls. Episodic television was entering its golden phase. This was surely perfect material: extraordinary, racy and real. “Then she wrote a pitch and had no luck whatsoever,” says Matthew Mosley, executive producer of new series Outrageous. “We met her, three or four years ago, and said, ‘We’d love to work with you; what story do you want to tell?’” The true story of the Mitfords, of course.
Outrageous covers the sisters’ volcanic lives up to 1937. Two of them – Diana and Unity – became prominent Fascists. Diana, having been known in the social pages as the most beautiful woman in England, was renamed “the most hated woman in England” after she left her wealthy husband for Oswald Mosley, leader of the Blackshirts. Unity persuaded her parents to send her to finishing school in Munich, where she made it her business to find and befriend the Fuhrer.
Bessie Carter as Nancy Mitford in the TV series Outrageous.
Jessica became a Communist and eventually a prominent journalist in the United States. Pamela became a gentlewoman farmer; Deborah married well and was known henceforth as the Duchess of Devonshire. Nancy, the eldest, turned their lives into comic novels – Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love are the classics – that have never been out of print. What is remarkable is they were raised under one roof and were fiercely devoted to each other – mostly, anyway – but headed in such different directions.
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“They were so isolated. They were so isolated,” reflects Bessie Carter, who plays Nancy. She is not only the leading character, but provides snatches of wry voiceover tying the drama together; we see their world through her eyes. “They were like this tribe in the countryside who weren’t allowed to go to school and weren’t really allowed to socialise, so they were really sort of starved of social connection. They only had each other and I suppose if you have siblings, if one sibling goes one way you probably want to go the other way just to spite them. There’s that kind of dynamic, which I think then played out on a global scale.”
Coincidentally, Carter has history with Nancy Mitford; a few years ago, she was chosen to read The Pursuit of Love as an audiobook. Television viewers may know her as Prudence Featherington in Bridgerton; she has a voice and face that fit easily into past times. One of the great things about Outrageous, she says, is that she didn’t have to wear a corset. “We were very much in an era where women could wear trousers. And I was lucky with Nancy; she was a lot more Bohemian in what she wore when juxtaposed with Diana, who is … like a steely swan.”
Joanna Vanderham, who plays Diana, is often seen in evening dress. “I was so uncomfortable. I had to have help going to the bathroom,” she says.
Joanna Vanderham as the most controversial Mitford sister, Diana, in the TV series Outrageous.
Producer Matthew Mosley has history of a different kind with this material. He is Oswald Mosley’s great-grandson, descended from the British Union of Fascists leader’s first marriage. Mosley never met his great-grandfather – he died before he was born – but grew up with that knowledge. “I’ve always been honest about it, because it’s important to acknowledge things that happened and that are still happening,” he says.
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Even so, it was a shock to find himself working on a series in which his disgraced ancestor was a major character. “There was a moment of thinking, ‘Oh goodness this is a very strange scenario,’” he says. “But I loved working with Sarah, I loved her writing and her take on the story, I found it so immersive.” The situation came to feel normal, with only odd moments making him gasp.
“Seeing the amazing Joshua Sasse step out on set in all his hair and make-up as Oswald Mosley and give that performance: it was surreal to be in that position,” he remembers. Sasse threw himself into research, collecting scrapbooks of images and nuggets of history that Mosley knew nothing about. “Joshua showed me a letter to Mosley from his mother where she compares him to the Messiah,” he told Time magazine. “That’s a strange little insight into his psychology that I won’t forget.”
As he points out, however, the main focus of the series is on the siblings. The Mitfords were aristocrats whose feet were firmly planted in another era; the paterfamilias, the second Baron Redesdale, was a huntin’-and-shootin’ dictator notable for mismanaging the family finances so badly they were forced to keep renting out their country house and moving into ever smaller London flats. There would be no more money; Outrageous is, among other themes, about the dramatic decline of the landed gentry.
A decision was made, however, to abandon the dialect of their class, long in vowels and clipped in consonants, which is – remarkably – now entirely obsolete. “We wouldn’t sound relatable if they spoke as they really did,” says Shannon Watson, who plays Unity. “It was as if they had speech impediments.” A dialect coach brought them into line with each other. “The point isn’t how they spoke,” says Carter. “The point is what they did in their lives.”
Anna Chancellor as Sydney Bowles and James Purefoy as David Freeman-Mitford in the TV series Outrageous.
This series finishes in 1937 – Mosley and Williams are hoping to make a second and possibly a third – when supposedly no one knew quite how monstrous the Nazi and Italian Fascist regimes were. News was filtering through, however, even to their country pile, thanks to Jessica’s monitoring of radical literature. Their arguments are disquieting. “I had lines where Diana said she was told about concentration camps, but it was Germany’s business and she didn’t intend to get embroiled in it,” says Vanderham. “I found it very difficult to say those lines. I couldn’t even learn them.”
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This dark seam runs through their story; the family, split down the middle within their little bubble of privilege, is a microcosm of a divided society. “I think at the heart of the series, it asks: can you love a family member and despise their politics?” says Carter. “And I think that is the relevant point of the series. Here were six sisters who were repetitively told they weren’t allowed to be educated, they had no role in society other than being a wife and mother and they said, ‘I don’t want that.’ And I suppose, when you don’t listen to people, you make them feel voiceless – and the voiceless will then go somewhere and scream louder.”
Outrageous, as the name suggests, is as much froth as it is about trouble. The Mitfords were fascinating, surmises Mosley, as women “who all, for better or worse, took their destinies into their hands and made their own fate”. But they were also funny. There are 17,000 letters written between them. “If you read any of them, you get the sense immediately that humour was the lifeblood of this family, it’s how they all related to each other.” Those intimate exchanges set the tone: there is the shadow of war, but there is also one sister kicking another under the dining table and giggling. “And to me, that reflects life as it is,” says Moseley. “It’s never all one thing.”
