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In Love With Barbara


Sunday, 26th October 2008

9pm to 10:25pm

BBC4

In Love with Barbara is a fine example of one of TV’s newer genres: the well-chosen, slightly stagy but quietly powerful BBC4 biopic. In other hands, Barbara Cartland could easily have been just a figure of absurd fun. But here her life was treated with a genuine sympathy that – more unexpectedly still – soon seemed entirely deserved. 


Anne Reid plays Cartland in her late-1970s pomp as the pink-clad and apparently indestructible Queen of Romance. Yet, the more the drama flashed back to the 1930s, the more it became clear that her whole world view represented an enormous and often costly act of will. 


We see the young Barbara (Sinead Matthews) had been in the tricky position for a society girl namely not being "beautiful, rich or titled". Before long she’d married a wealthy alcoholic, and suffered a humiliating divorce. She then dedicated herself to her beloved brother Ronnie (Tom Burke) and his political career until he was killed at Dunkirk. 


In the circumstances Cartland would have been forgiven a spot of self-pity. Instead, she responded by pretending that nothing unpleasant had ever happened and that, as her 723 novels so frequently put it, "love conquers all". 


By the 1970s, this capacity for denial had grown almost boundless. Cartland’s relationship with Lord Mountbatten (David Warner) was, she thought, heading towards marriage when he was murdered by the IRA. Receiving the news, she informs her staff that "there is no such thing as death", and went back to her writing. 


Through all of this Reid does a superb job of conveying emotions that her character is afraid of acknowledging. She is especially good at those scary moments when reality threatens to roll back in and overwhelm the performance that Cartland had long ago chosen in preference to her own personality.


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=== File Information ===

File Name:            In Love with Barbara (26th October 2008).avi 

Duration:      	       01:25:35 (128,375 fr)

File Size:            699 MB (or 716,718 KB or 733,919,232 bytes) bytes


=== Video Information ===

Video Codec Name:     XviD

Video Bitrate:        1004 kb/s

Bits / Pixel:         0.197 bits/pixel

Resolution:           608x336 (1.81:1) [=38:21]

Frames Per Second:    25.000 fps


=== Audio Information ===

Audio Codec:          0x0055(MP3) ID'd as MPEG-1 Layer 3

Audio Bitrate:        130 kb/s (65/ch, stereo) VBR LAME3.90




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