COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: United Kingdom
GENRE: Psychological thriller
CHANNEL: BBC1 (USA - PBS)
PRODUCER: Ken Riddington
YEARS: 1989 (USA - 1990)
NUMBER OF SERIES: 1
EPISODES: 4
SCREENPLAY BY: Andrew Davies
ADAPTED FROM: Mother Love by Domini Taylor
THEME MUSIC: Patrick Gowers
DIRECTED BY: Simon Langton
STARRING: Diana Rigg
James Wilby
Fiona Gillies
David McCallum
Isla Blair
James Grout
Holly Aird
Amelia Shankley
Ann Firbank
Jeffry Wickham
Today marks thirty two years since the haunting drama, Mother Love, was first broadcast on BBC1. A disturbing tale of obsessive love, betrayal and toxic family ties in which Dame Diana Rigg absolutely stole the show as the spurned wife and deranged mother who will stop at nothing to avenge those who have wronged her (a true Avenger indeed!) So if you know you've upset Helena Vesey in even the smallest of ways... Don't accept any baked goods from her!
Mother Love was first shown on BBC1 on 29th October 1989, and was screened on US television almost a year later as part of PBS's Masterpiece Mystery anthology series - with the Mother Love episodes hosted by Dame Diana herself! We take a look at this classic BBC drama that suddenly made everyone appreciate their mothers-in-law a little bit more!
PLOT
Kit Vesey and Angela Turner are madly in love, engaged to be married, and ready to embark on the next stage of their lives together. There's just the small matter of Kit's overbearing, emotionally unstable mother, Helena...
Helena Vesey is a woman for whom loyalty is everything and she cannot bear what she might consider to be the slightest bit of betrayal. Furthermore she is a woman who is not afraid to dish out the severest of punishments to anyone she feels may have crossed her...
THE NOVEL
Mother Love was adapted for television from the 1983 novel of the same name, written by Domini Taylor (one of the few aliases of Scottish author Roger Longrigg.)
THE SCREENWRITER
The novel was adapted by former teacher and Welsh writer Andrew Davies, who has written for TV, stage, film and radio since the 1960s. Davies is best known for his TV adaptions of literary classics including Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, and Sense and Sensibility, with his first adaptation being To Serve Them All of Their Days, based on the novel by R.F. Delderfield. But that's not even the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Davies' work, so even if the name isn't overly familiar to you, you're bound to have watched something he's worked on at least once in your life!
As well as Mother Love, Davies is also well known for the political thriller House of Cards, and although not his usual genre, he also co-wrote the sitcom Game On. And us kids of the eighties will forever be grateful to him for Marmalade Atkins, and the Look and Read series Dark Towers and Badger Girl, watched by pupils at schools around the country during the eighties and nineties - before filling out the accompanying worksheets! Remember those, anyone?
THEME TUNE and CREDITS
The theme tune composed by Patrick Gowers is reminiscent of a parent humming a lullaby to a child. But far from sounding soothing it sounds quite melancholy and slightly eerie. There's a feeling of loneliness and overwhelming sadness that's just perfect for the series. For the opening credits, the theme tune plays over images of a an open eye in which a young child can be seen at different stages of his young life. The message appears to be that the child is quite clearly the apple of the mother's eye. But the opening images combined with the haunting theme tune creates an atmosphere that is cold, dark and macabre and thus quite fitting for Mother Love.
FAMOUS FACES
The most famous face of all was Dame Diana Rigg whose portrayal of the obsessive mother earned her a well deserved BAFTA award for best actress. A young Holly Aird also starred as the eldest of the Vesey girls, and we were very excited to have spotted Amelia Shankley as Harriet Vesey who had previous played the lead role in ITV's A Little Princess. David McCallum has had an extensive and successful acting career, particularly in America, that goes back to the early fifties, and prior to Mother Love, he had starred in The Man From U.N.C.L.E, Colditz, and Sapphire and Steel. His career is still going strong and these days he's better known as Donald Mallard in NCIS.
James Wilby has been acting steadily since the early eighties and after Mother Love went on to star in Crocodile Shoes, Casualty and Poldark. The very beautiful Fiona Gilles has starred in Holby City, Casualty and Coronation Street. Isla Blair has been a very familiar face on British TV having appeared in The Darling Buds of May, Taggart, and Casualty among many, many other shows. The late James Grout has been in countless TV shows since the late forties including A Very Peculiar Practice (also written by Andrew Davies) Z Cars and an episode entitled File it Under Fear of one of Nostalgia Pie's fave shows - Thriller! But the role he was best known for was Chief Superintendent Strange in Inspector Morse.
STORYLINE
When promising young barrister, Christopher 'Kit' Vesey proposes to his girlfriend Angela Turner - an art gallery receptionist who loves shared baths and bath toys just as much as he does, after a whirlwind romance of just three weeks - neither of them know that taking this step towards the next chapter of their lives will threaten to blow open a secret that Kit has been keeping for fifteen years... and that it will have devastating consequences for so many of those close to them...
Since the age of eleven, Kit - whose parents divorced when he was a baby - had secretly been in contact with his father, Sir Alex Vesey, a well-renown music composer, and his new family. The reason for the secrecy is Kit's very controlling, unstable mother Helena, who has never forgiven Alex for walking out on her and Kit after only two years of marriage to set up home with the woman he'd been having an affair with - photographer Ruth, known to Helena as 'the tart with a camera' - who Alex later married and had three more children with. A failed suicide attempt by Helena when Kit expressed an interest in meeting his father only further convinced the boy and the rest of the Veseys that they had to keep their relationship a secret from Kit's mother.
The Veseys are a great success story, both in their professional and personal lives, and live in very luxurious surroundings which further adds to a jealous Helena's fury, who is very resentful at having to struggle, scrimp and save in order to raise Kit on her own - while not actually realizing the role Alex had secretly been playing in their son's life.
After their engagement, Kit reveals the details of his childhood to his new fiancée and tells her that in order to be a part of his life, she will also have to keep this secret from Helena. Although initially appalled at the level of dishonesty from the Veseys, Angela reluctantly agrees to to keep this secret and is thus drawn into the Veseys' web of secrets and lies.
Viewers might initially feel sympathy for Helena, thinking that she is quite simply a woman scorned whose cheating husband and his mistress pushed her over the edge. She seems to have nobody in her life other than her beloved 'Kitten' and her cousin, George, who also acts as her chauffer, and eventually her daughter-in-law Angela and her granddaughters. But as Helena's story is told in a series of flashbacks going back to when she was ten years old, a shocking act she carried out as a child reveals that Helena had always been dangerously vindictive towards anyone who she perceived to be disloyal and treacherous, bordering on psychopathic, no matter how small the misdemeanour. Perhaps Alex was right to get out while he could! Though it was too bad he had to leave little Kit behind.
After their initial meeting, Helena feels that Angela is a woman that she can control so doesn't oppose the impending marriage between her and Kit. But Angela isn't quite the pushover Helena thinks she is, and as the wedding day approaches, Helena is very disheartened to know that Kit and Angela would be moving into a flat of their own rather than live with her. She'd be even more disheartened if she knew that Alex had helped them to buy the flat and not Angela's father as they had led Helena to believe!
Unfortunately married life doesn't provide any respite from Helena who is forever phoning a harrassed Kit and Angela, and tries to spend as much time in their home as she can. And her interference in their lives only increases when Kit and Angela have children of their own. When Kit becomes seriously ill later on in the series and ends up in a coma, Helena seizes this opportunity and Angela's anguish to move into their home. A move that proves to be distasterous as this is when Helena gets her first inkling that secrets are being kept from her, and takes it upon herself to uncover the truth...
Part one of Helena's vendetta against the Veseys occurs after Helena learns that Alex is to receive a knighthood. There's a magazine spread about the Veseys, and Ruth takes part in a documentary about her work. Enraged at their picture perfect life, and at Ruth for taking what Helena feels should have been hers, she decides to make them pay. So when a terrible tragedy occurs that shatters the Vesey family and sees an innocent man go to prison, no one realises that it was Helena who was behind it all. And when she sees the Veseys rebuild their lives and come back from the tragedy, a vengeful Helena decides to destroy them once and for all with an even greater act of malice...
WHAT WE THINK
We had an absolute blast watching Mother Love all over again. For those of you who thought Glenn Close struck fear into the hearts of any man who ever fancied a bit on the side, or anyone who thought that they had the mother-in-law from hell, well... you've clearly never watched Mother Love! There's never been any doubt that one of Britain's best loved actresses, Dame Diana Rigg was talented to the core, but she really did give the performance of her life as the out-of-control Helena Vesey. When it came to those she despised, Helena was pure venom, and what we'd like to know is who Dame Diana was thinking of when she had to film those scenes! Because she really was quite chilling - and we don't mean in a relaxed way either!
Diana Rigg may have been the star of the show but that does not at all mean that the rest of the cast did not excel in this series - because they all absolutely nailed it and worked very well together. Initially we weren't sure about the inclusion of the character Jordan Tennyson - we just didn't see her as a good fit in the Vesey household - but come the final episode, we definitely saw her as part of the family and she provided some much needed support to the Veseys.
The script is incredibly well written and like the cast's performance - faultless. We love how the tension just builds and for those who are watching Mother Love for the first time, you wait for that explosive moment where you know Kit is bound to be rumbled. And when it happens, Helena's reaction is a thousand times worse than what you thought it would be when the realization that the most precious person in the world to her has betrayed her in what she perceives to be the most cruel way possible.
There are no moments of boredom during this series and the viewers interest is held throughout every episode as we wait to see what Helena will do next. As TV adaptations have a more limited time structure than novels, a lot of the more seemingly mundane parts are cut out so we go straight to the action. Therefore babies are born without there ever being a baby bump in sight. Romantic relationships are established without viewers witnessing the initial period of courtship. The grief-stricken have miraculously recovered from their loss within a couple of scenes, and newborns reach infant school age in next to no time. In Mother Love, there's the sensation of time moving by very quickly so we get to the crux of what the viewer needs to see. But it's so skillfully written, that we don't feel that we're missing out on anything and everything still makes perfect sense. EastEnders' writers take note!
Because the of sinister storyline, you wouldn't expect Mother Love to have laugh out loud moments but it does. The scene where Helena became hysterical after being scared half to death by the Turner family's dogs at Kit and Angela's wedding was just the first. Her imitating her love rival Ruth's voice in order to convincingly dupe her cousin George over the phone was also amusing, especially her overuse of what she considered to be key 'Ruth' phrases. How many times can you use the words 'dreaded' and 'muddle' in a sixty second phone call? But what did it for us was the scene where Helena spies on Angela while in the back of a cab and sees her daughter-in-law and grandchildren with Alex and his wife. The faces she was pulling in the back of the cab that indicated that she was about to throw up alarmed the cab driver who had seen that expression from his passengers on many Saturday nights but he tried to remain composed. The entire scene was hilarious. We don't know if these comedic moments were intentional but they provided a pleasant change from the rather heavy subject matter.
We learn of what Helena did to her childhood friend, Maureen, very early on so we know that she is no angel. But despite this there is a very small part of you - perhaps because you're more human than she is - that feels sorry for her when you witness her growing isolation and you know before she does that her small but tranquil little world isn't what she thinks it is. Kit, Angela, and George are not only firmly ensconced within the Vesey household but they seem to prefer being there than with Helena. Even Kit and Angela's friend Danuta and their cleaning lady are in on the secret. Furthermore they genuinely adore Ruth, whereas with Helena, even though George and Kit obviously love her, it's more about tolerance and obligation; having to give into the demands of a very seemingly-fragile woman.
Helena may have pet names for everyone, and play the doting mother/mother-in-law/grandmother but she comes across as rather cold and false. She doesn't possess Ruth's warmth and exuberance that draws everyone towards her. There is never a dull moment in Ruth's home which is always filled with the sound of music, people talking, laughing and joking - a far cry from Helena's staid home and existence.
TEST-OF-TIME TEST
There is so much about Mother Love that just screams 'the eighties,' and that's great if you love the eighties as we so obviously do. But you don't have to be an eighties aficionado to enjoy this fabulous piece of drama. Good writing, a compelling storyline, strong characters, great acting, and over-the-top dialogue never goes out of style... darling! So despite the fact that Mother Love was made in the late eighties, we don't think it has aged at all.
Mother Love is very much a show of it's time - the yuppy era as personified by Kit and Angela - when everyone was hooked on soaps like Dallas and Dynasty with it's glitz and glamour; flash lifestyles and bucketloads of cash. And the more glamourous characters like Helena or Danuta with their shoulder pads and boxy suits wouldn't look out of place in Southfork or Denver. In fact the first time Helena appears, we couldn't help but think how much like Alexis Colby she was. If Joan Collins had turned down the role of Alexis, they could have asked Diana Rigg instead!
One thing viewers today may not recognize is the London that's represented here. It's one with spacious homes in St. Johns Wood; people purchasing artwork or looking to own galleries; where the streets don't look as dirty or crowded as they do now, and where even a receptionist can live more than comfortably without having to rent a room in a shared house! A very different London indeed! It's ironic to see a very coiffed, very polished Helena with her exquisite home and taking taxis everywhere complain about how she had to scrimp and save to get by when bringing up Kit as a single mother. We think a lot of people living in London today would have something to say to Helena about scrimping and scraping!
We thoroughly enjoyed watching Mother Love again. This really is a marvellous piece of classic TV drama. Diana Rigg did such a phenomenal job of playing the possessive mother and we really can't see anyone else in that role. She effortlessly glided between the elegant charmer to doting mother and grandma to manipulative schemer until she finally unraveled at the end. And as much as we're not a fan of sequels, in this case we'd take our chances as we'd love to know what became of Helena and the Veseys.
Photos: Dailymotion
Blog graphics and Word Cloud: Angel Noire