North and South (TV serial)

Plot

Margaret Hale (Daniela Denby-Ashe) and her parents Maria (Lesley Manville) and Richard (Tim Pigott-Smith) move to the (fictional) industrial town of Milton, Darkshire, in the north of England because her father, a clergyman, decides to leave the Church of England and become a Nonconformist. Thanks to his friend, Mr. Bell (Brian Protheroe), he is able to find a house and gains employment as a private tutor. One of his pupils is local mill-owner John Thornton (Richard Armitage), who gets off to a bad start with Margaret when she witnesses him beating a worker whom he has caught smoking in the mill, thus endangering all the workers. Gradually, Margaret gets used to Thornton, but his mother Hannah (Sinéad Cusack) and sister Fanny (Jo Joyner) disapprove of her, believing her haughty and alien to the customs of the North. In the meantime, Margaret attempts to do charitable work among the working classes, and thus comes into contact with Nicholas Higgins (Brendan Coyle) and his daughter, Bessy (Anna Maxwell Martin), who contracted Pneumoconiosis from exposure to the cotton-fibres in the mills. When Bessy became ill at Hamper's Mill, her father moved her to Marlborough Mills, Thornton's mill, because the working environment is better there. In a meeting with fellow mill owners, Thornton says he had a wheel for ventilation installed in all of the rooms of his factory, despite the fact that it costs a great deal of money. The other industrialists had refused to install a wheel because of the expense.

Margaret's mother is falling ill. Mrs Hale desires to see her son Frederick (Rupert Evans) before she dies. Frederick, a naval officer was involved in a mutiny and he cannot return to England without risking his life. However, without telling her father, Margaret writes to her brother in Cádiz, Spain, to tell him that their mother is dying. Margaret calls on the Thorntons to borrow a water mattress for her mother and is trapped while mill workers riot during a strike. When the angry mob threatens John's safety as he confronts them after Margaret's goading, Margaret defends him from the rioters and is injured by a thrown stone.

Margaret recovers and returns home, telling nobody about what had happened at the Mill, mainly to protect the health of her mother. When Thornton proposes to her the next day, she scorns him, thinking he believes himself superior because of the difference in their financial circumstances. He denies this and tells her that he is in love with her, but she insists that her actions were not personal.

Meanwhile, Bessy Higgins dies and Thornton stops coming for lessons from Mr. Hale. As a distraction for Mrs. Hale and for herself, Margaret visits the Great Exhibition with her Aunt Shaw (Jane Booker), her cousin Edith and Edith's husband. Margaret meets Thornton at the exhibition, where he is discussing the machinery with a group of gentlemen, all of whom are listening with great respect and admiration for his simple good sense. Margaret is embarrassed to meet Thornton so soon after her rejection but defends him when Henry Lennox (John Light), Edith's brother-in-law and an admirer of Margaret, tries to belittle him for being in trade. Henry's sophistication and reliance on fashionable wit and sarcasm compares unfavourably with Thornton's honesty when Margaret sees them together.

When Margaret returns home, her mother has taken a turn for the worse. Margaret's brother arrives just in time to see his mother on her death-bed. While Frederick is in the house, Thornton comes to visit his friend Mr. Hale, but he cannot be allowed in, in case he sees Fred. Thornton interprets this as Margaret refusing to see him. The family's servant, Dixon (Pauline Quirke), sees a former member of Frederick's crew in Milton town, and it is decided that Frederick must leave at once, before he is discovered and arrested. He and Margaret are seen together at the railway station by Thornton, who thinks Margaret has a lover.

Thornton gives employment to Higgins after Bessy's death, and master and hand get along surprisingly well, despite their differences. They come up with a plan to feed the workers cheaply in a communal kitchen, and Thornton comes to a greater understanding with his workers as they share ideas. However, because of the strike, Thornton's business is in trouble, and he is forced to close the mill.

Margaret's father dies in Oxford and she leaves the north to stay with relatives in London, but her godfather, Mr Bell, makes over his fortune to her when he finds out that he has a terminal illness and chooses to move to Argentina for the better climate. Margaret becomes the owner of Marlborough Mills and John Thornton's landlord. Thornton, having discovered the truth about Fred from Mr Higgins, goes south to see Margaret's home town, and on the way back meets her returning from a visit to the north. She proposes a business deal by which the factory can be reopened; after this the two share a kiss. Their final scene takes place on the railway station platform with both going "home" to Milton.

Cast

Origins

Sandy Welch started adapting Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 North and South in 2001, making a few changes to emphasise the industrial landscape of the story. Welch's story, for example, begins and ends with the main character Margaret Hale travelling by train, which is not the starting and ending point of the novel (although Gaskell describes the Hales travelling from the South to the North by train). Welch also made the main characters visit the Great Exhibition of 1851. These are changes Welch believed Gaskell would have done "if she'd had the time", since Gaskell had complained of being under pressure to complete the novel by her editor Charles Dickens. In the summer of 2003 Kate Bartlett was brought to the project as a producer and a ten-week period of pre-production started at the beginning of February.

Casting

Daniela Denby-Ashe had not originally auditioned for the role of Margaret Hale but for that of Fanny Thornton, and was not sure she would be participating on the project, but the producers had been looking for the right Margaret for a long time and Denby-Ashe's "directness, energy and charm" as well as the chemistry she had with would-be co-star Richard Armitage proved decisive. Armitage himself had been the first actor to read for the role of John Thornton and even though his performance had impressed producer Kate Bartlett and casting director Jill Trevellick, they still had to see many other possible Thorntons. Three weeks after casting had begun, Trevellick decided to recapitulate the first auditions, realising that Armitage was "perfect".

Filming

Filming took place from the end of April 2004 until July 2004. Gaskell's fictional town of Milton, Darkshire, was loosely based on Manchester, but the producers decided to shoot many of the town scenes in Edinburgh, which maintains more of its visual and architectural heritage from the industrial Victorian era. Keighley in West Yorkshire became one of the main locations, the cotton mill's exteriors were filmed at Dalton Mill. The scenes inside the mill were shot at Helmshore Textile Museum in Rossendale and Queen Street Mill on the outskirts of Burnley, Lancashire. London was another main location, all the interior scenes were shot at the Ealing Studios in west London and the Great Exhibition scene was shot at Alexandra Palace in North London. Other locations were Selkirk, a town in the Scottish Borders, Burnley in Lancashire, and the Bluebell Railway in Sussex, where the final and the beginning scenes were shot. Additional railway sequences were filmed in Yorkshire, using carriages provided by the Vintage Carriages Trust

As a costume drama, North & South required substantial work from the art department. In 2005 the serial's production designer Simon Elliot received a British Academy Television Award nomination for Best Production Design.

Music

Martin Phipps composed the score for North & South. The short piano tune is played throughout the whole series in different rhythms. The music is especially loud and clear whenever there is a turning point in the relationship between Margaret and Thornton.

Reception

As the BBC had low expectations for the series, it was not well publicised and went almost unnoticed by critics. Audiences, however, were more receptive; hours after the first episode aired in November 2004, the message board of the programme’s website crashed because of the number of visitors the site was receiving, forcing host bbc.co.uk to shut it down. This sudden interest on the serial was attributed to Richard Armitage, a relatively unknown actor, whose portrayal of the emotionally restrained John Thornton drew parallels with Colin Firth's portrayal of Fitzwilliam Darcy on the BBC's 1995 mini-series Pride and Prejudice, and the reception he later received. Armitage himself claims that the series was a success because of the "industrial landscape and the attention [that the series gives] to the working classes and the way they develop". The reaction to the series was a surprise to the BBC, who then decided to release the DVD on 11 April 2005.

North & South was voted "Best Drama" in the BBC drama website's annual poll in 2004. Richard Armitage was voted "Most Desirable Drama Star" and "Best Actor", Daniela Denby-Ashe was voted "Best Actress" (Sinead Cusack came in third) and three different scenes were voted as the year's "Favourite Moments", with the final scene winning the number one spot.