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The Hardacres is too sanitised and silly to really stir the emotions, but its old-fashioned stylings feel counterintuitively fresh and fun
3/5
The poisonous potential of conformism flowed through the penultimate episode of The Hardacres, Channel 5’s entertaining, if slight, rags-to-riches costume drama. After a calamitous soirée of fisticuffs and humiliation, Mary (Claire Cooper) and Liza (Shannon Lavelle) sought very different ways to ingratiate themselves with the aristocracy – the former by kowtowing to the appalling Lady Fitzherbert (Cathy Belton, gamely offering her best Maggie Smith tribute), the latter by wolfing down pills intended to combat “stoutness”.
Sam (Liam McMahon), meanwhile, found his efficiency drive at the docks backfiring when the eminently booable board demanded that he went further still and laid off some of the workers he had just won over. Which side would he pick? In The Hardacres, where good deeds are rewarded and baddies get their comeuppance, it was no choice at all.
While her brood continued to gripe about “curses”, Ma (Julie Graham), stirred by Liza’s brush with disaster, bucked them up with the sort of line Charles Dickens might have rustled up, had he written Crossroads rather than Great Expectations: “The only curse that money has brought is that it’s made you forget who you are… We’re Hardacres… We fight.” Money corrupts and you can’t buy class, you see.
The dialogue once again made Downton Abbey appear a paragon of subtle plausibility by comparison. Poor, lovelorn Betsy Temple (Sarah Agha) was lumbered with some of the worst of it (from “I think you’re brilliant, Joe!” to “You can’t mess with people’s feelings like this!”), but everyone in the cast had to field the occasional stinker.
The Hardacres is too predictable, sanitised and silly to really stir the emotions. Yet its old-fashioned Catherine Cookson stylings feel counterintuitively fresh and fun, both for a costume drama and Channel 5’s schedules. It may not be All Creatures, but at least it’s not Susan Calman on Air Fryers.