Where Jason played Pop as a sort of rural Del Boy in cords, tattersall shirt and a yokel accent, Walsh is a more authentic-sounding Kentish man, less condescending to Pop, and mercifully doesn’t resort to the annoying “perfick!” catchphrase every time he’s presented with an overflowing plate of roast goose (which is to say most of the time).
Bradley Walsh cheerfully carries the burden of the bustling Pop Larkin, the “golden-hearted wheeler dealer” as ITV propaganda calls him, and does so slightly more convincingly than I recall David Jason managing.
The cast, to be fair, actually doesn’t do a bad job with the thin material they’re handed. Maybe in the 2070s they’ll be making telly dramas set in the 2020s, featuring knowing, loving references to such quaint bygones as the Toyota Prius, Facebook and catatonic people in derelict shop doorways off their tits on spice.Įven for those of us who’ve long tried to maintain our distance from the Darling Buds phenomenon, the new series is immediately familiar, jam-packed with period props (rose-covered cottages, Morris Oxfords, Bakelite phones) and tiresome stereotypical characters. As if time machines, our tellies are transporting us to the idyllic heartlands of Heartbeat, Endeavour and Call the Midwife. Future historians, or better psychologists, should be in a good position to judge exactly why the British in recent decades have wanted so badly to escape their present. It’s a sort of Brexit Television, set in a post-war green and pleasant England that never was and never will be, but for which so many feel an overwhelming nostalgia (and so much so that they’re prepared to vote in their millions for a better yesterday). It is the kind of production that the new secretary of state for culture, Nadine “Mad Nad” Dorries would greatly approve of, mainly because it is precisely the kind of opioid atavistic tosh she churns out in her novels. About the best that can be said for it is that it’s no more glutinously sentimental than the original television version, which was rightly euthanised like a surplus piglet about 30 years ago. ITV’s new adaptation of H E Bates’s The Darling Buds of May, The Larkins, is an abomination.
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