#I dont wanna rain on your parade series
#I dont wanna rain on your parade tv

Mr Inspiration: Feared head - then lifelong friend.

SIMON HEFFER: Ruthless, but it DID help defeat a savage foe 13/02/15.

SIMON HEFFER: How could any sane Labour voter not switch to the Tories? 19/03/15.

A monstrous slur against my friend: The allegations against Enoch Powell are lies beyond contempt, writes SIMON HEFFER 29/03/15.

SIMON HEFFER: Why do people STILL lionise wife-beating IRA apologist John Lennon? 06/04/15.Goodbye to the man who could never admit he got it all wrong: SIMON HEFFER on how Ed Balls never shed his reputation for slipperiness and political thuggery 08/05/15.More from Simon Heffer for the Daily Mail. Why, then, was I left befuddled by the end of the first episode, which seemed to be the dramatic equivalent of several car crashes? If I, knowing the books well, struggled to make sense of it, where did that leave those who had never opened them? If Parade’s End was going down a similar route, I wanted to see it. I like Downton (and I must declare an interest - its creator, Julian Fellowes, is an old pal), and have never felt I have too many O-levels to appreciate it.

#I dont wanna rain on your parade series

That was another reason not to miss it.Īnd, finally, I kept reading that the series would be ‘a thinking man’s Downton Abbey’. But if anyone could do it, Sir Tom Stoppard, one of our greatest living playwrights, could. Such a work was never going to be easy to televise, particularly in five one-hour episodes. He requires concentration - he wrote in the modernist fashion current in his day, with its shifts of time and streams of consciousness - but repays it amply. They are not a quick read: my Penguin omnibus edition runs to 836 pages, but I would happily have taken more.įord’s writing bursts with originality and acute observation. I particularly wanted to see it because I studied the books for an English degree more than 30 years ago and admired them enormously.

#I dont wanna rain on your parade tv

Very occasionally something pops up on TV that you feel you really can’t miss, and such a moment came for me on Friday.īBC2 is dramatising Parade’s End, a sequence of four novels from the Twenties by Ford Madox Ford, and its advance publicity revealed the galaxy of talent involved in writing, directing and acting in it. Lauded: Actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays Christopher Tietjens in Parade's End