Any human heart

British TV's Channel 4, one of the world's few sources of quality English-language filmed drama, maintains BBC-calibre standards of screenwriting, production values, and period stylishness. Its latest (2010) saga was Any Human Heart, William Boyd's adaptation of his own 2002 best-seller novel.

Through a set of memoirs, the life of an Anglo-Scottish writer (Logan Mountstuart) is used to represent aspects of intellectual life, literary ambitions and social mores from the 1930s onwards. It's the world, as Boyd portrays it, of the pre-WW2 privileged and moneyed classes, at university, in the Bloomsbury Set, around Paris and in London. It's the world of Hemingway (Julian Ovenden), the Duke (Tom Hollander) and Duchess (Gillian Anderson) of Windsor, and the fictional friends and lovers of the fictional writer, who also crosses paths with Winston Churchill and Ian Fleming (as spymaster).

Boyd excises various characters from his novel, such as Virginia Woolf, and concentrates attention on three periods of his central figure: young naif and lover (Sam Pillars of the Earth Claflin), middle-aged success and lover (Matthew Pride and Prejudice Macfadyen) and solitary old man (Jim Broadbent, stealing the screen, as always). Different actors portray stages of his best friends' lives in the upper class and Anglo-Jewry (including Samuel West and Ed The Pianist Stoppard). The main man's female interests are similar figures of historical import: Labour party activist, rustic lass, aristocrat, friend's wife (Kim Catrall) and true love (Hayley Pillars, The Duchess Atwell).

They're all part of the 5-hour 4-part series' basic flaw: its plot looks and feels too much like a fill-in-the-boxes DIY period-piece, a recycle of British/TV drama material from BBC dramatisations (usually by Andrew Davies) of every family saga ever written, lush Merchant Ivory movies, all the Brontes, Galsworthys, Waughs and Poliakoffs, and Upstairs, Downstairs and its derivatives. Boyd probably wrote a much more nuanced historical novel; it would be worth reading to find out, the next time I'm stuck beside a pool for a few days.