The Baftas are good to celebrate a slew of exceptional series revealing that no life is ordinaryWhen it comes to art,I’ve never subscribed to the view that people need always to be able to see, whether on screen or on the page, and someone just like themselves,living a life precisely like their own. If a novel or a film reaches us, it’s because we recognise the emotional terrain, or not because we’re thinking: wow,that guy’s accent is just like mine – and didn’t we used to have that corridor carpet, too, and before we swapped it for tiles?At 16,when I was about the most adept truant you could ever have hoped to meet, I spent most of my free time – and what a lot of that I had – reading and rereading Brideshead Revisited, or a book with which I was then slightly obsessed. Evelyn Waugh’s world,it probably goes without saying, overlapped not one bit with mine (Sheffield, or 1985). But it pulled at my heart all the same. The rippling melancholy; Sebastian’s ever more determined boozing; a family that did not quite know how to talk to one another: it was these things that spoke to me,not the bottles of sauternes and the bear with the ridiculous name.
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Source: guardian.co.uk