In fact, Nancy Mitford began to have reservations about publishing her 1935 novel on British fascists, Wigs on the Green, partly because a satiric novel about fascism started to seem less amusing the more the threat of fascism loomed over all of Europe. But despite Diana’s vociferous objections to the book, Nancy could not afford to shelve it. The Mitford women didn’t have major family wealth to draw on, and Nancy needed the money, something her hot cad of a husband generally failed to supply. Nancy, who called Mosley “Sir Ogre,” later allowed the book to go out of print, but the strains between her and her infamous sister remained. Diana, who decades later was “still beautiful and astonishingly unrepentant,” was thought by the authorities to be “far cleverer and more dangerous than her husband” and was jailed during the war as a security threat.
Carter says that at the first read-through, the cast got to meet Lovell, which the actor found very helpful, as the author had spent time with some of the sisters. “One of the things that came across is that they were brought up by a very intelligent mother. She was described as being ‘vague.’ In modern terms, she probably didn't know how to love her children in the way that we, in our time—we’re all friends with our parents, more often than not.” But Muv’s own mother died when she was young, and in any case, during the early to mid-1930s, the period covered by the debut season of Outrageous, the woman had more than her share of family chaos to deal with.
Casting heavy hitters like Purefoy and Chancellor demonstrates that Outrageous is serious about showing the Mitford parents as complex people who were much more than upper-class twit caricatures. The same goes for the daughters, who, in later years, carefully managed the family image—a curtain Williams hopes to pull aside with this program.
“We’re looking at the characters offstage,” so to speak, Williams says. “Of course when they’re ‘onstage,’ i.e., when they’re writing to each other or when they’re literally on television in their later life, they appear to be complete. They have a mask in place. This series looks under the mask. But even then, there is very, very little self-pity, and I love that about them.”
Williams has mapped out three seasons of Outrageous (though only the first has been commissioned). I observe that the plan makes sense, given that bringing this large array of complicated people and their relationships to life would require “nuance.”
“That is the key word,” Williams answers.
She chose not to depict the women’s childhoods, but to kick things off when Nancy is in her late 20s and the youngest, Debo, is in her early teens. Williams has a “slight aversion to flashbacks,” and in any event, “coming from a big family myself, what I know is that when you all get back together, you all revert to eight years old anyway.”
Jessica, Unity & Debo in the Hons CupboardCourtesy of BritBox and UKTV.
As the 1930s begin, Nancy is a little adrift, chained to a hopeless romantic relationship, and despite being popular with a huge array of artists, bon vivants, and writers (many of whom stayed lifelong friends), she is not the literary success she later became. But all those factors actually give the audience a pathway into this family full of big personalities. Nancy is “a natural narrator for me,” Williams observes. “She’s perhaps the most politically neutral. She’s the most relatable, I think, for a modern audience. She’s the eldest, so she has a good perspective on the family.”
Though Nancy’s narration frames the episodes—and also, according to Carter, breaks the fourth wall—one thing you won’t hear are exact replicas of the distinctively plummy Mitford accent, which is on display in a 1980 documentary about Nancy. Though Carter found watching that film very helpful, the way the women spoke was so stylized and retro that audiences “might feel removed from” the story. “They had a sort of Mitford twang where it was very, very posh. They had a very specific sort of rhythm and melody to their voice,” Carter says. In that 1980 documentary, Diana says during the war, other volunteers found Nancy’s accent “annoying.”
The problem is, Carter adds, “none of us hear that voice anymore. And if we do, it’s probably through the royals who, you know, half the country don’t care about anymore.… The scripts are so honest and truthful and real, and we want…people to really feel it, and understand that these were real people, not sort of ‘characters’ from the ’30s.”
That desire to depict reality more honestly extended to what the actors wore during production in the Cotswolds, which wraps next month. Costume designer Claire Collins did an “amazing” job depicting “the Swinbrook look.” (Swinbrook was the generally disliked house the family moved to after occupying more beloved rural homes.) There are smart clothes for parties and trips to London, but in the country, there are sweaters with holes in them and “muddy boots—it’s all very lived in,” Carter says.
