Dive into Gentleman Jack with no preconceptions, and a beautiful thing happens.
First, you notice how things are not quite as they appear. This is a costume drama, a bonnet opera set in the Yorkshire of the 1830s, but there’s none of the stuffiness you might expect. There’s a flash of carriages on country roads, the clatter of horses’ hooves, and some talk of how the people in the big house, Shibden Hall, are “a bit odd”.
There is a crash on a narrow road, between horse-drawn carriages. A boy and his pig are thrown asunder. And the action cuts to Shibden, where the slightly odd people are sitting in a wood-panelled room discussing the matters of the day. The dialogue is fast and funny. They talk of a woman called Anne, who is, apparently, “in Hastings”. Though this is a geographical matter, and Hastings was a long way from Halifax in 1832, it sounds like an existential complaint. Anne, we must conclude, is odd, even by the standards of the odd.
Clearly, Gentleman Jack is a labour of love for writer Sally Wainwright.
The author of Happy Valley and Last Tango in Halifax grew up near Shibden Hall, and even in the Seventies she gleaned that there was something about the woman who used to own the place that people were reluctant to talk about. That story was expanded in Jill Liddington’s book, Female Fortune, which illuminated the extraordinary life of the lady of the house, Anne Lister. At a time before the term “lesbian” was used, she was a “masculine oddity” who kept the details of her life in her diaries, some of which were written in code.
As 19th-century biographies go, Lister’s story is topical. She does some amazing things. But, limiting our knowledge to what happens in episode one, Anne is a forceful, charming woman who dresses androgynously, in suit and top hat when required, and with her hair cajoled into Princess Leia buns. She is a boy racer, although not, technically, a boy. It was she who caused the carriage crash while piloting herself back to “shabby little Shibden and my shabby little family”. In her mind she is Icarus.
Anne is played by Suranne Jones who, like Wainwright, served her time on Coronation Street, and excelled as a feisty psycho on Doctor Foster. Anne Lister, it transpires, is like a mister. She is the landlord, or landlady, of the estate and sets about collecting the rent with efficiency and a lack of sentiment.
She decides to exploit the coal reserves that are buried in the land. She makes the point that she, as a female landowner, has no vote. But when push comes to shove, she’s lonely. Which is how she alights upon Ann Walker (Sophie Rundle) a melancholy girl who — in the words of her forceful Aunt Caroline (Stephanie Cole, aka Roy Cropper’s mum) — “needs taking out of herself”.
That’s where we are. The period world exists as a backdrop of rumbling comedy and whimsical manners, with Anne’s father (Timothy West) affecting deafness to things he’d rather not hear. While talk of revolution — industrial and political — starts to foment, Anne is a hurricane, cheerfully self-interested and out for everything she can get.
