You may have had to search for his name in the closing credits of this final episode of series two of The Village, but all plaudits were due to its composer Adrian Corker, who gave us a great score which majored in atonality. The acting here remained top class, and the landscapes were still unsurpassable (more on which later), but for conveying a sense of unease in the air, it was the music that brought the atmosphere home.
And there was a lot to be uneasy about as this second series closed, even if the more depressed narrative of the opener seemed rather behind us. The Twenties have brought something of a lighter mood to The Village, and considerable diversification of narrative, though the problems certainly hadn’t vanished. The view from the big house was looking distinctly gloomy, with Juliet Stevenson’s Lady Allingham, who became something of a scene-stealer whenever we glimpsed her, exclaiming, “It’s all upside down!.. A plague of scandals!” What with the wife of one son hoofing it with the schoolteacher, and the other one, despite the weight of his public duties, increasingly batting for the other team, Stevenson’s character had a lot to deal with – and deal with she did, with considerable underspoken aplomb.
Grace certainly stood up for herself with a rousing finale speech
It ended up as something of a thesping competition between the matriarchs. Over at the farm Maxine Peake as Grace Middleton was resilient as ever, and her troubles, as we all remember, have been legion. (Can we really say they’ve eased off a bit in this second series? Maybe). Bert’s inclination to run away to America may be in the past, and the closing scenes of this episode suggested a hint of happy-ever-afters in his sub-plot, but we haven’t heard the last of what exactly happened to John by a long way. (John Simm plays as powerfully when he’s laid up as when he’s on his feet, main picture).
Grace’s dalliance with the shifty Bill Gibby (Derek Riddell) may have spent itself, but Gibby came back in this finale with a deux-ex-machina development – no spoilers revealed – that would certainly change the potential lay-out of this lovely landscape in every sense. Even the Allinghams weren’t having it. It managed to put the repeated trespassings on to the family land that occupied a fair amount of the action of this second series into perspective.
Grace certainly stood up for herself with a rousing finale speech, showing a gift for public oratory that surely bodes her a more public role in the future. Before then son Bert (Tom Varey) looks like he’s going to have his own issues defending his mother’s honour against that involvement with Gibby (Tom Varey and Derek Riddell, pictured below right).
No less significant was an end-of-series reunion that looks set to bring the two clans closer still. The responsibility on these young ones, to get themselves – and, by extension, us the viewers – towards a better place will not be a small one. But enough cliff-hangers were surely left at this episode's close to guarantee that series three will be coming along shortly.
No indications though as to when exactly we’ll be seeing these very different villagers again. Will it be sooner, as the difficult times of the Thirties come along? Or later, as they go through another war? You might not have said this at the close of Peter Moffat’s more than gloomy first series – and bets may still need to be hedged – but somehow it’s hard not to look forward to whatever The Village is going to bring us next.
