In 1968 a television serial was made, dramatised by David Turner in three 45 minute episodes. It starred Alastair Sim as Amos, Fay Compton as Aunt Ada, Sarah Badel as Flora Poste, Rosalie Crutchley as Judith, Brian Blessed as Reuben and Peter Egan as Seth. [15] Joan Bakewell was the narrator. This BBC adaptation was released on VHS but as of April 2014 is no longer available commercially, but can be seen on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AP0t3hUQKo. Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel by English author Stella Gibbons, published in 1932. It parodies the romanticised, sometimes doom-laden accounts of rural life popular at the time, by writers such as Mary Webb. Our protagonist, nineteen-year-old orphan Flora Poste, finds herself left with a meager annual income after her father’s death. Flora, “discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living”, chooses to approach her relations with a request to live with them in return for her annual income. As the rustic mayhem unfolds, Miss Poste, who is definitely a modern, metropolitan bossyboots, decides that it’s her mission to bring a metropolitan “higher common sense” to this benighted spot, and sets about trying to redeem the lives of her relatives. Aunt Ada will go flying to Paris. The memories of the woodshed will become domesticated, Miss Poste herself will eventually marry her country cousin, Charles Fairford, and everyone live happily ever after. Sort of. (It’s a comedy, remember?) A note on the text Seth Starkadder, a handsome, virile, and libidinous man. Incapable of seeing any woman as anything but a sex object, he has fathered the hired girl’s four children as well as many others. He considers Flora as simply another female, but she sees him as another problem to be solved. Tied to the farm by the family curse, his great passion is the “talkies” that he sneaks off to see in the nearby town. When Flora introduces him to a producer friend from Hollywood, the producer immediately recognizes Seth’s magnetism and offers to put him in films. Seth is last seen on the silver screen about a year later, starring in Small Town Sheik.

The novel is constructed of two elements the mash-up and topsey-turvey. The novel published in 1932 is set in a topsey-turvey near future – Lambeth has become the posh part of London (Oi!) while Mayfair has become the slums, the wealthy have private planes to zip about the country (not quite so fantastical) while the plot is broadly Jane Austen triumphs over Bronte sisters. When Aunt Ada Doom was just a small child, she saw "something nasty in the woodshed". And if it didn't blight her entire life, she certainly made sure it would blight, or at least add even more blight, to everyone else at Cold Comfort Farm, the family home and ancestral seat of the Starkadders.

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When sensible, sophisticated Flora Poste is orphaned at nineteen, she decides her only choice is to descend upon relatives in deepest Sussex.

Pretty in Mink: Elfine has a short fur cape. Aunt Ada wears a fur trimmed coat, in the style of Queen Mary, when she goes on a trip. I mean seriously, oh my god! It's funny. Flora (our protagonist) is a feminist queen of getting sh*t done and not taking anything from any man ever in the history of time. All the characters are hilarious. The language and voice are unreal. I want to live inside this book!!!!! Gibbons declared she wanted Nightingale Wood to be Cinderella brought "right up to date" – but now it's fascinating as a period piece. Gibbons is superb on middle class life in the years immediately before the second world war, on the erosions of class division and ongoing snobbery. There's something stupid and sad and lost about her quiet genteel characters trying to pretend that life can go quietly on as ominous noises from Europe grow ever louder. There's plenty that's enraging about the stifling judgements that this society heaps on women. There are a few hilarious moments and a funny comic character in the form of a hermit who lives in the woods near the suburban Essex setting, but generally there aren't so many of the big belly laughs of Cold Comfort Farm. This satire is far subtler, relying on icicle wit and sharp observation to lambast conventional morality. Well, just kidding. All of my trying-to-move-in-and-permanently-inhabit-a-fictional-world energies are currently taken up by the film Mamma Mia!: Here We Go Again (2018). I am really tryna become Lily James as a young Meryl Streep Donna. I am purely certain that I could handle the whole Sam situation much better and end up with him in the end but also still get with Harry and Bill in the interval.The issue is whether we see this as part of the joke or part of the message. Given that Flora ends up marrying a man who is her cousin, and a clergyman to boot, I tend to consider her part of the joke. In many ways, Flora herself is absurd. It's hard to believe, for instance, that Gibbons shares her disdain for anyone ever saying anything intelligent, or for education: Gibbons has enormous fun with sexy Seth, all panther-like grace and unbuttoned shirts; hellfire-preaching Amos, the family patriarch; put-upon Adam who washes up with a thorn twig while breaking his 80-year old heart over young Elfine; Elfine herself who roves the countryside, writing poems and acting suitably fey; and interloper Mr Mybug who can't help but see fecund sexuality in every leaf and bud.

Adam Lambsbreath: an old old farmhand who among other things washed dishes with a twig. You can imagine how clean the dishes were at the farm. The Dramatization: The cast looks good on paper. Rosalie Crutchley is a perfect personification of Judith. Her burly son Reuben, who wants the farm from his father, is ably portrayed by Brian Blessed. Freddie Jones does a masterful job as the thoroughly disgusting Urk, as does Aubrey Morris as "Mr. Mybug." Peter Egan falls a little short as Seth, but he's good looking and a fine actor.From its opening line – “The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged” – to Aunt Ada’s celebrated recollection of “something nasty in the woodshed”, Cold Comfort Farm has the air of a novel written, as it were, in one joyous exhalation, according to Gibbons, somewhere between Lyons Corner House and Boulogne-sur-Mer during the year spanning 1931/32. Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Flora counts "Seth" and "Reuben" among these. You'll never guess what her cousins are called. Amos's half-cousins: Mica, married to Susan; Urk, who expects to marry Elfine and is devoted to water-voles; Ezra, married to Jane; Caraway, married to Lettie; Harkaway

Heartwarming Orphan: Averted. Recently-orphaned Flora may bring happiness into the lives of the Starkadders, but not through any sweetness of temper. "On the whole I dislike my fellow-beings,” she says. "I find them so difficult to understand. But I have a tidy mind, and untidy lives irritate me." Seth Starkadder: younger son of Amos and Judith, handsome and over-sexed, with a passion for the movies In 1942, the English author Lucy Beatrice Malleson (1899-1973), who wrote detective stories under the pen name of Anthony Gilbert, published Something Nasty in the Woodshed, of which the Evening Chronicle (Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumberland) of Saturday 28 th March 1942 said that it I was very much looking forward to seeing this. The cast looked very promising (especially Alastair Sim) and the BBC has a high reputation when bringing classic literature to the screen. In the film, Rennet is washed in a cattle-trough as part of the spring-cleaning, and subsequently catches the lovelorn eye of the farm's new master.

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But Flora loves nothing better than to organise other people. Armed with common sense and a strong will, she resolves to take each of the family in hand. A hilarious and ruthless parody of rural melodramas and purple prose,Cold Comfort Farmis one of the best-loved comic novels of all time. Tanfani, Joseph (25 July 2013). "Late heiress' anti-immigration efforts live on". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on 26 July 2013. Following the death of her parents, the book's heroine, Flora Poste, finds she is possessed "of every art and grace save that of earning her own living". She decides to take advantage of the fact that "no limits are set, either by society or one's own conscience, to the amount one may impose on one's relatives", and settles on visiting her distant relatives at the isolated Cold Comfort Farm in the fictional village of Howling in Sussex. The inhabitants of the farm – Aunt Ada Doom, the Starkadders, and their extended family and workers – feel obliged to take her in to atone for an unspecified wrong once done to her father.