As you may have noticed, I’m a sucker for TV thrillers with subtitles (Scandi noir, Spiral, even Montalbano). But the recent French drama Philharmonia, from the normally dependable Walter Presents on Channel 4, is compelling for different reasons.

Like Stuart Jeffries in this brilliant review (“Acorn Antiques with subtitles”), I love it for all the wrong reasons. His review largely relieves me of the burden of slagging off this piece of posh Eurotrash, but hey.

OK, I am very hard to please when it comes to feature films about WAM—possibly because they’re all rubbish, falling for every single deluded romantic cliché going (or long gone) about Artists. I make an exception for the films of Ken Russell, redeemed by excess.

This flaw applies to films about sport too (Wimbledon, football…). What is it about culture that film-makers get so wrong—why can’t they just stick to the grimy underworld? Sure, career criminals doubtless watch cop dramas with similar disdain—“FFS, no-one’s cut an ear off like that since the 1960s”—but at least we also have conscious spoofs there. I guess people who work in offices felt like this about The office. Not to mention medical soaps…

In the first episode Marie-Sophie Ferdane approaches her role gamely as conductor Hélen Barizet struggling against sexists unreconstructed since about the 1950s zzzzz while she pouts in heels. As Stuart Jeffries wrote, “Imagine a musician as brilliant and scary as Nadia Boulanger, but with a pearl-handled Beretta in her top drawer.”

Sure enough, her fit husband is a composer; naturally, she’s had a 1950 Erard grand put in her hotel room, As You Do; and inevitably, as he plays his latest composition for her (which by hallowed film decree must be in the retro style of Richard Clayderman), she straddles him at the piano. Of course she does. Just excuse me while I throw up. The only upside of her keeping him busy between the sheets and on top of the Erard is that he may never get to finish his piece (cf. Schubert). Oh no—she’s announced that she’s going to premiere it with the orchestra! Later, when he’s suffering from that good ol’ composer’s block, she inspires him to finish it—if she hasn’t committed other crimes, she should be locked up for this, at least. And YAY—there’s a family curse!

With the orchestra she’s a new broom sweeping clean, to the players’ outrage—OK, so far, so realistic, until the melodramatic script hams it up. But she wins them over rather quickly. At least she, like her enigmatic young protégée, really does play the violin, although they both have magic instruments that never need tuning up (cf. the muso’s old excuse “It was in tune when I bought it”). And why do all these films never synchronise the image of the conductor’s beat with the musical sound?

It’s not just her unfaithful cad of a husband—they’re all at it comme des lapins. And so we become voyeurs of this imagined posh, capricious, temperamental world.

The script offers every musical cliché in the book, with sexist clichés liberally thrown in. The gags come as thick and fast as in Airplane—only inadvertently. I couldn’t resist watching the whole series, a divertissement from weightier matters.

However, as the series wears on, I confess that I did find myself becoming more involved in the whodunit of the drama—if you can leave the orchestral flapdoodle out of it, it’s quite involving, my quibbles just making an entertaining diversion. Rather like enjoying Titanic while blanking out the whole ship/sea scenario.

* * *

Philharmonia makes a worthy Gallic companion with Appassionata by Jilly Cooper, “queen of the bonkbuster”—which is at least tongue-in-cheek. Here’s another gleeful review.

The blurb alone is hilarious (particular credit to the names!):

Abigail Rosen, nicknamed Appassionata, was the sexiest, most flamboyant violinist in classical music, but she was also the loneliest and the most exploited girl in the world. When a dramatic suicide attempt destroyed her violin career, she set her sights on the male-dominated heights of the conductor’s rostrum.

Given the chance to take over the Rutminster Symphony Orchestra, Abby is ecstatic, not realising the RSO is in hock up to its neck and is composed of the wildest bunch of musicians ever to blow a horn or caress a fiddle. Abby finds it increasingly difficult to control her undisciplined rabble and pretend she is not madly attracted to the fatally glamorous horn player, Viking O’Neill, who claims droit du seigneur over every pretty woman joining the orchestra. And then Rannaldini, arch-fiend and international maestro, rolls up with Machiavellian plans of his own to sabotage the RSO. Effervescent as champagne, Jilly Cooper’s novel brings back old favourites like Rupert and Taggie Campbell-Black, but also ends triumphantly with a rampageous orchestral tour of Spain and the high drama of an international piano competition.

YAY, YAY, and thrice YAY! Gimme Mozart in the jungle any day.

Among many gifted, real, female conductors, see Barbara Hannigan and Oxana Thaili here.