Program Title
Where Angels Fear To Tread

Based On
The book by E. M. Forster

Adapted By
Charles Sturridge, Derek Granger, Tim Sullivan

Number of Episodes:
1

Description
The newly-widowed Lilia Herriton is packed off to Italy by her straitlaced in-laws with the hope that she will acquire a little culture. She is accompanied by the demure and ineffectual Caroline Abbot. When she announces her intention to marry Gino, a penniless young Italian from the local village, Lilia's family is appalled and Philip Herriton and his sister Harriet, are dispatched from England on a rescue mission with disastrous consequences.


Original broadcast date
1993-11-07

Cast	Characters
Helena B Carter	Caroline Abbott
Judy Davis	Harriet Herriton
Rupert Graves	Philip Herriton
Helen Mirren	Lilia Herriton
Giovanni Guidelli	Gino Carella
Barbara Jefford	Mrs. Herriton
Thomas Wheatley	Mr. Kingcroft
Sophie Kullmann	Irma
Vass Anderson	Mr. Abbott
Sylvia Barter	Mrs. Theobald
Eileen Davies	Ethel

Credits
Executive Producer: Jeffrey Taylor, Nick Elliott, Kent Walwin
Producer: Derek Granger
Director: Charles Sturridge

Intro
WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD/Intro by Russell Baker

Respectability has a hard time of it nowadays. In movies you can watch people do things they wouldn't even do in the bedroom a generation or two ago... Others entertain TV audiences with confessions that grandmother wouldn't have made to her doctor...much less to grandfather.

This contempt for respectability is so much admired nowadays that people who say it's bad taste...are apt to be considered quaintly antique. Tonight's story -- E.M. Forster's "Where Angels Fear to Tread" -- takes us back ninety years or so -- to an age when respectability was so important that people were willing to mutilate their lives for it…even to kill for it.

Forster was a creature of that age, didn't like it, and with this novel was pioneering what was to become the twentieth century's brutal triumph over respectability.

The story is set in motion by Mrs. Herriton, whose obsession with middle-class propriety will make her seem like a dreadful gorgon to today's young people.

Those old enough to remember when people still worried about how to use a finger bowl may grant her a little sympathy.

We meet her at Charing Cross Station where she is shipping her widowed daughter-in-law, Lilia, off to Italy. Mrs. Herriton disapproves of almost everything about Lilia. She disapproved when her son, who is now dead, married Lilia. She disapproves of the way Lilia is bringing up her daughter, Irma, and she is scheming to get rid of Lilia so Irma can be brought up properly by - of course - Mrs. Herriton.

Her plan is to send Lilia to Italy for a year chaperoned by a clergyman's daughter - the dull, tame , perfectly safe Caroline Abbott.

We meet them all as the train is leaving -- Mrs. Herriton, Lilia, Caroline, Irma, Mrs. Herriton's fanatically proper daughter Harriet, who hates Italy, and her younger son Philip, who loves it. As the train pulls out, all are in for shattering discoveries...about themselves...about Italy...and about the evil that comes of caring too much for middle-class respectability.

"Where Angels Fear to Tread," by Edward Morgan Forster.

Extro
WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD/Extro by Russell Baker

E. M. Forster lived to the age of 91. But "Where Angels Fear to Tread," his first novel, is very much a young man's book.

He was twenty-six when it was published. Young novelists tend to write books about themselves, and Philip, who is twenty- four years old, is a fairly exact portrait of Forster as a young man. A very proper, rather dull...highly respectable young man under the firm control of his mother. Though he accepted his mother's respectable Victorian code, Forster seemed to yearn for the life of someone brought up rather badly, by people familiar with the kind of love that's more carnal than a mother can provide. Not that he didn't love his mother, he adored her. His father had died when he was a baby and after that he was spoiled by hordes of female relatives.

During the first World War, approaching middle age, he embarked on a tepid and rather sad homosexual love life, which included affairs with a poor streetcar conductor in Egypt and a London policeman, both of them with wives who seem to have been grateful for Forster's generosity to their families. After the war, Forster returned to England and moved back in with his mother. He was then forty years old. They agreed that he could spend two nights of every week away from her in London. On each of his two weekly outings, however, he faithfully sent her a postcard. They lived together until she died at the age of ninety. He was then sixty-six.

It was a life that young Forster seemed to foresee in "Where Angels Fear to Tread" when he has Philip, age 24, tell Caroline: "I seem fated to pass through this life without colliding with it or moving it. I don't die. Don't fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I'm not there.

Incidentally, he didn't like the title "Where Angels Fear to Tread." It was imposed on him by the publisher. Publishers find it easy to push young writers around. The title Forster wanted was "Monteriano."

I'm Russell Baker. Goodnight.





The Archive Database | Program History | Poster Gallery | Awards

Home | About The Series | The American Collection | The Archive
Schedule & Season | Feature Library | eNewsletter | Book Club
Learning Resources | Forum | Search | Shop | Feedback


©