What a disappointment! Having just read Anne Sebba's That Woman, a biography of Wallis Warfield, the Duchess of Windsor, I thought it would be interesting to read this fictional account woven around the abdication crisis of 1936 by Juliet Nicolson, granddaughter of the celebrated Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson.
Unfortunately what we get here is an awkwardly written third rate rip-off of the shortlived Upstairs, Downstairs the Sequel, itself a pale imitation of the original award-winning BBC series. Nicolson's depiction of Wallis and her Prince are standard fare, but the fictional characters and plot with which she surrounds that shopworn tale are so derivative it's a bit embarrassing for someone with Nicolson's literary antecedents. She's written two nonfiction books about Britain in the pre and post WWI era --- let's hope she's better at fact than she is at fiction. The BBC shouldn't waste its money filming this.
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