A centuryÕs tale through eyes of Channel 4 blockbuster

Date Published: {J}

It’s hard to go wrong with a mini-series that ‘stars’ Ernest Hemmingway, Edward and Mrs Simpson and Ian ‘007’ Fleming – not to mention a cast led by Jim Broadbent, Matthew Macfadyen, Gillian Anderson and Kim Cattrall – and that combination is enough of a reason to stay in for Channel 4’s latest blockbuster, Any Human Heart.

But it’s hard to be certain whether this is wonderfully clever or hopelessly absurd, because it mixes history with Mills & Boon to take the viewer through the guts of a century, tackling real events – World War II, the exile of the Duke and Duchess and so on – through the eyes of a fictional character.

As heroes go, Logan Mountstuart, not least with the name, is straight from the pages of a Jackie Collins or Jilly Cooper – a suave philanderer whose directionless existence takes him from the bars of the backstreets of Paris with Hemingway to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in exile in Barbados.

It’s his lifelong diary that provides the thread that draws together so much of the history of the 20th century – but really this is the story of a man who falls in love too easily and lives to regret his inability to stay the course.

Jim Broadbent plays Mountstuart as he is at the end of his time, sorting through the debris of his life and then reflecting on them as chapters in an existence that, frankly, was more exciting than any one man could have reasonably expected his life to be.

And for most of these flashbacks, Logan is played by Macfadyen, who is the quintessential rake – a writer of sorts, a war correspondent out of necessity, a Naval officer of poor standing, a spy and above all a serial womaniser whose only true love, Freya, is killed while Mountstuart is in an Swiss prison during the Second World War.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.