![]() The series is returning to our screens again, which must explain the publication of Michael Haag’s pointless book while his introduction promises “a new and revealing narrative”, it is hard to see what he adds to the well-known story. Last year’s ITV serial The Durrells, based on My Family and its two sequels, averaged 7 million viewers. No wonder a grey postwar Britain greedily devoured the Durrell myth and has been letting the juices run down its chin ever since. Add at a favourable rate of exchange, cheap domestic service and good rough wine with every meal and you had the makings of what paradise might look like from “Pudding Island”, the scornful epithet for England coined by Lawrence Durrell, the eldest sibling and catalyst for the whole shambolic enterprise. Here was the comic opera version of Elizabeth David’s wildly popular Mediterranean cookbooks – the same colours, textures and sand-between-the-toes lyricism but with an added helping of wacky local characters, naughty fauna and ribald – “Rabelaisian” was the word the Durrells liked to use about themselves – humour. British readers, having only in recent years torn up their ration books, were transfixed by the naturalist Gerald Durrell’s account of his biophiliac childhood on prewar Corfu in the bosom of his eccentric family. W hen My Family and Other Animals was published in 1956 it was as if someone had flung back the curtains, thrown up the windows and let in a stream of bright light. ![]()
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