True Love Will Find You In The End:The Pursuit Of Love.

"True love will find you in the end. You'll find out just who was your friend" - Daniel Johnson

Alconleigh, a posh stately home in rural Oxfordshire, was not, in the 1920s, a very happy place. The man of the house, Uncle Matthew (Dominic West) dished out beatings as regularly as he killed foxes. He hated Germans and he hated Americans. In fact, he hated all foreigners and all foreign lands which, in his world view, was one horrific amorphous blob dismissed as "abroad".

Even more than foreigners, he hated children. Especially female children. Especially intelligent female children. Especially headstrong and intelligent female children and ones that dare to use such fancy words as "notepaper" or "mantelpiece". Which was unfortunate because Alconleigh was home to two of them. At least during the holiday season when Fanny Logan (Emily Beecham) came to stay with Uncle Matthew and his family.

Her best friend, and permanent resident, is her cousin Linda (Lily James), the second of Matthew Radlett's daughters, and in Alconleigh, starved of both culture and contact with the outside world they create their own inner sanctum. A place of fantasty, of safety, and of peace. Linda and Fanny are cousins and, at times, they're close to kissing cousins. For all their talk of men they seem, on occasion, very close to getting it on with each other.

The Pursuit of Love (BBC1/iPlayer, written and directed by Emily Mortimer and adapted from a 1945 novel by Nancy Mitford) tells the story of Linda and Fanny's coming of age between the wars and as the story flits from Oxfordshire to Surrey to Chelsea and even abroad to France and Spain we see the relationship between the two cousins wax and wane as their lives begin to take very different paths.

Paths, it seems, that have been predetermined by their characters. Linda is fur coats and high heels, she's wild, she's full of passion, she falls in love easily and deeply - even with a photo of The Prince of Wales, and she's often in tears. She wants to dress up and go to the cinema and she wants a man to sweep her off her feet - even if the men in her life, for the most part, are underwhelming.

She wants, essentially, to be adored. Fanny is the ice to Linda's fire. Practical, sensibly attired, anxious, and educated. She shares with Linda a love for the novels of Virginia Woolf and she shares with her, also, a desire for love. But how that love is defined, and how they each go about searching for it (Fanny works at it, Linda believes it arrives on a magic carpet), is the heart of this compelling, if initially too jaunty for its own good, drama.

Some of the whimsical touches (the captions when new characters appear, reading such things as "Boring Don's wife", "important person", and "the chatters" for example) fall a bit flat and the voice overs, provided by Fanny, reminded me of last year's Anna Kendrick vehicle Love Life. But, as the story played out, I found myself becoming increasingly emotionally involved and that's not something I thought would happen in a world of coming out balls, ponies, follies, tea and toast in pristine landscaped gardens, and people who never fancy a drink but always "desperately" need one.

That's not to say upper class people's lives can't be interesting but more to say that the comedy of manners has never said much to me about my life. I didn't grow up with and nor have I ever moved in circles with dandies like Lord Merlin (Andrew Scott). An obscenely wealthy man for no apparent reason who introduces Fanny, and Linda especially, in to a world of Dada, jazz poetry, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Proust, Cezanne, Watteau, and Josephine Baker.

Uncle Matthew, of course, loathes this swell, this unapologetic boulevardier, but Linda is besotted. Like a magpie, she is attracted to that which shines. Merlin's exciting and sophisticated lifestyle has a magnetic force that Linda cannot, and will not, resist. Merlin, initially, appears to be a potential suitor of Linda's and yet neither his true feelings, nor his sexual preferences, are ever divulged.

In this, the makers of The Pursuit of Love have wisely steered clear of the hackneyed gay best friend trope and, in lieu of that, choose to present Merlin as some kind of Blitz club/glam rock precursor. With Merlin's platonic credentials established, Linda is presented with a triumvirate of widely different love interests, all of which Merlin holds a strong, and often unforgiving, opinion on.

Tony Kroesig (Freddie Fox) is a pompous, blond haired Bullingdon boy with a staggering air of entitlement whose confidence greatly outweighs his ability. It's hard not to make comparisons with our current Prime Minister when in the presence of Kroesig and when he becomes a Tory MP you wonder if the show's creators have gone a bit too far with the lampooning comparisons. When he lies back on the green leather banquette seating of the House it owes to everything to another of Britain's most loather Etonians, Jacob Rees-Mogg.

While Kroesig's family are sympathetic to Hitler, one even proudly boasts of having been taken for a spin in Heinrich Himmler's Mercedes-Benz, Tony Kroesig's first love rival, the young communist Christian Talbot (James Frecheville), could not be more different. In an era long before the invention of the word mansplaining, Talbot turns Linda on to Marx, Trotsky, and Orwell and she even opens up a "red" bookshop and surprises everyone by making a success of it.

Completing this motley troika of swains is the suave and confident French Duke Fabrice de Sauveterre (Assaad Bouab) and a smoother mover you could not imagine, witness him shower Linda with affection, elegant French decor, and an ugly bulldog. Both Linda and Fanny marry and they both 'fall' pregnant but whereas Linda takes little or no interest in her child Moira (Abbiegail Mills), Fanny becomes a devoted mother and husband to Alfred.

We meet Alfred Wincham (Shazad Latif) as a young don at Oxford and his kind, scholarly nature (in mien, he has echoes of William Butler Years) never deserts him. Nor, less happily, does his fastidious manner. He frets over coffee rings on tables, he abides to societal norms unquestioningly, and, even in the height of passion, he neatly folds his trousers and places them over the back of a chair.

All of the leading actors put in first class performances and in this they are abetted by an impressive supporting cast (credit due to Kitty Archer as the studious Lavender Davis, Dolly Wells as Aunt Sadie, John Hefferman as the valetudinarian Davey, Beattie Edmondson as Louisa Radlett, and Emma Mortimer herself as Fanny's mostly absent mother The Bolter). The soundtrack is anything but diegetic and transposes music from the future on to characters, and mores, from the past.

Never mind the authenticity, feel the quality. New Order, T.Rex, John Cale, Nina Simone, Karen Dalton, Marianne Faithful, Cat Power, The Meters, Sleater-Kinney, Le Tigre, Bryan Ferry, Blossom Dearie, and Joan Armatrading is not a score to be sniffed at and the judicious use of these artist's songs succeed in eking out emotion in a story that, at least for the first half of The Pursuit of Love, was played out somewhat dryly.

I was gently entertained but not, to begin with, moved or invested in the characters. As the story developed, however - and not least when the action was interspersed with black and white archive footage and stills to invoke the coming storm of World War II, it crept up on me and I became, quite quickly but also profoundly, involved in the events.

Like love itself, perhaps, something that started off as a piece of fun became imbued with an unknowable and transformative power. True love, it seems, WILL find you in the end. Sometimes it was there already.