"It's like I was eating for her," Georgie confided. That's how long it had been since his mum died. There was a worrying moment, in his late mother's bedroom, when you wondered what kind of a comedy this was turning into… but no, Amy was soon settling in, cooking and tidying up, nibbling a dark chocolate Magnum with Georgie (not the classiest of product endorsements), helping Janice with his pig-sized legs and restyling his terrible 80s mullet – an early clue that he hadn't been out in 23 years. Aisling Loftus was excellent as the underfed, beaten waif looking for a father figure and finding it in kindly Georgie. Things took a turn when a crew of youths was sent by the social services to tidy the garden and Amy – a pregnant teenager on the run from a violent boyfriend – ended up moving in. With Caroline Aherne co-scripting, there was as much pleasing northern drollery as you'd expect amid the ill-lit claustrophobic clutter and junk food and trash TV familiar from The Royle Family, though admittedly the oxygen tank looked ominous. Frances Barber completed the homely trio as Janice, who came in every day to shovel Georgie's meals together and grease his legs, which was as attractive as it sounds. "I would ask you to respect Georgie's private zones," said Morris (though, frankly, you imagined these people might get enough blubber at home). Timothy Spall looked dangerously at home in the title role as Georgie, with comedian Bobby Ball admirably cast as his "manager", Morris, turning up with a cabful of Japanese tourists eager to take pictures and lay their hands on the big man's folds. If anything was going to put you off your Ferrero Rochers over Christmas, it had to be The Fattest Man in Britain, ITV's comedy drama about a man in an orthopaedic armchair eating himself to merry hell. It was a bumpy one, with travel sickness in first class and romance in third, with Peggy Bell and young Mr Buxton literally thrown together, but it took us clanking into the future, or at least episode two. What promise did Cranford hold for his generation and the next? This is what ate away at Miss Matty, who finally thought the unthinkable and rounded up doubters for a train ride. Was it also possible that this self-serving scheme for grasping local landowners might also serve Cranford? Or, put another way, might standing in the way of progress condemn Cranford to a slow death? Would people simply move out – people like Dr Morgan, a footnote in this drama, departing off-camera in the opening scene and felt as an absence later when poor Martha – nine months pregnant and still at the mangle – went into howling, doomed labour, leaving her husband, Jem, a joiner, to seek pastures new, clopping off on his cart, weary of having nothing to do but build coffins. The railway stood for more than the despoliation of land and demolition of cottages and sooty filth it also stood for modernity. We had the makings of a villain in Lord Septimus, home from Italy to claim his birthright and, if necessary, do the dirty to get it, but the real battle – with decent people on both sides – was about ideas. The camera's lingering gaze on Miss Matty attending to the ritual proprieties of death – laying out the body of scullery maid Martha, a white ribbon in her braided hair, the dead baby placed alongside – was a reminder of proprieties not observed elsewhere in this newly worrying Cranford: excitable young Mr Buxton with his shirt open on the stair pouting young Erminia still half-dressed in the middle of the day navvies sighted at the George inn. In an age when death – if not your own, then somebody else's – might sweep away your moorings in an unforeseen instant, why rock the boat? Progress was a dubious fancy people went to church on Sundays to thank God for not making things worse. Doing things properly was a shield raised against the unknown. The coming of the railway was the critical anxiety, but it was the everyday, atavistic distrust of otherness we saw in Miss Pole's ever-twitching antennae, or in Miss Matty's flickering unease about the newfangled waltz or the reported unsavouriness of Liverpool. Death is never meaningless in 19th-century plots and so it wasn't here, binding personal tragedy with Cranford's destiny as a sleepy town nervous of change. Cranford aficionados know not to confuse laughs with lightness, and it wasn't long before the high jinks of a dog peeing in church and misunderstandings with a parrot were stopped in their tracks with a triple death.
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