TV Review - ‘Nightingale’ on PBS Delightful Season Start

“Masterpiece Theatre” unfurls another season in banner style Sunday with a delightful, passionately real, terrifically acted comedy/drama about a British working-class family in World War II.

Adapted by Jack Rosenthal from C. P. Taylor’s play and directed by Robert Knights, “And a Nightingale Sang” airs in a single 2-hour episode at 9 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15 and at 8 p.m. on Channels 50 and 24.

The Stotts are a family not easily forgotten, the air-raid sirens and whistling bombs that punctuate their routine in Northern England seeming to be only a minor inconvenience as they go about the business of living. It’s not Taylor’s intent to trivialize war, only to demonstrate, with grace and slants of delicious humor, our strength and resiliency in carrying on as best we can when faced with extreme adversity.

In the case of the Stotts, they do very well, thank you. Joan Plowright is the beleaguered, church-going matriarch and John Woodvine her escapist, piano-plunking husband. Phyllis Logan is the sensible 30-year-old daughter whose heart is broken by a manipulative soldier. Pippa Hinchley is the young flirt of a daughter who marries a simpleton soldier.

This is a household where the occupants are likable and believable and where misery and happiness mingle as naturally as they do in real life. In an understated way, this is irresistible television.

The nightingale sings sweetly.