TV REVIEWS : New ‘Masterpiece’ Host for Witty ‘Exits’

There was a time when PBS launched its “Masterpiece Theatre” seasons with sprawling, high-profile blockbusters. Six parts at least.

Affirming that size and quality are not necessarily synonymous, however, this season’s “Masterpiece Theatre” opens Sunday with an enchantingly witty and poignant BBC memoir of the late Welsh writer and raconteur Gwyn Thomas. “Selected Exits” runs just 90 minutes. (It airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15, and at 8 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24.)

With this leaner, meaner new age comes a new host.

Where once sat Alistair Cooke, for 21-plus years the PBS host and gray, sleek hood ornament for this British chassis, now sits author-columnist Russell Baker, facing the camera from beside a desk, a fire blazing in the background. Although “Masterpiece Theatre” may never be quite as silky without the retired Cooke, Baker is efficient in the job and, as a biting humorist himself, obviously appreciates the rich drollery and wordplay of the auteur whose life is about to be depicted.

Written by Alan Plater and directed by Tristam Powell, “Selected Exits” is aptly titled, for its fragmented narrative makes no attempt to fill the gap between Thomas the youth and Oxford undergraduate and Thomas the middle-ager, a relentlessly unfashionable teacher and author played with great aplomb by Anthony Hopkins. You do wonder about the missing years, yet so satisfying is the rest of this contemporary piece that their omission is hardly lethal.

Although slow to warm up, “Selected Exits” ultimately becomes one of those seductive television works you can’t put down. Brought up in a mining town where his headmaster regards him as an intellectually gifted but “ambulant vat of ribaldry and anarchism,” young Gwyn (well played by Brendan O’Hea) sets off for Oxford. Snooty colleagues pelt him with derision, but he’s used to such treatment and, as always, he’s an illusive target, obscuring himself behind a veil of sly, self-deprecating wit.

As both voice-over narrator and the adult Gwyn, Hopkins is an engaging, irresistible protagonist, biting off words and clever phrases that epitomize the ironic lens through which Thomas devilishly observes the world.