In British ‘Streets,’ doomed love and unrequited yearning

BBC America’s “Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky,” airing tonight and Sunday over three hours, builds slowly and pays off poetically. It’s a dreamy but gritty period drama, superbly acted, based on a trilogy of novels by Patrick Hamilton.

In England, Hamilton, who wrote the plays “Rope” and “Gaslight,” both of which were made into films, was an acclaimed novelist and playwright of the 1930s and ‘40s, a chronicler of prostitutes, barmaids and various pub denizens -- the “semi-proletariat,” as Hamilton is said to have referred to them.

And yet, much of his work subsequently fell off the radar. A critic writing about Hamilton in the Guardian newspaper as his centenary approached two years ago quoted Hamilton’s biographer as calling him “an eerie non-presence in modern British literary history.”

“Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky” was published in 1935, encompassing three novels set in a pub off London’s Euston Road called the Midnight Bell, with the action, such as it is, centered on three characters.

Bob (Bryan Dick) is a barman and aspiring writer who falls in love with Jenny (Zoe Tapper), a prostitute who comes into the pub, while Ella (Sally Hawkins) who also works behind the bar, secretly yearns for Bob as she is confronted by the affections of a regular, the older Mr. Eccles (Philip Davis).

The simplicity of the story, its relative quiet, gives occasion to its depth; each hour of the miniseries, based on a different book in the trilogy, is approached from a different point of view -- first Bob’s, then Jenny’s and finally Ella’s. What the stories get at, principally and heart-wrenchingly, are doomed love and unrequited yearning. Nobody is a hero here but all are equally complex and tragic.

Bob, in a desperate attempt to buy Jenny away from prostitution, begins draining his savings, even as she repeatedly stands him up for dates. Jenny, damaged, cunning and dead-eyed, regards Bob with both sadness and malice. Ella, the innocent, allows herself to be wooed, comically so, by an older man with money while lost in reveries about Bob.

What emerges is not so much a “Rashomon” effect as a poignant look at three lives that intersect around the theme of unrequited love, affections doomed, withheld or blurted awkwardly. The London conjured by director Simon Curtis and screenwriter Kevin Elyot, particularly its smoky pubs and foggy nights, is immediately transporting, with music of the period from 1930s British dance orchestras.

“Twenty Thousand Streets” is the kind of television at which the BBC repeatedly excels -- rich and fulfilling for its understatement, discreet tales that are well told.

Here, recovering Hamilton’s between-the-wars world, they created something real and very beautiful.

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‘Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky’

Where: BBC America

When: 9 to 11 p.m. (Parts 1 & 2) Saturday; 8 to 9 p.m. Sunday (Part 3).

Ratings: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under age 14).