A Dance to the Music of Time is a British four-part television drama series based on the book series of the same name by Anthony Powell. The series was also written by Anthony Powell with Hugh Whitemore as co-writer. The series was produced by Table Top Productions and directed by Christopher Morahan and Alvin Rakoff. It was first broadcast on Channel 4 on 9 October 1997 over four consecutive weeks.
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Synopsis
A Dance to the Music of Time follows the life of Nicholas Jenkins and the large, shifting circle of people around him from his schooldays in the early 1920s to the post-war world of the 1960s. Told largely from Jenkins’s observant and often detached point of view, the story traces the friendships, marriages, affairs, professional ambitions, rivalries and social manoeuvrings of several generations of British upper- and upper-middle-class society.
At its centre are Jenkins’s contemporaries Charles Stringham and Peter Templer, and above all Kenneth Widmerpool, an awkward and initially faintly ridiculous schoolmate whose relentless ambition carries him through business, politics and public life. Their paths repeatedly cross over the following forty years, sometimes after long periods apart, as old acquaintances unexpectedly reappear in new circumstances and relationships are reshaped.
Jenkins himself moves through literary, artistic and fashionable circles, encountering writers, painters, musicians, aristocrats, businessmen, soldiers and politicians. His marriage to Isobel Tolland draws him into the sprawling Tolland family, while figures such as the novelist X. Trapnel, the musician Hugh Moreland and the formidable Pamela Flitton become increasingly important in the later story.
The narrative passes through the prosperity and uncertainty of the 1920s, the political and social tensions of the 1930s, Jenkins’s wartime service during the Second World War, and the altered society that emerges afterwards. Although major historical events form the background, the emphasis remains on private lives: who rises and falls, who marries whom, how friendships endure or decay, and how apparently insignificant encounters acquire meaning many years later.
Rather than following a single conventional plot, the series is constructed as an accumulation of meetings, recollections and coincidences. Characters enter and leave Jenkins’s life like figures in a dance, sometimes changing dramatically between appearances and sometimes seeming almost incapable of change. Through them, the story examines ambition, class, sex, loyalty, ageing, artistic creation and the gradual disappearance of the social world in which its characters began.
The television adaptation condenses Anthony Powell’s twelve-novel sequence into four episodes, preserving the broad sweep of Jenkins’s life and many of the principal characters while necessarily reducing or omitting a considerable number of incidents, relationships and subsidiary figures from the books.
Critical reception
The Thomas Sutcliffe of The Independent described the first episode in the series by saying "It's questionable whether any literary work can survive a compression as intense as that undergone by A Dance to the Music of Time" and went on to mention "For obvious reasons barely even a homeopathic trace of Powell's patrician ruminations remain - what has survived are the incidents upon which he strung his grand reflections."