I’ve been watching a lot of old Masterpiece Theatre miniseries on Amazon Prime, some for the second time and some I didn’t catch when they were on. It’s turning into a game of “wait, who is that?” because even in the more recent ones, the costumes/hair/hats of the period dramas render actors less recognizable, and then there are the ones that are 20+ years old, so I’m seeing much younger versions of actors I think of as older. There are also some fun correlations with other roles.

So, for example, the 2008 TV version of Sense and Sensibility (from the year Masterpiece went with all Jane Austen) … Dan Stevens plays Edward Ferrars, and the actress who played his Elinor was the same one who played the Enchantress who cursed him in Beauty and the Beast.

Or there’s calculating the show’s Doctor Who or Harry Potter score (as just about anything made in Britain in the past 20 or so years includes at least one actor who was in either a Harry Potter film or a Doctor Who episode). Sense and Sensibility got a double score with Mark Williams, who played Mr. Weasley and Rory’s father. There were at least three other actors with Doctor Who roles in that miniseries.

I just finished watching a production of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall from 1996, which had me rushing to IMDB because some of those actors were nearly unrecognizable. We had “Sister Evangelina” from Call the Midwife as the hero’s mother and “Prudie” from Poldark as the evil husband’s mistress. Rupert Graves is familiar in both young and older modes, since I do still remember him from all those E.M. Forster adaptations from the 80s and early 90s but he’s also still working, so I know what he looks like now. Still, it was a bit of a jolt to see him so young again, and he almost made the evil husband semi-likeable. At least, he was charismatic enough that you could see why she married him.

I’ve also rewatched Bleak House and Under the Greenwood Tree (a rare happy Thomas Hardy story).

I’ve started watching one called Desperate Romantics that I don’t remember being on in the US. It’s about the Pre-Raphaelites and has a great cast, including Aidan Turner from Poldark as Dante Gabriel Rossetti. There’s a fair amount of nudity and sex, so maybe it didn’t make the cut for American broadcast television.

Since all this stuff is either historical or literary, I can almost count my TV watching as educational programming.