Cold Comfort Farm

Cold Comfort Farm (1995) is a BBC adaptation of Stella Gibbons' 1932 satirical novel — watch it online on iFILM. Director John Schlesinger assembled a cast that reads like a shortlist for a British honours ceremony: Kate Beckinsale, Ian McKellen, Stephen Fry, Joanna Lumley, Miriam Margolyes, Rufus Sewell.

Flora Poste, newly orphaned at nineteen, arrives at Cold Comfort Farm with no money and an extremely organised mind. Her relatives the Starkadders have been marinating in gothic misery for generations: a thundering religious patriarch played by McKellen, an aunt locked in her room with some unnamed childhood horror, a brooding farmhand with ambitions toward Hollywood, and several others in varying states of distress. Flora's approach to all of them is cheerful, methodical, and not especially sensitive to the word "no."

Gibbons wrote the novel as a sendup of rural English fiction that wallowed in suffering — and Schlesinger keeps that lightness intact. Watch Cold Comfort Farm online on iFILM.