Howards End: episode two shows how to humanise EM Forster’s pompous bores – review

Apart from having given away in the trailer after episode one that one of the main characters was going to cark it, it’s hard to find fault with the BBC One’s new adaptation of Howards End. There will be some viewers, I imagine, who might find the argument at the heart of the series, and of the novel on which it’s based, a little highfalutin: is the great divide between intellectuals and men of affairs really a big thing in a world where the redesign of the emoji poo is headline news?

Anyway, the telling of the story so far has been immaculate, with Hayley Atwell and Matthew Macfadyen both terrific as Margaret Schlegel and Henry Wilcox. Last night, we were treated to some marvellously nuanced two-handers, through which both actors managed to make a forthcoming love affair between two people from camp chalk and camp cheese seem not just plausible but inevitable.

Writer Kenneth Lonergan and director Hettie Macdonald are also starting to make their presence felt, embellishing EM Forster’s story with a couple of exquisite scenes. I remember studying the novel and thinking that characters like Margaret and Helen Schlegel, with all of their pontificating on the poetry in life and the plight of the lower classes, could easily become pompous bores. But in this Howards End the actors have made them believable human beings and the writing breaks up the theorising with humour. There was, for example, a truly wonderful vignette all about cheese that had, as far as I could tell, very little to do with only connecting.

By far the highlight of this episode however was Alex Lawther as Tibby Schlegel. Tibby may be the most irritating character on television since Mr Blobby, but, like the pink-and-yellow character, I suspect his appeal may become cultish. Tibby is a man-boy who wafts around in his smoking jacket doing precisely nothing, except growing his fringe or complaining about errant bass notes in Beethoven or the indignities of his current head cold. The other characters find him infuriating too – I counted five separate “GO AWAY TIBBY!”s in this episode, a meme I would like to lay claim to right now. Ideally, we would have a 10-minute section at the end of each episode like they do with Blue Planet – Tibby’s Diaries – in which he can whinge, peeve and piddle about, sucking on his pipe and spouting Goethe to camera. And at a time when the BBC desperately needs a new sitcom? Well, I give you “Tibby!”, ready made and fully formed.