Hotel Portofino, review: 1920s period drama tries, and fails, to copy Downton and The Durrells
If Netflix commissions content by algorithm, BritBox does it by scribbling the names of popular shows on the back of an envelope and asking if someone has time to knock out something similar. How else to describe Hotel Portofino? It is a drama serial which draws so heavily from The Durrells and Downton Abbey that it could have been assembled from an ITV kit, although it is a pale imitation of both.
The show is set on the Italian Riviera in 1926, where Bella Ainsworth (Natascha McElhone) has opened the aforementioned hotel. Bella glides through the place with such a beatific smile that I suspect she might be on drugs, which would also explain why she can’t stop stroking her staff.
Bella has a son, Lucian (Oliver Dench), who is traumatised by his experiences in the war, and two less interesting daughters. She also has a good-for-nothing husband called Cecil (Mark Umbers). Most of the men, come to think of it, are pretty awful, especially those dastardly Italians with their fascist ways.
You can tell which characters are good and which are bad from the minute they appear. One of the worst characters is Julia Drummond-Smith, a guest who arrives with her daughter and is a snobbish nightmare of panto proportions. The cast know full well how unsubtle it all is, and aren’t taking it very seriously, judging by the way their period-appropriate accents come and go. Mark Prentice is probably just delighted to have got away from the gloom of that submarine on Vigil, and here plays a smooth American. It’s all as hammy as a hunk of prosciutto.
Anna Chancellor is the best thing in it as Lady Latchmere – imagine her Duckface character from Four Weddings and a Funeral, just 25 years older and wearing widow’s weeds. The plot is a Julian Fellowes crib sheet: blackmail, shameful secrets, a bit of gay longing and a cook fretting about mealtimes. Only here the cook has the extra problem of funny foreign ingredients, and an absence of beef dripping for her Yorkshire puddings.
Oh, how gorgeous it all looks, though. This is the real selling point of Hotel Portofino (although, confusingly, it was mostly filmed in Croatia). Cerulean skies, turquoise sea – watching it is almost a holiday in itself. If only the script were as delightful as the surroundings.
