Twisted sisters

Period drama Outrageous taps into our continuing fascination with the Mitford family.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

The story of the Mitford sisters exists in a peculiarly English mythology. They were the beautiful, charming, posh gals who were the daughters of a fading aristocracy. From the 1930s onward, they variously embraced fascism and its leaders, anti-Semitism, communism, socialism and high society scandal, though some still preferred horse riding, breeding chickens and restoring stately homes.

They - mostly novelist Nancy Mitford – distilled their upper-class lives into bestselling, legend-stoking books.

Tackling the sisters' actual lives as a television series - as the new show Outrageous does - comes with challenges. Firstly, how those stranger-than-fiction existences make for you-couldn't-makethis-stuff-up implausibility.

At the same time, any screen drama could face the wrath of Mitford aficionados armed with a pile of memoirs, biographies and letter collections.

And given the people they knew, a show about the Mitfords and their milieu might look like an overnight stocktake at Madame Tussauds.

They were related to Winston Churchill. Four of them and their mother met Aldolf Hitler - one of them, Unity, was a Führer groupie. Another one, Diana, left her first husband for British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, which landed him and her in prison as a threat to national security during World War II. A Holocaust denier who never repudiated Hitler, she was labelled the most hated woman in Britain, living much of her later years in Paris, where she died.

Other incidental characters in a full true-life Mitford drama might include Joseph Goebbels, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, Evelyn Waugh, Lytton Strachey, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Cecil Beaton, John F Kennedy, Maya Angelou and Lucian Freud.

Eldest sister Nancy's best-known books The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate – both autobiographically inspired – have had regular television adaptations. The most recent was