Time, Gents

A&E'S ADAPTATION OF DAVA SOBEL'S LONGITUDE

Watching the A&E Network's beautiful dramatization of Dava Sobel's Longitude, it is difficult not to wonder how the achievements of the great English clockmaker John Harrison could ever have been neglected. Without this bluff, sympathetic genius, who made the miraculous timepieces that allowed longitude to be measured accurately, the voyages of the 18th century would have continued to end in navigational disaster.

The four-hour film, which airs this month, is a painstaking account of how Harrison—played with jeweled precision by Michael Gambon—struggled for 40 years to win a prize of £20,000 that was offered by an Act of Parliament in 1714.

Eventually the obstructive members of the Board of Longitude were overruled by Parliament, which rewarded Harrison for a clock that, in the words of director Charles Sturridge's screenplay, was "a masterpiece weighing only slightly less than the brain that conceived it."

Sturridge, who proved to be a wizard of quiet pace with his 11-part series, Brideshead Revisited, almost 20 years ago, has added another layer to Dava Sobel's narrative with the story of Lieutenant Cornmander Rupert Gould, a neurasthenic obsessive who discovered Harrison's original clocks between the wars and restored them. Gould's sad life, portrayed by Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons, is spliced into the action of the past. He dismantles Harrison's mechanisms and thus comes to see their tiers of ingenuity, haunting the 18th century like a ghost from the future in search of understanding.

There are many things to recommend in the joint A&E-Granada production: the never overstated portrait of 18th-century Britain, the convincing naval scenes, and the cast of British actors, which includes Stephen Fry, Bill Nighy, Peter Vaughan, Charles Gray, and Anna Chancellor. But beyond these is the

evocation of the Age of Reason, which should perhaps be renamed the Age of Measurement. For, as Sobel made clear in her exquisite best-seller, without the practical skills of men such as Harrison, all the academics and thinkers of the 18th century would have been sunk.

Set your timepieces, ladies and gentlemen, for the hour of Longitude's broadcast. (Rating: ★★★★) HENRY PORTER