In the days when the sun never set on the English Empire and Queen Victoria glowered at everyone as if daring them to enjoy life after she had suffered the loss of her beloved Albert, London society was a mass of repressed emotions. Propriety, or at least the impression of it, was the byword. Even the least hint of non-conformity in late 19th century England would be enough to cause you to lose your place in society.
Just ask Oscar Wilde how easy it was to fall from grace; one moment being the toast of all society, the next being exiled and left to die in squalid poverty. Yet it was also an era where if you played your cards right, with a little bit of luck you could parlay looks, charm, and sensuality into elevated status in society. Catch the right eye and you could even end up being made part of the inner circle surrounding the throne.
Such was the case of Lillie Langtry who started life on the Channel Island of Jersey, the daughter of a clergyman, and ended up being the toast of London society, the mistress of the Prince of Wales, and finally a successful actress. In Lillie we saw the precursor to today's celebrity who, with no discernible talent, manages to command the attention of the press and the public. They might not have been so crass as to call it sleeping your way to the top in Victorian England, but no matter how you sugar-coat it, that's what it amounts to.
In the 1970s television producers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean we're finally beginning to realize the potential for theatrical presentations offered by their medium. While movies were limited in their length by how long you hoped you could keep an audience seated at one go, television offered the opportunity to create far longer presentations split up into episodes and broadcast over a period of days or weeks. In North America the mini-series epidemic started on a high note with an adaptation of Roots but eventually disintegrated into tawdry soap operas like The Thorn Birds.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the British began mining their literary history and figures from history for their efforts, and in 1978 released a thirteen-episode presentation on the life of Lillie Langtry entitled simply Lillie. Thirty years after its initial television presentation Acorn Media has gathered together all thirteen episodes onto four DVDs and will be offering this package up for sale as of February 19, 2008.
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