Time to relax with a child’s-eye view of life

This is being written in advance of the Nov. 2 Presidential Smackdown, and however things have turned out -- or not turned out -- it’s safe to say that these are stressful times, and their end is not yet in sight. So, in the spirit of therapeutic disengagement, I direct you toward “The Young Visiters” [sic], which airs tonight on BBC America and has nothing at all to do with today’s headlines, based as it is on a novel written in 1890 England by a 9-year-old girl.

Daisy Ashford is the young lady in question, and according to J.M. Barrie’s preface to the 1919 first edition, “She was one of a small family who lived in the country, invented their own games, dodged the governess and let the rest of the world go hang. She read everything that came her way, including, as the context amply proves, the grown-up novels of the period.” Under their influence, she penned -- or, rather, penciled -- the story of Mr. Alfred Salteena (Jim Broadbent), “an elderly man of 42 ... fond of asking people to stay with him”; Miss Ethel Monticue (Lyndsey Marshal), his houseguest; and Lord Bernard Clarke (Hugh Laurie), an old friend and eventual rival for Ethel’s affections, who is “inclined to be rather rich.”

The cast alone is reason enough to spend your hard-earned 90 minutes -- not only Broadbent, whose Oscar win for “Moulin Rouge!” you may recall, and Laurie, of “Jeeves and Wooster” fame, but also Geoffrey Palmer (“As Time Goes By”) and Bill Nighy (“Shaun of the Dead,” “Love Actually”), who is so consistently good it seems a shame that a movie is ever made without him. Nighy plays the Earl of Clincham, who takes on the job of helping Mr. Salteena “to become more seemly,” by “rubbing him up in society ways.”

To say that the movie is not as good as the book is only to say it hasn’t achieved the impossible. (It is delightful on its own terms.) The charm of the original has less to do with the plot than with the manner of its expression and with the child’s-eye-view details -- observed and imagined, borrowed from life or literature, grasped and misunderstood -- that enliven it. The novel has necessarily been interfered with by adults, and even though they are sympathetic adults, they cannot overcome the sad fact of their having grown up and been filled full of experience. Screenwriter Patrick Barlow does an excellent job translating Ashford’s little-punctuated prose for the screen, but his own dialogue rarely equals hers: A construction like “for reasons I hope shall become clear in the very near distant future” is funny but contrived, intentionally cute in a way that Ashford never is. She was trying to write like an adult, after all, not a child -- appropriate to her characters, who are also trying to come up in the world.

The film is nevertheless far truer than most to the source material, even though inflating to 90 minutes a story that might be read in 20 requires the addition of a good bit of additional business, such as Mr. Salteena’s misadventures with a lobster, a finger bowl and a champagne glass, or his maid’s attempt to deliver a letter in a howling gale. Ashford’s bad spelling is represented in visual asides (Ethel reads a magazine called “La Madmoisel,” Mr. Salteena attends “Corect Cultlarly Class”), and much is made of her use of the word “compartments” for “apartments.” The enchanted visions of childhood are suggested by singing train conductors, by confetti falling upon the station platform Ethel and Bernard arrive at in London “for a week’s gaiety,” by nobles eating ice cream at a party thrown by the Prince of Wales.

While Ashford’s grown-ups frequently act like children (as when Ethel says that “I had my bath last night, so I don’t need to wash much now”), she also understands some of the ways that real adults act foolish, and she does not shrink from leaving some of her characters a little disappointed at the end. She can be surprisingly saucy, too, for a 9- or even a 12-year-old. “You are like a heathen god,” Ethel tells Bernard, passion mounting, “with your manly form and handsome flashing face,” and the words are all little Daisy’s.

*

‘The Young Visiters’

Where: BBC America

When: 8-10 tonight

Rating: TV-G (suitable for all ages)

Jim Broadbent...Alfred Salteena

Hugh Laurie...Lord Bernard Clark

Lyndsey Marshal...Ethel Monticue

Bill Nighy...Earl of Clincham

Executive producers, Jim Broadbent, Pippa Harris, Laura Mackie. Narrator, Alan Bennett. Director, David Yates.Teleplay, Patrick Barlow.