To Walk Invisible review – a bleak and brilliant portrayal of the Brontë family

Emily Brontë is telling her sister Anne a story she heard in the village, about a family, that might make the basis of a novel. “They’re woollen manufacturers,” she says, adding: “Aren’t they all?”

We end 2016, televisually at least, on a high, with Sally Wainwright – creator and writer of Happy Valley, Last Tango in Halifax and other pieces of astute, compelling, impeccably written, character-driven drama – turning her attention to the family from which no chronicler of northern womanhood can stay away for long: the Brontë sisters.

To Walk Invisible (BBC1) concentrated on what historically has been – for reasons of taste and delicacy early on, and later because of the obfuscatory nature of the gathering myths – an underacknowledged aspect of the three extraordinary years in which the sisters wrote the books that would make them famous, which is that they did it all in the teeth of their alcoholic brother Branwell’s brutal decline and death.

This, of course, is Wainwright’s specialist subject – the extraordinary things ordinary people face and the courage it takes to surmount them. She takes for granted the sisters’ genius (the books, after all, are there to prove it to us), leaving the focus on the domestic tyranny exercised – ’twas ever thus – by an addict in the family.

By the time we meet Wainwright’s Brontës, in 1845, Branwell’s dalliance with the wife of the family who employed him as a tutor and Anne as a governess has been discovered, ruining both their prospects. It is the latest in a series of disillusionments with the once-golden boy that his siblings have faced. “We should see him for what he is – and isn’t. It’s not fair on him,” says Emily, whose uncompromising nature and capacity for absolute fury is captured perfectly by the script and by Chloe Pirrie’s performance; neither make her into the freak of legend.

Realising they cannot depend on anyone but themselves, the sisters compile a volume of their verses for publication without telling Branwell (a blazing performance by Adam Nagaitis, who conveys the inner torment as well as the selfishness and keeps our sympathy even as he drives us up the wall). He was always meant to be the poet, but Young Soult the Rhymer never realised that talent is not enough: an iron will is required, too. As To Walk Invisible makes plain, Emily, Anne and Charlotte channelled their thwarted feelings, unrequited loves and endless frustrations with life into their art; Branwell sought solace in a bottle.

As Branwell falls apart further at the news that Mrs Robinson is now widowed, but (as has been abundantly clear to everyone but Branwell all along) has no intention of marrying him, the sisters’ ambition is whetted by their increasing need. While their brother is reduced to sleeping with his father at night for safety and writing begging notes to friends for fivepence-worth of gin, Jane Eyre becomes a bestseller, Wuthering Heights stuns the world and Agnes Grey – well, Anne’s time will come, thanks to the novel that remains perhaps the greatest, most ruthless description of the effects of a man’s alcoholism on his family, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

To Walk Invisible was, above all, true to Anne’s heartfelt plea in the introduction to the second edition of Wildfell Hall – for people to abandon the “delicate concealment of facts – this whispering, ‘Peace, peace’ when there is no peace.” It was bleak, beautiful and brilliant, like everything Wainwright and her growing repertory company does.

The theme of great northern women I can really get behind was continued in Cunk on Christmas (BBC2). Philomena Cunk (the deadest-of-pan creation of Diane Morgan, whose scrambled reality was here scripted by Charlie Brooker, Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris) took us through the history of the festive season and its evolving traditions, with the help of a handful of experts. Jay Rayner was momentarily fazed by the question: “What kind of gravy goes with peacock?” while Kate Williams valiantly fielded the poser: “Is it Jesuses or Jesii?” (“Figures of Jesus” is suggested.) You either die laughing at lines such as: “How difficult was it for the pagans to get about on all fours?” or the explanation that tinsel is a plant that became used as a decoration because “it’s horrible in salad and won’t boil down for soup” or you don’t. I do, and did. If you don’t, and didn’t, all I can do is wish you as joyous an end to 2016 as Cunk fans found herein. Happy New Year, everyone.