This episode of Bodyline chronicles the lives of Douglas Jardine and Donald Bradman from their childhoods to meeting their respective lovers to being selected for their county/province and finally being selected for their respective national teams.
Tropes found here are
- Boarding School: Believing that “only English schools can produce good Englishmen”, Douglas is sent off to the Horace Hills school in England.
- Truth in Television: Many English children born in British colonies were indeed sent back to boarding schools in their mother country in order to avoid a North America like situation where colonizers settled permanently and slowly lost all ties to Britain, thereby not considering themselves British anymore. India in particular had a track record of invaders eventually assimilating into the local population and even considering themselves “Indian”. To avoid this, British kids were sent back if nothing else to be ingrained into the culture of Britain.
- Establishing Character Moment: The flamboyant carefree Percy is seen cracking open a bottle of champagne and playing a banjo, much to Lord Harris’s annoyance.
- Douglas’s ruthlessness is seen when he instructs his bowler to “Mankad”note an opponent batsman.
- Don Bradman demonstrates his skill as a batsman when he steps up as a young boy to play for his father’s team, as a young lad, facing bowlers literally twice his size, and still saves the match.
- Harold Larwood bowls both Percy and Douglas for a duck, after demonstrating his accuracy while practicing bowling near a coal mine.
- First Love: Edith Clark for Douglas, Jessica Menzies for Don Bradman.
- How We Got Here: The episode commences a long story chronicling how Douglas Jardine got from a sheltered upbringing in colonial India to a cricket match in Adelaide.
- Serious Business: An Australian porter refuses to do his bloody job and carry bags when he finds out his customer is Douglas Jardine, an English cricketer.
