onsdag 22 september 2010

Well-reasoned TV drama - a solace in hard times

There are advantages with unpaid leave. For instance, in between job applications, there is nothing to stop me from taking TV breaks during the day which distract me from my cold, crackpot parties with scarily focused party leaders in the Swedish Parliament and other annoyances.

I finished watching "North and South" (again, the Gaskell version) last week, and unless the book is radically different from the adaptation, I remain puzzled about Gaskell's "Christian Socialist" label. That would be "Socialist" as in "not Socialist at all but quite able to see both sides of an industrial quarrel and with no wish to dispose of factory owners either violently or by unspeficied peaceful methods". Well, not that I'm complaining: a lucid, balanced look at 19th century Industrial England was just what I would have wished, but did not get, from Dickens in "Hard Times". In "North and South" (the adaptation at least), the social conflict is so well handled that the romantic part of the story is less captivating by contrast. Of course you want the beleaguered mill owner Thornton (the exceptionally handsome Richard Armitage - but why doesn't he shave?) and the ex-vicar's daughter in straitened circumstances Margaret Hale to lay their differences aside and realise that they love each other. But the obstacles in their path are, as so often in romances, largely self-imposed. You know they will kiss and make up, and when it happens you could be forgiven for thinking "what took you so long?". When Thornton reaches an agreement with the union leader Nicholas Higgins - who shares his faults: they are both proud, stubborn and contemptuous of weakness - you feel, on the other hand, that they have achieved something important, and that real issues have been resolved.

I'm not going to switch allegiances, however: Dickens is still the master storyteller. He may not be much good when it comes to insightful comments on the Condition of England, but his characters have that extra oomph which few other 19th century authors ever come close to - even when he's not trying very hard. Gaskell's characters are a bit colourless by comparison, and a problem from my point of view is that she just doesn't "do" villains. Milton (Yes, I get it, Mill-town, plus Margaret thinks she has lost a paradise when moving from the South - but still, as a town-name it is just as unconvincing as Coketown) could have done with the odd Bitzer or Slackbridge. And as for the hero's stern mother Mrs Thornton, Mrs Sparsit in "Hard Times" out-gorgons her effortlessly.

My main cold-curing TV at the moment is not a costume drama at all: I'm re-watching "The West Wing" for the umpteenth time. It's great entertainment, at the same time as it makes you feel intelligent for being able to follow the political arguments and get the jokes. Some questions raised are more pertinent than others right now: there's one episode called "Five votes down". Guys, I know exactly how you feel.

onsdag 15 september 2010

Where have all the costume dramas gone? The blinkered head of BBC drama took them every one

I still haven't got over it. It was almost a year ago that I found out, in an article about Andrew Davies, that the BBC had axed his upcoming adaptation of "Dombey and Son". I had so much been looking forward to this adaptation: no-one does them better than Andrew Davies, wo had already adapted "Bleak House" and "Little Dorrit" so splendidly. Finally, I would be able to show my family and friends what my ongoing Carker-obsession was about. I couldn't expect them to read the novel, which, truth to tell, is uneven. I couldn't expect them to watch the existing "Dombey and Son" TV adaptation from 1983. It's wonderfully cast: Julian Glover was surely born to play Dombey, and as for Paul Darrow as Carker - yum. Nevertheless, the adaptation creaks horribly, somehow managing to retain boring stuff like Mrs Chick's soliloquies (very well acted, but what of it? They're still boring!) while disposing of the whole subplot involving Carker's siblings, his discarded mistress and the latter's creepy mother completely. I'm glad I have it, but it really is for hard-line Dickens fans only. Whereas only imagine what Davies could have done with such material! One of the many wonderful things about his "Bleak House" and "Little Dorrit" adaptations is that they are both pacy and contain so much of the original plot lines. He would have made something eminently watchable of a plot involving dysfunctional families and dark erotic drama. Maybe he could even have found a way to deal with The Awful Plot Twist.

We may not be entirely bereft, of course. There are rumours that Davies has been told to do an adaptation of "David Copperfield" instead. But we already have a perfectly good BBC adaptation of "David Copperfield" which has not aged perceptibly. In fact, there are quite a number of "David Copperfield" adaptations out there, so there is no pressing need to make a new one. I'll still watch it when it comes of course - IF it comes - but I would have liked a "Dombey and Son" adaptation better.

So why am I whining about this now, one year afterwards? Simply because I've read a summary of the dramas that will be aired on English TV this autumn, and it looks less than promising. Yes, there are some costume dramas, but they are predominantly set in the 20th century and based on novels by authors such as D.H. Lawrence. Of the great Victorian novels with their thrilling, epic plots there is no sign. All this, of course, is entirely in line with the BBC drama head's ambition to "broaden" BBC's outlook, if by broaden you mean abandoning the 19th century entirely, since regrettably the BBC has now run out of Austen books to adapt to death. The BBC seems to have some sort of trendy aversion to "bonnet drama", but it's not the bonnets that make Victorian novels exciting: it's the characters and the plot. I doubt they will be able to find something equally meaty period drama-wise elsewhere. Meanwhile, ITV is putting on a lavish series set in the Edwardian era and scripted by the reliable Julian Fellowes. That should be fun. Not quite Dickens, but at least it's not D.H. Lawrence.

More on cossie dramas another time: I have to get ready for a yoga class. My first and, I suspect, my last.

onsdag 8 september 2010

Things royal and industrial

My punishment for rubbishing "Hard Times" seems to be that I'm now possessed with the spirit of Slackbridge. That I should quarrel with my employer, who suddenly considers "telemarketing" - that's cold-calling to you or me - part of my job description when I was hired as an administrator, and that I should join the union in consequence, may not be that strange. But that I should watch the first episode of the TV adaptation of Gaskell's "North and South" and think "Cut wages to below the level of five years ago? Nah, that's not right, you go on strike lads" - now that really scares me.

I may be too early to tell, but I must admit that so far Gaskell's treatment of the industrial North is more nuanced that Dickens's and fairer that I expected from a "Christian Socialist" (I'm a Christian myself, but I don't care for the combination with "Socialist" at all - in fact I find it insulting, as if people with other political views were automatically bad Christians). The reasoning we get from both sides of the factory owner-worker quarrel is far more sensible than anything Bounderby or Stephen Blackpool came up with, which I agree is not saying much. It is refreshing that the tender-hearted heroine from the South is not always right: in fact she is sometimes blatantly naïve ("and all this for cotton no-one wants to buy!"). But didn't we have the whole "factory owner scarred by years of hardship" plot in Charlotte Brontë's "Shirley"? It irritates me that there has to an "excuse" for the fact that he is not dancing around kissing babies. Maybe what made factory owners of the nineteenth century somewhat edgy was not their own early experiences, but the annoyingness of bleeding-heart authors who swooped in, complained about their town, idealised their workforce and then "wanted some answers" about why things had to be the way they were.

I wonder what kind of early experiences could possibly have counted as an excuse for Henry VIII's style of leadership. Mind you, he's more kindly portrayed in "Wolf Hall" than one might expect, maybe in order to make us see why a sensible man like Wolsey would call him "the sweetest prince in Christendom". I've now read the whole novel and yes, it is good until the very end, though Wolsey is sorely missed after his demise by both Cromwell and the reader. It does suffer a bit from Tudor-novelitis, that is, too many "atmospheric" descriptions. I really don't care what the weather was like or how the trees or the water looked on this-and-this day. Give me another scene with überbitch Anne and her likewise bitchy ladies-in-waiting instead. I confess I thought Cromwell's interest in Jane Seymour, still an obscure (non-bitchy) attendant on Anne and nothing more, somewhat unlikely, but it does provide a cliffhanger. At the end of the novel, Cromwell is planning a visit to the Seymours' place Wolf Hall. We know butter-wouldn't-melt-Jane ended up with the king and not with "Master Secretary". So what happened there? I'll definitely be buying Mantel's next Cromwell book so I can find out.