Sadly, not my cup of tea
ONE phrase from The Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy books has always stuck with me. It concerned a drink obtained from a vending machine, described as “a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite entirely, unlike tea”.
So much of our world can seem like that – a passable but poor copy of what we expect. The Hitchhiker’s tea effect was particularly strong in THE CHILD IN TIME (Sunday, BBC1), a one-off drama adapted from Ian McEwan’s prize-winning novel. If you had read it, you would have felt let down by this adaptation, despite the presence of thespian top brass like Benedict Cumberbatch, Kelly MacDonald and Saskia Reeves. For similar reasons, you might have felt the same if you had not read the book. Reduced to a trailer or a line of TV listings, the plot sounded like classic drama-thriller territory.
A children’s author loses sight of his daughter for a few seconds and she’s gone. For good. This was not, however, a posh version of The Missing. There were many searingly well-acted scenes over the 90 minutes that followed, some almost too truthful to watch. Stephen (Cumberbatch) and his wife Julie (MacDonald) picked their marriage apart and separated. She sought solace in solitude, he wrote a book about a boy wanting to be a fish.
Stephen’s publisher friend Charles (Stephen Campbell Moore) – a high-ranking politician – slipped into a kind of mania, living out the boyhood he had never had.
Meanwhile, committees convened in Westminster and as a prominent children’s author, Stephen sat on them – half lost in grief, half disgusted at whatever politicians were doing to education.
Some sort of child-rearing handbook was produced and whatever was in it was horrid. And Charles, who seemed to have been the author of it, hanged himself in his woodland playground. Stephen became preoccupied by the idea he had peered through a pub window at a much younger version of his mother, pregnant with him at the time. And on a trip to see Julie, the couple slept together and at the end a new child replaced the one they had lost.
If that all sounds like a disjointed account, it is because this was a disjointed story, lacking almost all the bits of the original that would have helped it make sense.
Written in 1987, the novel was an almost sci-fi-like depiction of the future, with a cultish atmosphere around the Prime Minister and his acolytes.
The adaptation captured none of that. In the novel, Charles’s wife Thelma (Reeves) was a quantum physicist, her mind-bending chats with Stephen providing a backdrop to the time-travelling interludes. Without that backdrop, they seemed like hallucinations or an unwelcome hint of the paranormal in an ordinary, human story. A version of McEwan’s tale so partial you wondered why they bothered.
Some of BRITAIN’S ANCIENT TRACKS WITH TONY ROBINSON (Saturday, C4) have been walked for 5,000 years. It feels like Tony has been walking along them for nearly as long but his wanderings combine various ’ographies and ’ologies in a fashion that never gets dull.
He was on Dartmoor this time, where every rock concealed a story. A local druid explained them – and the way pagan beliefs fused with Christianity and the landscape to create this uniquely meaningful place.
Better than a stroll in the park.