The new Les Mis? Well, it left me bloomin’ miserable

EARly in the first episode of the BBC’s new adaptation of les Misérables, one character turns to another and says: ‘I wonder if you know how I am suffering.’ Well, darling. My thoughts exactly. love it or hate it, the unarguable fact about this classic is that, as it says on the tin, it is completely bloody miserable. From start to finish, from first gunshot to last guillotine, it is grim, grim, grim all the way.

Be it Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel, Cameron Mackintosh’s smash hit stage musical or the treacletastic Hollywood version of 2012, you can depend upon les Mis for gloom piled upon doom in a cruel

mille-feuille of human torment. I have wept buckets at all three of them, and I wept again at a preview of this new BBC1 six-part series, which begins on December 30. Although this time for very different reasons.

We open on the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, a warscape of bloodied corpses and dying horses; the latter fluttering their lush equine eyelashes before carking it on the smoking fields of Europe. Merry Christmas, war is over? Well, not quite.

Soon we are down at the Toulon prison Hulks, where Jean Valjean (Dominic West) is a slave in chains, cross-hatched with whip wounds and jammy open sores, while sporting an unfortunate beard that makes him look like Fred the maitre’d from First Dates.

you think things are bad? They are about to get very much worse.

With its themes of workers’ oppression, social justice, the treatment of women and the redemptive power of love, it would be hard to find a tale that is more politically correct than les Misérables.

But guess what? It is not quite politically correct enough for the BBC in 2018. So this version has a super ‘inclusive’ cast and has been given a ‘contemporary relevance’ by writer Andrew Davies, who has floated a homoerotic theme between Valjean and his pursuer Javert, the police inspector played by David oyelowo, which is about as believable as a bromance between Tom and Jerry.

ANDREW

Davies is an adapter of genius, famed for sexing-up classics for television, such as pride And prejudice and War And peace. yet has he gone too far this time?

He thinks that Javert was in love with Valjean ‘in a strange way’, and depicts this by the policeman’s lingering looks when Valjean strips naked in an early scene.

To be fair, officer, so did I. For Dominic West’s naked bottom, which makes an appearance in nearly every role he plays, is always a sight to gladden any revolutionary’s heart.

Meanwhile, Davies, an incorrigible old leftie, is keen to point out that even though les Misérables is more than 150 years old, it still reflects the injustices and divisions within society today. To illustrate this, he spoke of the beggars he had seen on the streets and the homeless sleeping rough in london.

yes, it is wholly regrettable that times are tough for these unfortunates. But be fair. Even if you do not like the Tories, it is safe to say things have improved since early 19th-century France.

Single mothers are supported financially and emotionally in society, not shunned like Fantine. There is no way underage Cossette would today be sent to work in an inn, with cruel olivia Colman making her scrub the hearth.

And no one is given 19 years’ hard labour for stealing a loaf of bread, like Valjean. you don’t even get 19 years for murder, Andrew!

So a little bit of perspective wouldn’t go amiss. Meanwhile, there are no songs in this excruciatingly right-on adaptation — no songs!

But even with all the box-ticking snowflakery, the power of Hugo’s epic tale of redemption and uncrushable human spirit does begin to cast its spell.

It is filmed on a lavish scale, with a starburst of fabulous actors and a will to be winning which transcends its demagoguery. This week, David oyelowo said of the production: ‘The really radical thing we’ve been doing is to take a 150-year-old novel and transpose it on to English life — to make it relevant to the wide audience we want to speak to.’

David, can I just say something? you don’t mean English, you mean

British. And that mistake is really annoying to the millions of Scots (like me), Welsh and Irish who live in the UK, but were not born or are domiciled in England.

We get really fed up when people say England when they mean the UK, which they do all the time. Being politically correct on an epic les Mis scale is exhausting — but it is a two-way street, for all of us.