Oh boy, a suitable stab at Indian epic
THEY said it wasn’t possible.to get to the Moon? No, to adapt A Suitable Boy (BBC One, Sunday) for television. Even the screenwriter who finally took on the job, Andrew Davies, initially turned it down. Nonetheless, here we have it – almost 600,000 words of the novel fromvikram Seth turned into six hours of television. I’m exhausted at the thought.
Davies has form having already done War And Peace brilliantly. Was I won over? For the final 10 minutes of the first episode, yes. Otherwise, I needed a significant amount of prodding in my planter chair to get through the first 50 minutes.
Not that I saw one – a planter chair. Nor did I spot a colonial tea plantation either. There’s little trace of the Empire in this period (post-partition 1950s) which is historically accurate, but this is the first, high-profile drama on British television to attempt an all-indian story. It may explain why it took so long to bring this book to the small screen since it was published in 1993. In short, this is no Jewel In The Crown, and may struggle for it as we’ve become accustomed to recent offerings such as Channel 4’s Indian Summer and ITV’S Beecham House which ooze Empire – often not in a good way.
The story centres on a Jane Austen-style romance of marrying off a daughter against the backdrop of the Hindu/muslim divide.the first half an hour, however, wafted around in subplots including the rebel son Maan – the best character so far, who might be gay, bisexual or curious.
He was indulging his love for an older singer while happily pushing a stuffy government minister into the family fountain.we’ve all got one of those. Indeed, this is a very upper middle-class story involving at least four large families. I think we needed a helpful character list. And why was some dialogue in Hindi, and some in English? It was utterly random. We know it’s India.
The real focus is the blossoming love story which should develop over the next few episodes among some stunning set pieces. But in the interim can the director do something about the acting? Some of the wayward looks and glances were so Bollywood as to make it almost laughable.
Away from that issue, one scene had all the hallmarks of Andrew Davies who is known for sexing-up his adaptations. It involved our popular singer again, this time entrancing an extremely rotund rajah who needed help with almost everything, including standing up. Earlier, he easily filled an open-top sports car with his bulk, as a biddable assistant trotted alongside the motor holding a parasol. Maybe the Raj isn’t such a distant memory after all.
TV just can’t leave Hitler alone.this time, it was the fascist leader’s love for fast cars, or at least Formula One. But in the watching of Hitler’s Supercars (C4,
DO you ever feel sorry for
Salem? It’s always the go-to witches’ lair. Yet another US drama, Fort Salem arrives with a Hogwarts for witches who are defending us from a death cult. Hmm... Nice bedtime viewing, including a mass suicide in a shopping mall with possessed teenagers hurling themselves off high balconies on to the solid floor below. Thank you BBC Three for bringing this uplifting, heartwarming story to our younger population. Bizarrely, comic actor Will Ferrell exec produced. His appearance as a comedy Dumbledore would help. For pining fans of Buffy
The Vampire Slayer only.
Sunday) – like a recently unearthed 1930s Top Gear episode – it was obvious that he loved propaganda and what Goebbels could do with it, rather than waving the chequered flag at weird petrolheads on a racetrack. Right from the start, the Nazis invested in their motor racing industry, with £500,000 for Mercedes and £300,000 for their rivals, Auto Union, and built autobahns as public roads to race on – and for Jeremy Clarkson.
The idea was for them to beat all-comers, and break speed records, which occasionally they did. But not always. In the first attempt, Mercedes thought it would be beaten by Auto Union so pulled out, while Auto Union’s Porsche was beaten by an Alfa Romeo driven by a chap from a German Jewish family. Take that! The British, quite rightly, smelled a rat all along.at our Donnington race circuit before the war, fans booed the German race car for “being too fast”. Absolutely. A fair fight if you don’t mind.
FINALLY, Michael Portillo in Great Continental Railway Journeys (BBC Two, Wednesday) surpassed even his own high standards of tailoring by combining a canary yellow jacket with purpley-blue shirt and orange slacks.as he took a train through the tunnel to France, he looked like the human embodiment of the European flag. Well, he did vote Remain in case you’re wondering. Remember that Brexit vote? Politics was deeply embedded in the first episode of a new, sixth series as he visited Spain, the country from which his parents, who would meet in Britain, fled into exile.
In a touching story, he visited the archive kept by fascist General Franco in which his father Luis, a liberal law academic, was represented on two indexing cards. It was an emotional moment for the presenter, who recalled how all his father’s brothers supported Franco. Not good for family gatherings. Undoubtedly the best moment, however, involved Portillo talking to Richard Blair, who is George Orwell’s son. Blair’s father fought for the anti-franco forces in the trenches of northern Spain. The experiences, Blair said, would inspire him to write both Animal Farm and 1984. They did rather well, I believe...