This is how to adapt a literary classic for TV
The weekend on television Jasper Rees
Another week, another classic about illicit spooning at the dawn of the 20th century. Where the BBC’s fresh take on Lady Chatterley’s Lover hollowed out the original and injected its own up-to-date agitprop,
The Go-Between (BBC One, Sunday) kept faith with LP Hartley’s devastating story of love denied. This was what creative fidelity is meant to look like.
In the novel, the narrative is relived in the memory of Leo Colston 50 years on from the glorious summer gone wrong during which, at a friend’s grand home, he ferried billets-doux between upper-class beauty Marian Maudsley and hunky tenant farmer Ted Burgess. To capture that sense of recollection without excessive reliance on voice-over, Pete Travis’s roving camerawork revealed the gilded paradise of Brandon Hall in impressionistic glances and lush screen grabs of floating pollen and wafting corn. As for the protagonists, he shot Joanna Vanderham’s Marian as a radiant extension of the sun, while Ben Batt’s Ted suggested a gritty compound of gnarled oak and loamy earth.
The drama was bookended by Jim Broadbent as the older Leo, the “creature of ashes and cinders” wearing a look of crushed sorrow as he chugged back to the foreign country of his distant past. His gaze was beautifully prefigured in Jack Hollington as smitten young Leo, whose trusting eyes caught brief confused glimpses of his coming expulsion from Eden.
This was a superbly intuitive performance from a child actor bearing a heavy burden. Hollington held his ground throughout, with Vanderham’s manipulative Marian and Batt’s taciturn Ted (both excellent), and even when Lesley Manville as Marian’s tightly wound mother tried to worm the shattering truth out of him. In the key scenes he sang like Ernest Lough and took his cricket catch like Ben Stokes.
Adrian Hodges’s script took careful and modest liberties. The disfigured Trimingham (Stephen Campbell Moore), vouchsafed greater knowledge of his marital undesirability than in the book, became a subtly tragic figure in a story with no victors. And then Broadbent returned at the end to encounter Batt as Ted’s grandson, Vanessa Redgrave as silly old Marian, and finally – redemptively – his younger self. Intensified by Christian Henson’s swooning soundtrack, this was a deeply moving reverie about a life sacrificed not in the mud of Flanders but on the sun-baked lawns of Norfolk.
This Is England has tracked its actors and their characters across a decade. For me, it’s like
Seven Up! in that I caught the original film set in 1983, somehow missed the two television series and have only now remade the acquaintance of Shane Meadows’s cast of characters in
This Is England ’90 (Channel 4, Sunday) as they prepare to bid farewell. I feel like an uncle catching up with distant family as they’re about to emigrate. Haven’t they grown?
The first episode introduced the characters to the acid-house or “Madchester” music scene. The hedonism went up a notch in the second episode but this time the comedown was far steeper. The gang’s party animals, searching for a rural rave they never found, instead crashed a pagan happening complete with wigwams and topless wassailing.
The gathering was filmed by Meadows in a muffled haze suggesting an aura of trippy invulnerability, only for Kelly (Chanel Cresswell) to stumble woozily into a mobile crack den where she was virtually gang-raped by three hippies. Druggy sex, done as toecurling farce in last week’s “sniff-banging” scene, was repeated as dystopian miserablism.
Kelly’s grim epiphany (“I’m a f---ing slag, Gadget”) was counterpointed by Shaun’s cathartic encounter with a middle-aged earth mother. As he spilled his grief over the death of his father, you were conscious more than ever that Meadows asks his cast to ad-lib their lines. This Is England arose as a TV series when the company came together after the death of Turgoose’s mother. It looked as if no acting was required.
This Is England ’90 can occasionally miss as well as hit. Not every actor is as adept at improv as Joe Gilgun and Vicky McClure as Woody and Lol negotiating the imminent return of Combo (Stephen Graham). Did people really close arguments with “end of ” in 1990? And Meadows lingered at the rave with a little too much love of atmosphere. But he’s earned the right to do as he pleases. End of.