VANITY PHWOAR!
Pining after Poldark? Missing your fix of frocked coats and ripped bodices? Well hold on to your tricorn, here comes the new period romp for a Love Island generation...
WITH handsome heroes, spectacular locations and scandalous storylines, it’s the new must-see costume drama vying to capture the hearts of TV fans mourning the loss of Poldark, the BBC1 series that finished last month.
Rival ITV has spent £10million adapting William Thackeray’s classic 1847 novel Vanity Fair, giving it a sexy makeover to appeal to the Love Island generation.
With Madonna and Kate Bush featuring on the soundtrack, the production is targeting ‘all generations of viewers’. It is ‘essentially the story of six young people looking for love’, screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes told The Mail on Sunday.
Admitting that her adaptation is not slavishly loyal to Thackeray’s original text, she added: ‘It would be fantastic to get on a bus and hear a bunch of young girls say, “Oh, did you see Vanity Fair last night?” You are watching the pairings come together and the love stories play out over the course of seven weeks – why shouldn’t it appeal to fans of Love Island?’
Vanity Fair stars Olivia Cooke as the low-born but fiercely ambitious Becky Sharp, who will stop at nothing in her determination to rise through the ranks of Regency society.
The cast also features Michael Palin, Frances de la Tour and Suranne Jones.
The series does not shy away from some difficult moments for modern viewers, particularly the racist language and attitudes in a novel written almost two centuries ago.
In one scene, the parents of Becky’s friend, Amelia Sedley, joke about how their son Jos might marry a ‘dusky Maharani’ in India and deliver them a dozen ‘mahogany grandchildren’.
Ms Hughes defended the scene, saying: ‘I felt very strongly we should keep it in. That’s how things were. That’s how people spoke and thought. We get very interested in costume drama in what people wore and how they danced so why wouldn’t we be interested in what they thought?’
Here is your – spoiler-free – guide to the hotly anticipated series, which starts next month – and how it will measure up to the smouldering passion and moody melodrama of Poldark…