Verne’s classic reimagined
THE point about Jules Verne’s classic, Around the World in Eighty Days, first published in 1872, is the plot can scarcely be bettered. In India, he rescues a young woman, Aouda, just as she is about to be consigned to her husband’s funeral pyre in an act of sati. She joins Phileas Fogg for the rest of his journey. The couple fall in love and marry when they reach London.
The new BBC adaptation takes viewers to India in the fourth episode, which was screened on Sunday (2). The railway line across India has been delayed (rather like HS2) and Fogg (David Tennant), his French manservant, Passepartout (Ibrahim Koma), and Abigail “Fix” Fortescue (Leonie Benesch), journalist daughter of the editor of The Daily Telegraph, end up in a village where the action takes place.
A local woman, Aouda (Shivani Ghai), saves Fogg’s life, but there is no romance between the two.
In 1989, Michael Palin did a seven-part travel documentary for the BBC recreating Fogg’s journey as faithfully as possible. Was it just coincidence that in 1988, my boss, Andrew Neil, editor of The Sunday Times, asked me to do a Christmas special for the paper, on what would happen if Fogg attempted to circumnavigate the globe in contemporary times? Fogg was required to stick to the route and means of transport described by Verne. No aircraft.
Alas, by my reckoning, Fogg lost his bet. The quickest I could get him back to the Reform Club was in something like 113 days. There was another hitch. When Fogg and Aouda arrived in England, immigration officers told her she didn’t have a proper visa and ordered that she be deported to India.
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