Vanity Fair
ITV, Sundays, 9pm
Before it’s opening episodes aired over the weekend, Vanity Fair was the subject of much disapproval on social media. The thrust of the negative comments was that it’s yet another version of an old story we’ve seen countless times. Or, as excellent BBC presenter Samira Ahmed put it on Twitter, “One day we’ll write history books about how during one of the most dramatic periods of social and political tension… TV execs kept remaking the SAME period dramas.” Putting aside the fact there are myriad new contemporary TV dramas this season, and thatvanity Fair is actually the only such classic getting a reboot, it strikes me that the same critics never seem to have an issue with relentless restagings of Shakespeare in the theatre. For some reason, TV is expected to reject the classics.
The bottom line with a show like Vanity Fair is that, while it’s obviously intended to grab the ITV Sunday-night audience that lapped up Downton Abbey, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t judge it on its merits. And from the clever title sequence featuring an atmospheric new version of Bob Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower as the theme song, to the funny tête-à-tête between our hero – feisty teaching assistant Becky (Olivia Cooke) – and her pompous headmistress Miss Pinkerton (Suranne Jones), it’s clear this version is anything but safe. Writer Gwyneth Hughes, best known for dark thrillers Remember Me and Five Days, ensures the whole thing fizzes along brilliantly, while making pointed observations about what women have to put up with in an inherently sexist society. It all seems cunningly… modern.