A sad farewell to the up and down ride of Vanity Fair
So it’s time to say a sad goodbye to ITV’S Sad, because this screen version of Thackeray’s novel found itself outflanked in both the ratings and public consciousness by its BBC Sunday night rival Bodyguard. Gwyneth Hughes’ adaptation had been trailed as a bold new take on its source material, from the sultry Bob Dylan cover that played over the opening credits onwards. But in the end, it wasn’t radical enough to compete with the outrageous twists and turns of Jed Mercurio’s thriller. Perhaps if Hughes had decided to kill off its anti-heroine Becky Sharp come episode four, it might have been a contender.
However, those of us who did keep with it were rewarded with a sprightly treat that largely succeeded where it counted – in capturing the caustic tang of Thackeray’s prose. As in the novel, a falsely happy ending – involving the union of those two doe-eyed saps, Sharp’s best pal Amelia Sedley (Claudia Jessie) and Captain Dobbin (a far too good-looking Johnny Flynn) – was undone in a quietly brutal coda, which found a forlorn Amelia usurped in Dobbin’s affections by their own daughter. Then the series closed with the image of Olivia Cooke’s unchastened Sharp, husband dead and the doltish Jos (David Flynn) ensnared, gleefully riding on the ever-present carousel that has introduced every episode.
As with that glaring visual metaphor, the whole thing was not exactly subtle. But it was always alluring, not least because of Cooke’s winning screen presence. Early on in the series, her performance seemed rather too obvious, her scheming more one-faced than two. But, as her bounder-ess fell on hard times, she got better and better, investing her performance with just enough humanity to make you doubt whether she was entirely insincere.
Even if the series won’t have inspired the popping of champagne corks at ITV, it’s been a credit to the channel, and a pleasing riposte to those who like to complain about a surfeit of costume drama. Regardless of period, we could certainly do with more of its moral ambiguity on our screens. Hugh Montgomery
There was a twin track to (Channel 4), the ninth series of Timothy West and Prunella Scales’s watery wanderings. One track was a cruise not along a canal but up the Nile, in a grand flat-bottomed craft with 70ft sails called a dahabiyah (meaning “gold”, as in “The barge she sat in like a burnished throne…”). The other was the touching journey of Miss Scales (Lady West) into the unknown country of dementia.
But neither track was real. Sure, we don’t expect travelogues to minute dull hours, and goodness knows the banks of the Nile look samey for the 140 miles from Luxor to Aswan. So we saw sparkling water and rising birds and preserved temples – but where was everyone?
Only these two travelled on a dahabiyah that could easily take 12 passengers at £75 a night for four nights (£3,600). There was no one at the astonishing temple at Karnak (“It’s so big it could contain St Paul’s Cathedral and St Peter’s in Rome,” declaimed Sir Timothy.) No one even at the Nubian village of Gharb Soheil, except some tiresome string musicians in clean robes. Surely not everyone had fled for fear of terrorism. It must have been the magic of television.
Prunella Scales, now 86, touchingly welcomed a supporting hand over the ancient stones, but could still read a line or two from Death on the Nile with expression. “Prue’s memory is not what it was,” declared Sir Timothy. “It’s true,” she replied. “Some days I don’t know if it’s Monday or Lewisham,”
They have spoken openly about Alzheimer’s disease since 2014. Her condition seems to deteriorate slowly. It figured as the most unreal part of this journey. How many viewers with dementia in the family would like to see their loved one in her last years smiling and quoting Shakespeare and being game and funny and going up the Nile, instead of being sometimes confused, upset and difficult, and unfit to go to the supermarket?
Yet I wept to see them together looking out of the window at home in Wandsworth – “Somewhere to see the world go by” – and then overlooking the Nile, with the same remark. That was true, and we did feel for this accomplished thespian couple (“Basil!” in Fawlty Towers; “Howl, howl, howl, howl!” in King Lear). But the emotion was too easy, unrooted – unfixed as the sands of the Nile. Christopher Howse
Vanity Fair Great Canal Journeys