This isn’t a sexy Dickens – it’s more of a dreary snoozefest
Great Expectations BBC1, Sunday ★★★★★ Succession
Sky Atlantic, Monday ★★★★★
Ihad been much anticipating the adaptation of Great Expectations by Steven ‘Peaky Blinders’ Knight, as the word was that it was spanky, sexy, druggy – Miss Havisham on opium? – and, I read somewhere, what Charles Dickens might have written if he were alive today. Although I would contest that, as I think he’d have probably written something like The Wire. I was prepared. I was ready. For the spanky, sexy drugginess, but what the pre-publicity had forgotten to whip up a storm about was the fact that it’s quite dramatically inert and dreary.
At 9pm last Sunday, along with two other members of my household, I sat down to watch in real time, and by the end of the hour only one of us was awake. We were twothirds down, in other words. I was the one who stayed the course. Because I’m paid to. Otherwise, who knows what might have happened.
Modernising classic texts can be successful, particularly when they happen at a lick and with a sense of fun, like Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History Of David Copperfield or ITV’s Vanity Fair, which only I liked, to be fair. But this is deadly, darkly earnest and, rather than excise the boring bits, this seems to add new ones of its own.
The first episode opened with adult Pip about to hang himself from a London bridge, which is our first ‘Whoa, that never happened in the book’ moment. The characters are familiar but perhaps not as we know them. By episode two we’ll discover that Mr Pumblechook enjoys being thrashed across his bare bottom by Sara Gargery. Did you ever suspect as much? I did not. But I wouldn’t read too much into that, as I can lack imagination.
After the bridge incident, we enter more recognisable territory. Now we spool back to Pip (played by Tom Sweet as a boy and by Fionn Whitehead as an adult) as the young orphan living with his abusive and, later, bottom-thrashing sister, Sara (Hayley Squires), and her kind-hearted blacksmith husband, Joe Gargery (Owen McDonnell). They live in a village in the middle of the coastal marshes of Kent, where Pip encounters the terrifying escaped convict Magwitch (Johnny Harris), who frightens him into fetching food and a file.
However, before we even make it this far we have to endure several underlit scenes on the prison ship from which Magwitch will flee, and then his tussle with Compeyson (Trystan Gravelle), another escaped convict, that seemed to go on for ever on the misty, monochrome marshes that looked quite CGI.
‘Hurry up and let’s get to Miss Havisham,’ I said to myself, as no one else was awake. Out of curiosity, I had a look at David Lean’s famous film adaptation from 1946. Here, Magwitch has been dealt with by 15 minutes in and we’re with Miss Havisham at the 20-minute mark. Knight has six hours to play with rather than two, that’s true, but it does lose narrative propulsion. There were several redundant scenes. Once we know that Pip does not aspire to be a blacksmith, did we have to see him reading a book while Joe clangs around the forge behind him? Once Magwitch is recaptured, do we have to see him back in chains on the ship? Show, don’t tell, of course, but also, know when to stop showing,
Finally, finally, through the services of Mr Pumblechook (played by Matt ‘Toast Of London’ Berry, who was born to be a Dickens character), Pip is delivered to Satis House, home to Miss Havisham (Olivia Colman), the crazy rich lady across town who hasn’t left the house or stepped out of her wedding dress since being jilted at the altar 30 years previously.
Colman is the best thing thus far, all woozy, mouldering decay with furry teeth and a cruel glint in her eye. Pip has, of course, been enlisted as a playmate for her adopted daughter Estella (Chloe Lea), who is being raised to become a heartless destroyer of men, although Knight has, apparently, changed the ending. But I haven’t got there yet. Maybe I never will.
Succession is back and Succession is thrilling and probably not the series Dickens would write if he were alive today, as there is no one who is noble beyond their circumstances, or even noble at all. I’m an arachnophobe but will watch the spiders at London Zoo just to remind me how horrifying they are, and I feel the same about watching the Roy family who are also, of course, safely contained behind glass.
This is to be the last season and it hit the ground running with Logan Roy (Brian Cox) attending his own joyless birthday party while, across the country, his three estranged children – or ‘the rats’, as he calls them – are creating The Hundred, a ‘one-stop info-shop’ that will be ‘Substack meets Masterclass meets The New Yorker meets The Economist’, says Kendall (Jeremy Strong). (I laughed aloud.) But as soon as they wake up to the fact that Daddy is about to buy the Pierce conglomerate (from season two), The Hundred doesn’t seem to be a good idea any more. How about, instead, snaffling Pierce? Right from under Daddy’s nose?
This was business as usual, with Roman (Kieran Culkin) and his potty mouth, and Greg (Nicholas Braun) blinking dumbly like a newly born chick, but there was also something new: a deep sense of loneliness running throughout. Logan referred to his bodyguard as his ‘best pal’ and ended his day basically shouting at the TV while Shiv (Sarah Snook) and her disloyal husband, Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), can’t quite let each other go. Or can they? I hope Tom sticks around, as Macfadyen’s performance is currently the best to be seen on TV.