Television should stop revisiting the same old novels
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a TV corporation in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a script. But, oh dear, is the BBC really so bereft of ideas that they have to exhume Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice again? Last week, they announced they would bring it to the small screen for a seventh time. It seems especially surplus to requirements these days when we have Andrew Davies’s 1995 version, which is rightly regarded as definitive. Sparkling, subtle and a little bit sexy, its production values are high and thus it remains undated.
Re-adapting the novel now adds nothing, despite the writer in this case being the seriously talented Nina Raine, creator of one of this year’s theatrical hits, Consent. I was troubled by her affirmation that her take would be “darker”. That’s the adjective used in TV circles for a second series when the desperate creator has reached a creative cul-de-sac.
No one loves Austen more than me, and I admit that her novels often translate brilliantly to the screen (Nick Dear’s Persuasion, made the same year as Davies’s Pride and Prejudice, is a personal highlight), but we need a moratorium. Within the past decade, there have been TV adaptations of all five of her other major novels.
Pride and Prejudice is not the only literary work that is resurrected consistently. Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, Vanity Fair, Wuthering Heights, even The Moonstone, tend to resurface every few years. Back in 2009, Davies himself complained that when he presented BBC Drama with an outline for a new version of Dickens’s rarely adapted Dombey and Son (which, actually, has very interesting, still resonant, things to say about father-daughter relationships), they were not keen, but asked Davies whether he would consider doing David Copperfield instead. A good story for television, of course, but one that had been adapted by the BBC less than a decade earlier.
Costume drama has been an essential part of British TV output ever since The Forsyte Saga in 1967. A top 50 of the greatest TV shows ever made would almost certainly include that, John Mortimer’s obsessively faithful 1981 adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, the 1985 production of Bleak House, for which Arthur Hopcraft delineated every salient point from Dickens’s complex beast of a novel and, of course, Davies’s Pride and Prejudice. But each, at the time of their first transmission, felt original. It’s time that period drama makers started prioritising originality once more – beginning with their choice of novels.
What to adapt? Well, anything written in the 1890s (a period oddly neglected by TV) by anyone called George would be a good start: George Gissing’s New Grub Street, George Moore’s Esther Waters and George du Maurier’s Trilby are all very different, all very televisual in their storytelling and all, oddly, psychologically in tune with the insecurities of 21st century life. The 20th century is trickier. Modernism, with its eroding of conventional narrative structures and fondness for experimentation with form, is no friend of the TV dramatist. Perhaps that’s why the last TV adaptation of a Virginia Woolf novel was To the Lighthouse, way back in 1983.
But there are plenty of other non-modernist authors who could be TV dynamite. Barbara Pym, with her many coruscating comedies of manners, for example. In my head, Pym’s 1977 masterpiece Quartet in Autumn, about a group of retirees heading towards a twilight of irrelevance in Seventies London, could be a showcase for Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins, Ian McKellen and Michael Gambon. And what about the oddly elliptical truthfulness of Penelope Fitzgerald or the cynical wit of Molly Keane? Or, more controversially, the homoerotic innovations of Ronald Firbank, or the black-hearted despair of Patrick Hamilton? And then there are those novels detailing the immigrant experience: Samuel Selvon’s devastatingly sad 1956 work The Lonely Londoners, for example.
Of course, not all work is eminently adaptable. There is a reason that Charlotte Brontë’s Villette has remained untouched since 1970, and Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge since 1960. Sometimes, TV commissioners’ plans to bring a lesser-known work to the public attention backfires – think of Channel 4’s disastrous attempts to truncate two great 20th century literary cycles, Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time and Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour.
(I remember my mum saying that Daniel Craig was all wrong as the gentlemanly Guy Crouchback because he had a working-class walk. I’m not sure I know what a working-class walk is, but I am sure it was a major contributing factor to Sword of Honour’s failure).
But sometimes an unloved novel from the past can blossom when presented to a TV audience. Elizabeth Gaskell’s fitfully structured, borderline twee Cranford and Ford Madox Ford’s unreadable tetralogy Parade’s End were both overhauled and reshaped, by Andrew Davies and Tom Stoppard, respectively. Stoppard, in particular, brought a sort of poetry and an emotional richness completely absent (at least to me) from Ford’s dense and unyielding prose. Both of these dramas prove that even the most difficult of works can come to life in the right hands; that a certain fearlessness is needed, as well as a willingness to look past the obvious.
There is a vast library of literature available to the BBC; that it can only be bothered to think about a handful of books from the past is depressing.