Does anyone know what actually happened to the BBC’s Homeric bid to record all of Shakespeare’s plays in original productions for the torture of schoolchildren and the Open University in perpetuity? They started about 30 years ago, and I think they got up to about Romeo and Juliet. And then nothing. They were terrible, really awful, repletely full of all the empty mannerisms and stagey projections that have convinced generations of Englishmen that their national Bard is best neither seen nor heard, but left as a decorative collected work on the shelf and only quoted in greetings cards and quiz shows. Whenever some columnists in the Daily Mail start on the “Why oh why doesn’t the BBC stick to its Reithian public-service remit and stop making lefty filth?”, I remember the well-meaning, literary-manna-for-the-plebs, nation-shall-speak-iambic-pentameter-to-nation electric Shakespeare and hope it’s been buried in some deep vault. Because it’s cultural genocide — a bad revival is far worse than no revival at all.
Good adaptations may encourage people to inquire within, but clumsy, dull ones can turn millions off whole genres.
So, after Bleak House as a soap opera, the BBC offered us Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (Monday, BBC1) as a sitcom farce. Much Ado is one of those plays that relies on a lot of mistaken identity and overheard conversations, which works on stage, because we all understand the conventions of theatre, but is difficult on television, which is a far more literal and naturalistic medium. It does, though, have a pair of the Bard’s favourite lovers. I dread to think how many Siamese cats and Norfolk terriers are called Benedick and Beatrice in intellectually insecure university closes.
The transformation of a Renaissance Italian governor’s mansion into a contemporary Bournemouth local news studio is not as radical as it sounds. Again, we’re used to Shakespeare being made the Captain Kirk of playwrights and boldly going into weird sets and situations. A TV studio allows for plenty of comic eavesdropping.
This production was completely rewritten, which is a foolhardy thing to do to Shakespeare. Shakespeare without Shakespeare’s language is a big hole to fill. But this was done very neatly — the humour sparkled, the banter bounced like a dropped ping-pong ball. There were occasional genuflections to the original, for the edification of purist snobs. The affair between Beatrice and Benedick was, if not believable, then at least enjoyable, though the subplot between Hero and Claude (Shakespeare’s Claudio) ended in an unfunny and cruel confrontation at the altar that jerked the atmosphere and was altogether less successful, like finding an anchovy in your candy floss.
What made this production a success was the incredibly good cast; even the smallest walk-ons were provided by actors who might expect to find their names above the title on a provincial tour of No, No, Nanette. It was proof of Stanislavsky’s dictum that there are no small parts, just small pay cheques.
Damian Lewis and Billie Piper were the most moreish faces on offer, but the whole cast worked well as an ensemble. Collective responsibility is one of the many joys Shakespeare left the theatre.
We can thank reality television and real-life diary documentaries for forcing so many first-rate actors into one production. Big television drama has become the game reserve for an endangered species. It also means there are few places for young ingénus to learn small-box acting. Much Ado is the first of a number of Shakespeare adaptations. They ought to do the complete canon like this: it would be original and public-spirited, and annoy the garters off hardback traditionalists.
The new Trial and Retribution (Monday, ITV1), Lynda La Plante’s police procedural, started with Romeo and Juliet the ballet, performed at Covent Garden. La Plante’s dark and dank trawls through the alleys and underpasses of foul behaviour have always been bellwethers and metaphors for the time they’re made. TV police and the crimes that fascinate mark an age more exactly than comedies or documentaries or the news. Her new detective is a brassy, pikey chav, rather well portrayed by Victoria Smurfit, who treats the victims of crime, in this case a woman who has lost her husband on honeymoon, with a barely concealed irritation that borders on scorn.
Perhaps this is symptomatic of the current moment. We have a compassion fatigue for victims and the walking-wounded compensation disability culture. This does, though, even by La Plante’s standards, make our hero a spectacularly unattractive woman, but then maybe that is the new hero of our time, like the horrible, blackboard-grating non-celebrities in the gossip columns. The first episode was rather underpowered, and lacked tension, but La Plante’s track record and her ability to ratchet the excitement slowly is proven, so I expect we’ll all go on watching.
Infidelity with Rod Liddle (Monday, Sky One) tapped into another zeitgeist trend, that of the poacher turned gamekeeper — Jeffrey Archer on prison reform, Jade Goody on etiquette. Now here we have Liddle Rod, as he’s known around the newsroom’s water cooler, telling us, more in sorrow than in anger, that we can’t help putting it about because he can’t help putting it about. This was an uncomfortable and unconvincing tiptoe through some familiar pre-Desmond Morris behaviourism and tabloid psychology, and it was as self-serving as a Jewish wedding reception.
The usual sniggering examples of animal behaviour were brought in to explain cheating. Funny how the behaviour of shrews and gibbons is never used to explain table manners or road safety or gardening, only sex. Anyway, it was bad Darwinism. Taking the example of a monkey and applying it to yourself misses the point that animal behaviour is made for the benefit of the species, not as an excuse for the individual. Being incapable of sustaining a stable pair and supporting children is really not in the interests of our species. Neither is it really in the best interests of the philanderer.
There was a pathos at the heart of this programme — guilt and unhappiness and regret — but it remained unexamined. Liddle’s pathological inability to shut up about his indiscretions and stinking laundry is more a Tourette’s-like symptom than a journalistic examination.
