Close the curtains, settle the children, fret the hearth: the BBC Classic
Serial, television’s annual tribute to mists and mellow fruitfulness,
returns to BBC One tomorrow night. The latest adaptation of a Victorian
masterpiece is everything you could want and, what is more, everything you
would expect. Hark the opening dialogue. Two bonneted maids of a familiar
visage enter a darkened room and begin to bustle. “Open the curtains,
Matilda,” says Eileen Atkins to Judi Dench, “while I remove the dustsheets
from the furniture.”
The speech is a perfect statement of the adapter Heidi Thomas’s intentions
towards Cranford, a novel – actually three novels – by Elizabeth
Gaskell that you will almost certainly not have read. This production, with
its outstanding cast, sumptuous visual values and careful modulation between
sentiment and humour, blows the dust off a forgotten classic. Whether or not
we shall be convinced entirely by the adapter’s premise that all human life
is to be observed in 1830s Cheshire, it is hard to disagree that this is
what the BBC is here to do. ITV’s drama controller had a quick response when
I asked if her network would have made it. It was: “No”.
There are problems with the current craze for classic adaptations, however.
The first is that most of the books being reopened by television have not
been gathering dust. Cranford is an exception, a five-year obsession
for its producer Sue Birtwistle. But look at what else is around.
After a year in which Jane Austen took up residence in its spring schedules,
ITV gave us E. M. Forster’s/ Andrew Davies’s A Room With a
View two weeks ago. It was clever and affecting, but moved the Radio
Times to ask on its cover: “Why another adaptation? And why now?” ITV’s
Christmas treat will be an adaptation of The Old Curiosity Shop
starring Derek Jacobi. Next year it makes Wuthering Heights, just
nine years after its last version.
On the BBC, meanwhile, stand by for Sense and Sensibility, by (again)
Andrew Davies – and don’t say you still haven’t watched the Kate Winslet
version that your auntie gave you on video ten Christmases ago. You may be
less familiar with Little Dorrit(unless you recall the 1988 Derek
Jacobi film) and Lark Rise to Candleford(unless you saw the National
Theatre’s ambulatory production in the 1970s), but you could probably write
an essay on the plot of Oliver Twist, which the BBC is also remaking.
“We worked out it had been done 49 times,” laughs Kate Harwood, the head of
series and serials at the BBC, arguing that the EastEnders writer
Sarah Phelps has brought a “strong London voice” to the piece. Each
generation of actors deserves its turn at the greats and she is enthusiastic
at having secured the services of Timothy Spall as Fagin and Tom Hardy as a
“sexy and dangerous” Bill Sykes. “But,” she adds, “Dickens is catnip for
actors.”
Like many of the canon’s authors, he is irresistible too to commissioners,
directors, DVD merchants and publishers (whose sales of out of copyright
work soar). Finance directors crave the foreign sales they provide. In
Australia, ABC fêtes a BBC period drama with as much fanfare as anything it
produces itself. In America the BBC has long enjoyed partnership deals with
WGBH in Boston – Cranford is another beneficiary – but as it
launches new commercial channels abroad, it is the petticoat lines that
drive subscriptions. For ITV it is more important that the advertisers are
happy. And they are. Of the 3.8 million who watched A Room With a View
almost half were ABC1s, exactly the affluent audience ITV finds hard to
reach. Teachers will also rejoice – although executives deny that they check
out the national curriculum’s set texts before they commission their
adaptations.
But how much, except at the margins, can each new version add? Two years ago Bleak
House broke the mould by becoming a “soap”, going out in twice-weekly
half hours; Oliver Twist will follow its frequency. There are
reinterpretations to make. Sandy Welch adapting the BBC’s Jane Eyre
last year emphasised more than is usual the heroine’s time away
fromThornfield Hall and had Jane eventually succumb to Rochester only after
first giving the MCP a good ticking off. Davies’s A Room With a View
revved up the class war latent in Forster’s novel and strongly hinted that
Cecil Vyse was not the marrying type because he was, well, gay.
We may harbour hopes, too, for ITV’s Wuthering Heights since it
has been written by Peter Bowker, who, with great originality, wrote the
BBC’s musical thriller Blackpool. But Bowker must know his main
job is to deliver viewers and prestige to ITV. As Laura Mackie, ITV’s new
head ofdrama, says: “I would struggle to point to a definitive TV version of Wuthering
Heights, in the way you can with Andrew Davies’s Pride and
Prejudice. That’s a challenge for us, to try and do the definitive
version.”
It was Davies’s Middlemarch in 1994 that turned the classical
adaptation from a viewing chore to a treat. His tools were low humour,
classy sex, a modern intelligence and a budget to die for. This is not
denigration. It is hard now to recall how unacceptable classical adaptations
had become. From Sunday afternoon Dickenses that masqueraded as
children’sprogramming, to the grand Forsyte Saga, which
included production values so low that when Soames’s coat fell off its hook
it stayed on the floor, these were programmes about the past fit only for
the past. After Middlemarch, commissioning editors would rather not
do a classic at all than do it less than lavishly. “Period drama,” says
ITV’s Mackie, “is the most expensive genre to make so we could never do
masses of it. It is the cherry on the icing on the cake.”
Yet there are things to be said for the ethos of the cheap and gloomy
adaptation. You do not need togamble half your department’s budget to make
it. You do not, to ensure ratings, have to choose only the most loved books.
Since they cost less, you can make more. “In the 1960s and 1970s,” says
Harwood, “the BBC did almost every Eng Lit novel there is. Blimey, I
remember Villette – ten half hours in 1978.”
And if, with the honourable exception of Cranford, it is now hard for
television to justify adapting the unjustly neglected, the millions it
spends on the Alist must mean there is less money available to dramatise
contemporary Britain. A producerwho did not want to be named thinks
commissioning editors actually prefer their writers dead. Hardy and Gaskell
are not going to storm into your office to demand more money or pull out
citing creative tensions. Their politics are containable. Maybe this is why
you rarely see TV adapting a modern historical novel, such as Susanna
Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell or Iain Pears’s An
Instance of the Fingerpost, even though both would offer frock coats and
bonnets galore.
It is still, of course, possible to turn a classic into a damp squib. No one
bought the BBC’s Wives and Daughterson video; Daniel Deronda
did not even make it that far. But you would have to do something pretty
terrible not to make money out of Jane Eyre. As it happens, Susanna
White’s version last year was a critical and popular triumph. Significantly,
however, White is now working neither on a classic nor in British
television. She is in South Africa for HBO making Generation Kill, a
drama about the US Marines in Iraq.
“They are doing an awful lot of period drama this year,” White sighs of the
BBC. “I certainly felt that I wanted to go out and do something
contemporary having done Bleak House and Jane Eyre. The big
appeal of doing this piece about the Marines is that it is a very modern
story.
“Classic novels are a very safe bet. There’s a guaranteed audience and
guaranteed DVD sales. But at the same time people are going to watch Life
on Mars, too. There ought to be room for both.”
So, when tomorrow we immerse ourselves in Cranford, we should not allow
our armchairs to become too cosy. Birth, copulation and death may be
contained within Cranford’s market square, but there is also, to
quote another author neglected these days by television, a world elsewhere.
With all the care and enthusiasm that TV drama currently reserves for the
past, we need to be shown it.
— Cranford, Sun, BBC One, 9pm
