In the book world, publishers use various tongue-in-cheek designations for
what is politely known as genre fiction. “Swords’n’sandals” denotes
action-packed novels about Greeks and Romans being heroic; “clogs’n’shawls”
means books, usually sagas, about downtrodden but spirited northern lasses,
in the tradition of Catherine Cookson; and sci-fi/fantasy novels with
luminously airbrushed cover artwork depicting strange new worlds are classed
as “two moons in the sky”.
Strangely enough, though, in the world of the gogglebox, the rather pallid
phrase “costume drama” seems to cover anything that takes place before 1900.
Maybe there are more finely tuned designations that we don’t know about:
maybe Jane Austen is “bonnets’n’barouches”; maybe Dickens is
“fog’n’orphans”. But as long as it’s all generally known as costume drama,
we tend to think there’s too much of it about, and so undervalue it. Instead
of less, we should be demanding more.
The past is vast, the present isn’t. To confine ourselves to the purely
contemporary would be as constricting and parochial as limiting ourselves to
the purely English and ignoring the rest of the world. While we obviously
need good contemporary drama to hold a mirror to the way we live now,
turning to the established, time-tested riches of English literature gives
us a far wider array of stories to plunder. The primary objection to our
taste for the world of bustles and crinolines, with the rich man in his
castle and the poor man at his gate, is that it derives from our worst
national vices, nostalgia and snobbery. But nostalgia is always underrated
as a fuel for the cultural engine. Didn’t the Victorians’ own rose-tinted
and ill-informed nostalgia, as it frequently stands accused, for the Middle
Ages give us St Pancras station and the preRaphaelites? Didn’t nostalgic
yearning for the classical world give us the glories of the Renaissance?
“Why oh why are we always looking back?” goes the complaint. The great
Victorian novels themselves were passionate, almost journalistic engagements
with the world around them, weren’t they, brilliantly documenting a changing
society with wonderful vividness and immediacy? Er, well, no, not exactly.
Many of the greatest, examined a little more closely, are historical fiction,
“costume novels” themselves. Dickens’s obsession with the French revolution
led to A Tale of Two Cities, set some 70 years before – the chronological
equivalent of a contemporary novel or television drama about the second
world war. Vanity Fair is set 30 years back, Middlemarch 40, War and Peace
60. Much of Thomas Hardy’s fiction looks back over two or three generations;
and even Wuthering Heights, it’s easy to forget, though it was published in
1848, takes place almost entirely in the late 18th century.
The problem isn’t too much costume drama, but too little, too conservatively
chosen. What we get at the moment seems to derive from a rather prissy,
constricted GCSE Eng Lit view of what’s available – hence the endless
reliance on Jane Flipping Austen. Okay, Jane is astute and sometimes quite
funny, and Hattie Morahan’s Elinor, in the current Sense and Sensibility, is
as good a piece of acting as you’re going to see this year. But you can soon
tire of the endless punani-for-property ethos, the relentlessly mercenary
world she so unromantically depicts. Dickens, the other perennial staple,
has a far greater breadth and depth of vision, and is more obviously
telegenic, but he’s been pretty well mined out, too.
But when was the last time we had a good Wuthering Heights, in all its
violence and bleakness, with a bold use of landscape and the elements to
match? There’s an unspoken anxiety that any portrayal of Britain
preWindrush, to be blunt, won’t have any black people in it, leading to
issues of exclusion. But there’s an enjoyably wacky academic argument that
Heathcliff is black – picked up as a boy from the streets of Liverpool, hub
of the slave trade, frequently referred to thereafter as “that black
villain”, and so on – so this, at least, would be a great role for some
aspiring black Byronic scowler out there.
We don’t get enough of the 18th century either, even though the Georgians’
religious scepticism, scatological humour and generally low estimation of
human nature brings them far closer to us than we are to the starched,
corseted, high-minded Victorians. Fanny Hill was dully predictable, but Moll
Flanders, with Alex Kingston, a while back was good fun. Why not some Tobias
Smollett and a rollicking adaptation of Hum-phry Clinker? (And you’d have to
admit that, yes, even though he’s about as omnipresent in the world of
costume drama as God Almighty, Andrew Davies would surely be the adapter of
choice again here.) Or how about Henry Fielding’s endearing Joseph
Andrews,the original road novel? Even though he suffers from ubiquity as
much as Davies does, you could just see Stephen Fry playing Parson Adams.
When did we last enjoy a good Trollope? The Beeb’s The Way We Live Now was
great, but that was more than six years ago now, and The Barchester
Chronicles, about as good as costume drama gets, 25 years ago – and there’s
hardly a shortage of Trollopes to choose from. It’s not certain anyone would
be bold enough to try to interest us in a Sunday-night dramatisation of
George Eliot’s less than thrillingly titled Scenes of Clerical Life, but
you’d have to admire the attempt.
Then we have all the minor classics, the more middlebrow stuff. There’s Emily
Brontë’s spiritual heir, Mary Webb, with Precious Bane or Gone to Earth.
There are numerous gripping Daphne du Mauriers other than Rebecca. And
allied to them is a whole tradition of adventure stories, at which British
writers have always excelled, even though they’re probably viewed with
suspicion nowadays by the bien-pensants of the BBC – tainted with
imperialism, and a little too suggestive of plucky white chaps battling
through mosquito-infested jungles, with swarthy faces peering out at them
through the leaves. But it’s high time we had a really blood-and-thunder
Treasure Island, or Kidnapped, or King Solomon’s Mines; or John Buchan’s
Greenmantle, about a mysterious Islamic leader and his planned jihad against
the West ... Or what about Moonfleet, or the Doctor Syn books, by Dame Sybil
Thorndike’s brother Russell, about the dangerous but charismatic
parson-smuggler of Romney Marsh? Maybe such stuff is mistrusted as being far
too old-fashioned to appeal to the kids nowadays: all goodies and baddies,
chases and mysteries. What, like Doctor Who, you mean?
Along with this apparent reluctance to delve into the dustier recesses of the
Eng Lit shelf, there’s an even greater, perhaps inverted-snobbish antipathy
to foraging among the European classics. If far fewer people have read
Turgenev than Dickens, why would they watch him on telly? But his love
stories are light, funny, entertaining, melancholy and quietly compelling.
Or how about some Chekhov? Why leave him to the Russians? There was a not
very good Madame Bovary a while back, but that wasn’t wholly surprising. The
main point of Flaubert is the prose style, the chilly, surgical tone:
difficult, not to mention unrewarding, to reproduce on screen. A far better
bet would be Balzac, surely – a glittering, fast-paced Père Goriot, or The
Wild Ass’s Skin, that galloping, brilliant fable of consumer-ism? Or what
about Candide?
Going further back, when the BBC plunged into Chaucer, it produced six
enjoyable Canterbury Tales, but why didn’t we get more? Or what about a
Decameron? Further back still, why should Hollywood have dominance over the
Greeks and Romans? Well, we did get the egregious Rome, but it appeared to
have been scripted for psychotic children with attention-deficit disorder.
I, Claudius might have had wobbly cardboard sets, but at least it treated us
like adults. Admittedly, the further back you go, the bigger the budget you
need, but if only the BBC didn’t insist on giving all its money – sorry, our
money – to Jonathan Woss, it could probably build a replica Colosseum every
month.
Yet there are signs of spring. Cranford was a welcome departure from the
relentless Jane, and Lark Rise to Candleford, starting tonight on BBC1, is
just the kind of amiable minor classic the English-literature shelf groans
with. The fact that the Beeb has been running trailers backed with a wildly
inappropriate Led Zeppelin sound-track is a great sign. Next, we want Cider
with Rosie with Amy Winehouse, and Wuthering Heights with Sigur Ros.
Moors’n’moodiness. Bring it on.
