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Escapist froth

James Delingpole

Wednesday, 3rd September 2008

Lost in Austen (ITV1)

For another, it does smack rather of something put together by a TV-by-numbers committee, viz: ‘Well, we can’t adapt Pride and Prejudice again, not when Colin Firth’s Darcy still has such iconic status. And we can’t do the others, ’cos they’ve all been done.’

But, hey, how about a postmodern take on it — sort of Bridget Jones meets Life on Mars in empire-line dresses?’ Never let us forget that this same sort of thinking led to Bonekickers.

Of course, you could have nitpicked all evening. Amanda Price (Jemima Rooper), the brassy 21st-century brunette who suddenly finds herself a guest of the late-18th/early-19th-century Bennet family, for example. If she’s really such a die-hard Pride and Prejudice fan and really spends her life longing for the decorum and restraint and politesse of Austen’s England, would she really — within 12 hours of her arrival at Longbourn — accuse Kitty of lesbianism, hoick up her skirt to show her her sculpted pubes, and then explain that this particular tonsorial arrangement is called a ‘landing strip’?

I appreciate that the point of that scene was to illustrate that moment — de rigueur in all these time-travel fantasies, apparently — where the confused and reluctant time traveller becomes convinced that it’s all some Candid Camera-style joke, and flies off the handle to show their disgust. But this is a trope I don’t find convincing.

Quite the most tedious aspect of Life on Mars were those bits where John Simm’s Sam Tyler agonised about whether this was real or whether it was all in his head — ‘Oh, shurrup, and just accept you’re in the Seventies, will you?’ we all went — and I’m not sure these scenes are as psychologically necessary as screenwriters imagine.