Felt like the product of a night in the pub: BBC1’s Great Expectations reviewed

By now a genuinely radical way to turn a Victorian novel into a TV drama would be to take that novel and turn it into a TV drama. But while we wait for someone to do it, Great Expectations stays true to the current ideals of junking large parts of the source material and infecting what remains with the neuroses of our own age – thereby demonstrating once again the strange modern neediness to believe in our superiority to all those benighted bigots who came before us. (Please tell us we’re the best people who ever lived! Please!) Or rather, it takes those ideals to new heights that are either infuriating or hilarious depending on your mood.

In fact, last week’s first episode was – certainly by the standards of this week’s second – almost fair enough. OK, so Pip said ‘shit’ more often than in the original novel, and was less like a frightened, semi-literate boy than a poised, well-educated young man. The programme also opened not with that predictable old terrifying scene for the ages featuring Magwitch on the marshes, but with the adult Pip about to commit suicide. For most of the time, though, writer Steven Knight appeared to retain some lingering faith in Dickens’s storytelling abilities – at least once they’ve been stripped of such distractions as comedy and tenderness.

The episode’s ending was pretty promising too, as Miss Havisham (Olivia Colman) looked at Pip and murmured sinisterly:  ‘I want you to play.’ It was a moment that seemed to justify Knight’s decision to crank up her menace, and in a way that intensified rather than betrayed Dickens’s version.

But then came Sunday’s instalment, which sometimes felt like the product of a night in the pub.