Allow me to introduce you to a fun game you can play in your own parlour. You take it in turns for someone to shout out the title of a pre-21st century literary classic. The other player responds by giving the blurb of a 21st century television adaptation. It might go, for example; ‘Middlemarch!’ ’ A searing, never-more-relevant exposé of the rural chemsex scene starring Sophie Okonedo’. Or possibly; ‘Mapp and Lucia!’ ‘Benedict Cumberbatch and Eddie Izzard are locked in combat with the county lines gangs of the Sussex coast’. Or even: ‘Jane Eyre!’ ‘Lesley Manville and Cush Jumbo star in this accessible tale of the devastating mental health impacts of Tik-Tok addiction’.
Nothing sums up this syndrome – the ‘relevant’ TV classic – better than the curious puff piece in the Telegraph this weekend for the BBC/FX’s new Great Expectations, to start next Sunday night. Yes, it’s Dickens. Oh no, groan, how stuffy, yawn. But wait – it’s funky! With swearing and violence and ethnic actors in it!
A sexed-up Dickens with multi-ethnic casting is the most predictable thing, like Tuesday following Monday
Such articles are a mainstay of the broadsheet culture sections. They
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