Hard on the heels of last year’s television adaptation starring David Suchet and Ray Winstone is a new version of Dickens’s Great Expectations, in cinemas later this month. The new version, starring Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes, and which closed the 2012 London Film Festival, comes after adaptations which include David Lean’s 1946 classic, the BBC’s 1999 version with Charlotte Rampling, a 1981 take on the yarn, an early 1970s production starring Michael York, one in 2007 with Timothy Spall, another featuring Ray McAnally, and yet another with Gwyneth Paltrow.
At least the versions differ — for example, Paltrow’s dumbed-down offering is set in modern times complete with an MTV-style soundtrack, while this latest adaptation differs from numerous others by being especially faithful to the book. Many locations are close to those in the novel, and the director made sure that the ages of the actors were similar to those of the characters.
In 2009, the costume-drama scriptwriting supremo Andrew Davies lambasted the BBC for sticking to the same old literary crowd-pleasers, after jettisoning his takes on Dickens’s lesser-known Dombey and Son and Trollope’s Palliser novels because they wanted yet another version of David Copperfield. There are far more versions of David Copperfield knocking about than we could ever need, including versions starring everyone from Arthur Lowe to W.C. Fields, Maggie Smith to Eileen Atkins, and Simon Callow to Richard Attenborough.
However, David Copperfield seems to have been rather neglected when compared with that other overfamiliar Dickens narrative, Oliver Twist. That has been filmed for cinema in 1922, 1933, 1948 by David Lean, 1968 (the musical) and by Roman Polanski in 2005. Television versions include ones from 1983, 1991, 1999 (starring Robert Lindsay), 2005 (Disney) and 2007 (with Timothy Spall). And don’t get me started on A Christmas Carol.
Davies said that BBC costume drama had gone ‘downmarket’ as bosses refused to show anything but well-worn classics. He blamed a new breed of BBC executive intent on ‘slate-wiping and territory-marking’ rather than supporting 19th-century drama other than the most obvious old chestnuts.
‘I think, in terms of doing the classics, their position is somewhere near where ITV’s was ten years ago,’ he said at the time. ‘Which is, “Yes, we’ll do them, but only if they’re big, popular warhorses.”’
The veteran film director Ken Loach has laid into TV bosses, too. ‘Television has become the enemy of creativity,’ he has said. ‘Television kills creativity. It is produced by a pyramid of producers, executive producers, commissioning editors, heads of department, assistant heads of department and so on, who sit on the people doing the work and stifle the life out of them. Can you believe the lunacy that goes on in these places?’
In their defence, programme controllers could argue that commissioning huge costume dramas is more complicated than it might seem. For example, some classic novels are more suited for film adaptation than others: as a character perhaps Dombey is less charismatic than Copperfield, and maybe the reason why Jane Eyre, for instance, has so often been revived is that Eyre is such a powerful, complex, individualistic and passionate character.
However, the influence of American co-sponsors, who almost always come on board with this kind of project nowadays, may play a significant part in what is produced. One suspects that the typical TV exec in America may not be au fait with many lesser-known British literary classics, and will think that most potential viewers certainly won’t be.
This narrow thinking and dearth of originality increasingly pervades all the arts and we, the viewing public, are as much to blame as the arts providers. We continue to lap up without complaint yet another three or four versions of, for example, The Nutcracker each Christmas; we are happy to listen to radio stations with playlists consisting of about three songs; and we eagerly snap up theatre tickets for seemingly endless Ayckbourn and Agatha Christie revivals.
Endlessly revisiting the overfamiliar in the arts is likely to get worse: deviating from the norm spells risk and with less money around we can expect fewer inspired programming choices. The mainstream arts risk becoming like the UK’s high streets: identikit, bland and supremely unimaginative.
It’s a great pity as we are enriched when introduced to something new: when the BBC broadcast the relatively little-known Bleak House in half-hour segments after EastEnders a few years ago, it was the talk of playgrounds as well as the usual fans of costume drama. There really is no need for timidity by producers. Just look at the incredible success of Downton Abbey.
True, millions of pounds have recently been invested in the BBC’s The Paradise and ITV’s Mr Selfridge, both centred around early department stores, but there is so much more to explore. What about a drama focusing on the rich life of Enlightenment writer and wit Voltaire? Or perhaps Queen Anne: her troubled life, including 17 pregnancies yet no surviving children against a backdrop of political turmoil, could certainly make a gripping new costume drama.
And, of course, there is still a huge wealth of outstanding classic literature that remains unfilmed: projects that would make enlightening discoveries for so many viewers.
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