If the bonnet fits
Is there too much costume drama on television? Quite the reverse – look beyond Austen and Dickens, and there’s a wealth of untapped classics ripe for adaptation.
(...) 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? (...)
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.
And we cannot agreet more with the following:
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. (...)
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.
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