Atremble with febrile worryings... are we?

The Guardian interviews Peter Bowker, basically about his new drama Desperate Romantics, which starts tonight on BBC2. Nevertheless, several references to the not-yet-seen in the UK Wuthering Heights 2009. One of them involves, not very accurately, this blog:

Occupation was a triumph, Desperate Romantics is poised to be a ratings-grabber this summer, and his bracing reimagining of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights will be on ITV this autumn. (...)
He is infinitely more proud of what he's done with the sulkiest monster of English literature, Heathcliff, in his new adaptation of Wuthering Heights – even though he concedes that he initially approached Emily Brontë's book from the wrong angle.
"I loved Heathcliff's class hatred. I really wanted him to stick it to those toff bastards. But of course that's a monstrous misreading. To revenge yourself for the crimes of others against you on innocent children is immoral. But I still want Heathcliff to get under your skin to such an extent that what he does makes sense to you, and you can go with it some of the way, at least."
The Brontëblog (bronteblog.blogspot.com) is now atremble with febrile worryings about what Bowker has done to their beloved classic.

...erm, what? We already posted our review of this adaptation some months ago. You can read it here and decide if we were atremble with febrile worryings... or not.

Challenged to explain himself after his adaptation was screened on TV earlier this year in the US, Bowker defended himself stoutly online for junking the narrator Lockwood, shrinking the religious zealot Joseph to next to nothing, and starting his adaptation halfway through the book's narrative. He changed the structure so radically, starting the story with the children of Heathcliff and Cathy before cutting back to what cursed their lives, that some of Emily Brontë's devotees in cyberspace feared they'd begun watching the thing halfway through.
"My partner Kate, who's a couples counsellor, gave me the key to the novel's psychology. She said that the wonderful speech in which Cathy says 'I am Heathcliff' tells you the relationship isn't going to work, even though it's one of the great declarations of romantic passion."
Intriguingly, that speech was cited by Simone de Beauvoir as the cry of every woman in love. "The idea is that Heathcliff and Cathy are cleaved from a single soul, which is hopeless," Bowker says. "If Kate had seen Heathcliff and Cathy, she'd have told them in the first session that their relationship hadn't got a future.
"The thing about Wuthering Heights is that you could just type out pages of it, it's so good – but you can't. Andrew Davies was right when he said that the ambition that keeps you going is to write a scene that doesn't exist in the book, but which will have everyone going back to the novel to look for it."
Have you written any like that? "One or two," says Bowker proudly. "I've made up some dialogue between Heathcliff and Cathy because there is so little of them in the book – you can't just have Nelly Dean [the novel's second, and unreliable, narrator] going, 'Oooh they loved each other.' You have to show them together in love. Andrew is right when he says adapting a classic is harder than you think. Writing for telly is much harder than you think. It isn't money for old rope, you know."
Desperate Romantics is on BBC2 at 9pm tonight. Wuthering Heights will be screened on ITV1 in the autumn. (Stuart Jeffries)

EDIT: The SJCPL Blog posts about the US DVD release of this production.

Categories: Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights