Unheralded Little Gem vs A Hopeless Being

Express & Star loved To Walk Invisible:

However, just when you think Auntie Beeb has lost the plot and your TV licence is a waste of money, she suddenly produces an unheralded little gem like To Walk Invisible (BBC1). It was a brilliant one-off drama about the Bronte sisters and their alcoholic brother. It painted a grim, utterly unromantic picture of English provincial life in the 1840s. The stage-coach scenes were perfect. As a rule, horses and carriages in costume dramas are polished to perfection. The coaches, horses and passengers in To Walk Invisible all arrived plastered in mud. Which is how it must have been. (Peter Rhodes)

But not all comments are good. We have two critical letters in The Guardian. One of them by Lynne Reid Banks, author of Dark Quarter: The Story of the Brontës:

Surely Sally Wainwright should have called her Brontë play “A Hopeless Being” – Emily Brontë’s comment on her brother Branwell – as it all hinged on him and ended with his death. Calling it To Walk Invisible, which refers to the sisters’ wish to maintain anonymity after they began to publish, was a misnomer, leading me, at least, to expect a play concentrating on them and their writing, not on the dismal subject of Branwell’s decline. As it is, more could have been shown of the expectations and hopes his family had of him when he was seen as a brilliant poet and painter.
As for the swearing, this is an example of modern authors using quite inappropriate obscenities just because they can. It jerks one right out of period, whether Branwell would have used the F-word or not. If he had, the reaction of his father and sisters would have been much greater. 

Faquier Arts publishes a summary of 2016 in local arts:

FCT [Fauquier Community Theater] can reliably be counted on to offer up well produced and performed entertainments. But every once in a while, as with “Fiddler on the Roof” in 2013, they rise above the norm and bring their audiences a surprisingly exciting experience. This was the case with “Jane Eyre: the Musical,” a show even ardent admirers of the classic novel don’t know exists.
An engrossing experience in its own right, the show rose out of the ordinary due to the magnetism, charisma and intense chemistry of its two leads: Shawn Cox as the tormented Byronic hero, Edward Rochester, and Elizabeth Gillespie as the eponymous heroine. (Constance Lyons)

From weed to books. In The Guardian:

I don’t know why I turned to reading: maybe it was the woman next to me on the bus who was so engrossed in her book that she missed her stop; maybe it was memories of Bible stories and the poetic beauty of the Song of Solomon. But one day I asked my boss for a list of the 10 best books he’d ever read.
I picked the first two off the shelf at Dillons and devoured them like spliffs. I finished his list in a few weeks and then worked my way through Dickens and Thackeray, George Eliot, the Brontës and all the usual suspects at the rate of about two each week, sometimes more. (Kit De Waal)

The Telegraph on Tom Hardy's role in the new BBC series Taboo:

[Tom] Hardy, whose father Edward “Chips” Hardy worked as a comedy script writer, has previously told how he hoped to play an amalgam of “every classical character in one”, encompassing the key traits of of Bill Sykes, Sherlock Holmes, Hannibal Lecter and Heathcliff. (Hannah Furness)

#AmReading lists five 'insightful' books about the Brontës:

 It’s fair to say that virtually everyone who loves to read has at the very least heard of the Brontë sisters. The genius of Charlotte, Emily and Anne brought us the corner stone classics of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall– but what about the people behind the pages? Here’s 5 great reads to introduce the lives of the three Brontës. (Sarah Lewis)

DVDFr reviews the recent edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 1996 in France:

L’adaptation de La Dame de Wildfell Hall faite en 1996 par Janet Barron et David Nokes choisit, à bon escient, d’oublier certains personnages secondaires se limite à esquisser les autres pour se concentrer sur Helen Graham, Gilbert Markham et Arthur Huntington et leur donner suffisamment d’épaisseur dans la durée limitée de la minisérie (166 minutes).
La Dame de Wildfell Hall tient une place honorable dans la longue liste des séries britanniques en costume qu’elle doit, non seulement au soin apporté à l’adaptation, à la qualité de la photo de Daf Hobson, plusieurs fois primé, mais aussi à l’élégance de la réalisation de Mike Barker qui s’est, depuis, distingué notamment par une excellente adaptation de Lorna Doone, encore absente de nos bacs, par la réalisation de plusieurs épisodes de la saison 2 de Broadchurch, de la saison 2 de Outlander, de la saison 3 de Fargo et de Versailles. (Philippe Gautreau) (Translation)

This is what Papel en Blanco (Spain) wants for Christmas:

Esto me da hasta vergüenza. Os prometo que creía que tenía un ejemplar de Cumbres borrascosas de Emily Brontë en castellano, pero cuando el oro día fui a echar mano de él resulta que no. Que no está. Tengo dos ediciones en inglés, una normalita y otra preciosa, pero en español ni rastro. Juraría que tenía la edición de Alba, pero ahora mismo no sé si es que me lo prestaron, si lo he prestado o si se ha perdido en alguna de las mudanzas. El caso es que lo quiero leer en español y no se me ocurre una opción mejor que esta de Tres Hermanas con ilustraciones de Fernando Vicente. (Sarah Manzano) (Translation)

Finally, a student rendition of I Have Dreamt from Bernard Herrmann's Wuthering Heights opera.