Yorkshire and Channel 5: a love affair of Heathcliffian proportions

It looks like Yorkshire tends to be TV gold, particularly if it's on a Channel 5 programme. From The Guardian:

In The Good Companions, the 1929 novel that gave him national fame, JB Priestley begins high up on the Pennines – the “knobbly backbone of England”. Looking down on the huddled communities that make their living in a Yorkshire landscape both beautiful and bleak, the author tells us: “At first the towns only seem a blacker edge to the high moorland, but now that you are closer you see the host of tall chimneys, the rows and rows of little houses, built of blackening stone, that are like tiny sharp ridges on the hills. These windy moors, these clanging dark valleys, these factories and little stone houses, have between them bred a race that has special characteristics.”

From the literature of the Brontë sisters and Priestley to films such as Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life and Ken Loach’s Kes, Yorkshire’s pastoral beauty, industrial grit and pugnacious spirit has proved fertile terrain for artists in search of contrast and drama. But few would have predicted that Channel 5, formerly the downmarket fiefdom of Richard Desmond, would become modern heirs to that tradition.

Under Desmond, the channel resurrected Big Brother, mainlined US imports and earned few points for artistic merit or originality. But in recent years, under a new American ownership, there has been an attempt to assume a warmer identity, promoting “spirited TV with an emotional heart”. The upshot has been a love affair with Yorkshire of Heathcliffian proportions, and the Royal Television Society channel of the year award for 2020. (Julian Coman)

A contributor to Central Maine on the risky business of recommending books:

Recommending books to people is a fraught activity.

The difficulty is that you never know for sure whether a book you like will be a book someone else will like. I once recommended “Jane Eyre” to some home-schooling family members. They detested it. My literary credibility was destroyed inside my own family. (Dana Wilde)

In this particular case, we can all agree that it should be the home-schooling family's literary credibility that should have been destroyed.

Srbija Danas (Serbia) has an article on Branwell Brontë.