Even a six-hour adaptation isn't going to do justice to Tolstoy's doorstopper. It is, after all, the sort of book you could take to a desert island and still be ploughing through when the rescue ship hove into view. Nonetheless the Beeb have gamely taken it on, and crammed in every Brit actor of note they can find, with American star Paul Dano as Pierre. Rather confusingly, this includes a couple of the cast of 'Dickensian'. So for the next five weeks we'll have to extrapolate Stephen Rea's Inspector Bucket from a devious Russian aristocrat and Tuppence Middleton's innocent Amelia Havisham from said Russian aristocrat's shallow daughter, though she looks rather more like Messalina than Helene here.
It's visually gorgeous (though we're not sure about one-shoulder dresses in a high society salon), and is shaping up to be perfect Sunday-night escapism. Purist fans of the novel should probably steer clear though.
Honestly, you wait years for Mr Whishaw to appear in a spy drama and two come along at once. He's currently reprising his role as Q in cinema's latest Bond film, and here he is as a far less geeky Danny, a vulnerable young man in London working in an Amazon-style warehouse. After a chance meeting, he falls in love with Alex, a mysterious and inhibited young man who says he works for an investment bank, but just as they begin to envisage a future together, Alex disappears.
Exquisite and painful. The cast, including Jim Broadbent as Danny's friend Scottie, don't put a foot wrong. It doesn't appear, from this episode, that the homosexuality is a theme at all; these are two young men in love, one of whom has an impossible secret. It's left to Scottie, a Whitehall mandarin with secrets of his own, to suggest that the man the police are calling Alastair worked for MI6. By this time, Danny has made a gruesome discovery of his own, that has similarities to the real-life case of the man found in a holdall. As gripping for its heartfelt portrayal of love as for its murky depiction of espionage, we genuinely can't wait to see what Danny finds out.
The past is a foreign country: they made things differently then. The 1971 adaptation by Joseph Losey starred three stalwarts of British cinema in Alan Bates, Edward Fox, and Julie Christie as the luminous Marion. The three instantly-recognisable stars and Losey's distinctive style somewhat swamped the novel's close adherence to Leo, the boy at the centre of the story. Ben Batt, Stephen Campbell-Moore and Joanna Vanderham as farmer Ted Burgess, Viscount Hugh Trimmingham and Marion Maudsley are, while not unknown, easier to accept as people whose lives swim in and out of the focus of a twelve-year-old boy.
This is the third in the short series of 20th Century classics adapted by the BBC and to our minds the most successful so far. It hasn't the controversial baggage of 'Lady Chatterley' nor the stage bound setting of 'An Inspector Calls', just a first line that (unlike the current shenanigans with Hamlet's monologue on the London stage) belongs in the opening scene. Nuanced performances from Lesley Manville as Mrs. Maudsley and Campbell-Moore as the facially scarred Trimmingham keep the novel's fine balance of ambiguity and acuity as young Leo (Jack Hollington) is dropped deep into the maelstrom of adult love, class and propriety, never to be the same again.
Much has been made of the scheduling opposite the opener of the final series of 'Downton Abbey', but they are surely not fighting for the same audience. That's cod roe, and this is caviar.
There must be some correlation between a society's sophistication and its obsession with deviance and were we to look, probably a few hundred PhD theses filed away on the subject. In the wake of the recent 'Mrs. Biggs' comes 'The Great Train Robbery' about the antics of Buster, Biggs and the rest of the criminal gang in 1963. (Not to be confused with the 19th Century attempt on a train that was turned into a novel and then a rather camp film by Michael Crichton in the 1970s, nor the 1903 Western.) Not that it isn't an interesting tale, but the endless fascination induces the same queasiness as those other much-dramatised mid-20th Century cases, the Kray twins and Lord Lucan. Somehow the violence becomes a by-product.
Does this new production avoid that trap? Not entirely. For every shot of sweaty men in dingy rooms in vests, there's a scene of the all-male gang in balaclavas and bowler hats; while they may have spent much time in greasy spoons, what's depicted is a nightclub scene with the gang as erstwhile Goodfellas, and while we're on comparisons, the stylised title sequence bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the late, lamented 'The Hour,
The based-on-truth story is almost undeserving of the script and cast, with Luke Evans as gang leader Reynolds and Neil Maskell as Buster Edwards fleshing out the moral ambiguity and Jack Roth unnerving as Charlie Wilson.
"Mickey Mouse!" spits Buster at a bewildered ex-train driver who asks his name, "and the pleasure's all yours." This 90 minutes (of 180) was the criminals' tale, astonishingly aptly broadcast on the day when the real Ronnie Biggs breathed his last. It was entertainingly tense, despite the outcome being known, presumably, by the majority of the audience. There was no attempt to give the Reynolds gang hearts of gold or good intentions, but the line about not taking guns rings hollow in the wake of the train driver's fate. These were men who took pride in their criminal 'careers', prepared to use violence to get rich without honest work and, far from meticulously planning to the last detail, they left too much to chance to get away with it. In the days of DNA and other advanced forensic evidence, they'd have been lucky to get to Reigate, let alone Rio.
Maybe that's a more palatable explanation for Britain's fascination with them: from the Gunpowder Plot to the Dunkerque evacuation, it's not exactly victories we seem to love to celebrate, but near-misses.
So, first up, with *spoilers* and a little later than planned:
‘Exile’
We had to like lots of things about this: likeable main cast, good pacing and all helped by scheduling over consecutive nights. Even those of us with lives could watch without too much head-scratching about what had happened so far. But...
1. The 'we'll send it to the newspaper and it'll all come out' ending. Would they publish? Even discounting Metzler getting a superinjunction, it was an unsolicited manuscript, based on the evidence of a now-dead low-life and an illegally recorded conversation (that didn't really get a confession). Plus couldn’t Metzler spike the story, assuming the paper did take it seriously?
2. Is it really likely Tom would have left Tulse at his request, to come back the next night? Does Tom never watch any telly, in which the person with info always then dies? This is almost as popular as the 'I'm about to kill you but I'll waste time telling you why so they can rescue you' scenario (which will almost certainly be alluded to again on this blog very soon) and the “Stop! You can’t go in there!” line (which happily appeared in ‘Exile’).
3. It’s official: Tom’s lover’s husband is such a good bloke that he forgives Tom for sleeping with his wife and thereby ending his marriage, all in a matter of days. Was there any real point in this affair at all, other than to show that Tom wasn’t a total sh*t and is amazingly irresistible to women?
4. Absuses did happen, and there were cover-ups, but two weirdos together raping women to the point where there were multiple pregnancies would have been investigated by more than just one lone journalist. Who told him? There must have been people who knew, and a nurse working there would have heard more than just rumours. So, would Metzler have had Tulse's contact details on his pc at work?
5. Respite care would be difficult to arrange at such short notice. Why not say Sam was in hospital for a day or two as they'd had to sedate him or he'd fallen over?
6. So there you are listening to one of your old cassette tapes, as you do, when suddenly you hear your dad talking about a conspiracy. I'm sure we've all been there. Lets leave the likelihood of journo dad being careful with his material and say it's a coincidence of Hardy-esque proportions that the very tape you pick would just happen to be the one.
