Death Comes to Pemberley

Fan-fic!  Don't you just love it?  Well apparently about half of us do and the other half would rather re-read the originals or, heaven forfend, something entirely new.  This is the adaptation of PD James's criminal spin on Jane Austen, pun intended.  It seems unlikely that Baroness James woke up one morning possessed with the need to pen a crime thriller set in the fictional world of the Darcys, Bennetts et al, but stranger things happen in the world of business-driven arts these days.  (We heard about an agent who requested a crime writer to 'set something in the trenches' with 2014 in mind, and when said writer suggested writing something about Dr Watson - yes, he of Holmes - almost had his arm bitten off in the agent's eagerness to snap up a likely bestseller.)  'Death Comes to Pemberley' sold well, despite a mixed reception, and was an inevitable adaptation for television, with almost as inevitable a slot at Christmas.

As a Dickens/Eliot/Bronte substitute drama, it has a cast of similar calibre and there are enough familiar pointers to reassure lovers of 'Pride and Prejudice'.  It's a handsomely mounted production (though we note Elizabeth, chateleine of Pemberley, did seem to spend a lot of time in the same dress) but the murder-mystery was an odd addendum to the light but incisive wit of the original.  Death also came rather slowly to Pemberley after all, it was a good half an hour before a murder was established.  We'll keep watching tomorrow and Saturday, though unless the murderer is someone unknown, there aren't too many possible suspects.

So now that Death has come to Pemberley, and we've been Lost in Austen, could the time now have arrived (please!) where new adaptations of other classics, or even new writing, appear onscreen?  Those who want fan fiction can find endless interpretations of endless classic stories for free on the internet, albeit of variable quality.  Seeing a costly, well-written production that tweaks a familiar setting and characters is somehow like warmed-up leftovers: never as good as the original serving.

Dancing on the Edge

The trouble with Poliakoff dramas these days is that they're so over-hyped as 'Event Television' that they're almost bound to disappoint.  'Friends and Crocodiles', 'Joe's Palace', 'Gideon's Daughter' and 'Capturing Mary' blend into one mannered, pretentious and seemingly pointless mess which wasted hours of our lives.  Like many established talents, Poliakoff attracts starry names and seemingly no editors with the gumption to question the great man's decisions.

There are recurring obsessions in the recent work: the war, the aristocracy vs new money, photographs, secret pasts, shadowy and reclusive millionaires, the chaos and clashes of the 20th Century and a great slab of a house which often seems to put in an appearance (Mr P's own perhaps?).  It looks like most if not all of these themes will turn up in 'Dancing on the Edge', a tale of a black jazz band, a jobbing music journalist and some English gentry in a very stylish and stylised 1930s London and Home Counties.  The romances are signposted, the cliches are present and correct (the very last singer to audition blows them away...!  A Prince takes a shine to the band at a garden party!)  Of-course it all looks sumptuous, with everyone and almost everything looking glamorous and polished - if not always quite authentically 1930s - and the cast are good enough to beg forgiveness for the funereal pace, even if Joanna Vanderham doesn't quite convince as sophisticated socialite Pamela and some of the band's American accents are shaky.  Janet Montgomery, as the contrasting brunette Sarah, is meant to be bohemian but isn't very, and incidentally bears a striking resemblance to Poliakoff's last muse, Ruth Wilson. 

It's not bad overall (the going-nowhere-on-a-train interlude and the histrionics by a band member in an upmarket hotel excepted) but... we're reminded of what David Hare said about Bertolucci's epic 'The Last Emperor': "no-one says a single interesting thing."  What do you know, but the idle, decadent rich were rather liberal in their last hurrah, and paved the way for acceptance of black musicians this side of the pond!  And there were we thinking that Duke Ellington had gone down a storm with the everyday folk as well as the Windsors at the Palladium in 1933.  It's not subtle, and people ruminate endlessly as they do in all Poliakoff dramas.  "One never knows what goes on in people's private lives, does one?" etc.  This is said about John Goodman's reclusive Croesus, Mr Masterson, who has trashed a luxury suite and assaulted a young woman.

It's difficult to know whether there will be a worthwhile payoff.  'Shooting the Past' delivered, as did 'Perfect Strangers', 'She's Been Away' and the superb 'Caught on a Train', but the most recent of these was over a decade ago.  The opening scene shows musician Louis (Chiwetel Ejiofor) appearing caped and hatted out of the shadows like an extra from 'Ripper Street', on the run and calling on his music journalist friend Stanley (Matthew Goode).  The action then slips back 18 months.  We hope the next 4 hours aren't wasted.

The Poison Tree

More familiar ITV territory here, based on a Ruth Rendellish novel.  Translator Karen (MyAnna Buring) tries to rebuild her life with partner Rex (Matthew Goode) and their daughter Alice when he is released after a 12-year prison sentence.  It comes as no surprise that she is haunted by events in their past, or rather that someone in the present knows about them.  Cue flashbacks to when she and Rex met at university, via Rex's oddball sister Biba (Ophelia Lovibond).

We know they're headed for Bad Things, but whether the conclusion is worth the two-episode watch remains to be seen.

Birdsong

We have to begin by saying that it isn't Dan's kind of thing and Ali wasn't mad about the novel, nor does Mr. Redmayne look like an obvious choice for Stephen Wraysford.


The first half was a beautifully shot 90 minutes, and effectively contrasted the hell of the trenches with the more exquisite hell of a clandestine love affair before the war.  It didn't do it in an original way, however, and the whole thing was soooo slooooow.  The two narrative hooks of what happened to the romance and does Wraysford survive the trenches are barely enough to keep a tired viewer awake.  There are lots of lingering, longing looks between the two leads and enough softly mournful piano music to signpost tragedy more clearly than the blasted intestines of a dying soldier.  The central love story doesn't come to life, however, either through singular characters or dialogue.


Visually handsome and fans of Faulks's novel will probably love it.  Anyone who loves a weepie with a bit of war thrown in, and not the other way around, will probably love it too, and if it prompts them to pick up the book, well... it's a better read than your average Mills&Boon.  It's just  that for the rest of us it's a bit dull.