War and Peace

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.

Dickensian

Christmas half-hour gobbets of Dickens seemed to work well on BBC1 with 'Little Dorrit' in 2008, so they've come up with this series of 20 half-hour episodes, airing a bit like a soap over the holidays.  This is another of those reboots/reinventions such as all those spin-offs of Austen novels, featuring characters from various Dickens stories in a murder-mystery.  None other than Inspector Bucket investigates the murder of one Jacob Marley, partner of Ebenezer Scrooge.

It's all rather fun if you like the Dickensian vibe without being too familiar with the original novels.  If you are a die-hard fan you will probably be too busy allocating characters to novels, or being appalled at the licence taken with, for example, the relative chronology.  Young Miss Havisham (Tuppence Middleton) is here dressed much as Estella would dress in 'Great Expectations' some years later.  And then there's Marley, who here deviates from miserliness just long enough to engage the services of young Nancy, through her pimp Fagin, much to Sykes's chagrin.  Meanwhile Amelia Havisham's friend Honoria Barbary is about to disgrace herself with a soldier under the disapproving eye of her spartan sister Frances....

Hopefully it can sustain 20 episodes, because if not it will just look like a lazy purloining of pre-written characters and their stories.  It never ceases to amaze us how what is essentially 'fan fic' can suddenly become respectable if commissioned.  We hear the new series of 'Endeavour' features riffs on famous tales such as 'The Great Gatsby'.  There are masterful reinterpretations, but they are rare, and 'Morse' ran out of good ideas when they'd exhausted Colin Dexter's novels.  So there. 

The Lady Vanishes... In the Flesh...

... and reappears as a zombie?  Now that might be a drama worth watching.  Have to be honest, this lady vanished long before the ending, and never even made it to the start of 'In the Flesh'.

The BBC remake/update claims to have been based closely on the book, 'The Wheel Spins' rather than Hitchcock's film version, so why keep the film's title if not to (falsely) lure fans of the film?  Pedantic gripes aside, this was a perfectly watchable, serviceable escapist drama which was apparently bumped from the Christmas schedules.  Maybe there were legal reasons, but any others were sheer madness since this is perfect post-pud entertainment.  Having it as a stand-alone in the March Sunday evening slot cruelly exposes the pointlessness of either a remake of the film or another adaptation of the novel.

The central premise is a tad confused (so they all lied conveniently for different reasons?) and rather distractingly every single character was a 'face'.  Is it us or is Tom Hughes the new Jonathan Rhys-Myers?  This is not a compliment.  If he is a better actor, he needs to appear in something worthwhile, fast.

And one look at the photo from 'In the Flesh' explains why neither of us sat down with a cushion and a cuppa to watch it.  BBC3 may have turned up something classy in 'Being Human' but there's just something about zombies....  It is a prejudice on our part, we admit, so maybe in the middle of the night, feeling a bit like the undead, we will take the leap.  Meanwhile there are zombies of the everyday variety all around, as anyone who commutes will tell you.