Introduction: Neo-Victorian Television: British Television Imagines the Nineteenth Century
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Notes Introduction: Neo-Victorian Television: British Television Imagines the Nineteenth Century 1. Such as for example Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affi nity (2002a) and Fingersmith (2002b), or A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1991), a detective and love story set against an academic background, paralleled by the love story of the two Victorian poets whose connection they are trying to uncover (adapted by Neil LaBute in 2002), which is similarly concerned with the discovery and construction of alternative truths, of knowing the past beyond the accounts of official history. A similar theme of hidden histories also drives her earlier collection of two short stories, titled Angels and Insects (1995), the first part of which was also made into a film (Philip Haas 1995). Concerns with alter- native histories also form the basis of Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002). Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx (1992), written in a style reminiscent of both Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, but with the ben- efit of hindsight and a lack of Victorian constraints regarding its sometimes candid subject matter, similarly strives to uncover an alternative and less tidy Victorian age, full of mysteries, and real in the explicit, and almost tactile way in which it paints visions of the squalor and the depth of human despair and poverty into which it delves. 2. As Caughie has pointed out, ‘films continually returned not simply to the past but to a very particular past: to the period in the first few decades of this century ... in which Britain began to detect the fault lines of its Imperial destiny. On television, drama cultivated the charms, the manners, and the costumes of the nineteenth century novel’ (2000, p. 211). 3. For example: The 1900 House (Wall to Wall, 1999), The 1940s House (Wall to Wall, 2001), The Edwardian Country House (Wall to Wall, 2002), The Regency House Party (Wall to Wall, 2004). 4. For a discussion of the heritage film, see for example Higson (1993, 1996, 2003). 5. I am referring here to Thomas Elsaesser’s discussion of trauma and the notion of Nachträglichkeit as marking ‘an origin or absent cause in order to explain how one knows what one knows’ (Elsaesser 2001, p. 198). Elsaesser here speaks mainly of the Holocaust, but aspects of this notion of trauma also apply here as the Victorian age becomes an origin of modern fragmentation, both present and absent, which is continuously remade in order to allow the individual to rein- scribe themselves into history and take control of their own identity and history. 1 Period Representation in Context: The Forsyte Saga on BBC and ITV 1. Initially, ITV’s television coverage extended to only 1 million homes in 1956, compared to BBC’s television coverage of over 96 per cent of all 15 million 209 210 Notes homes. At the end of 1955, only 30.8 per cent of all television-owning homes had been capable of receiving ITV programming, but ITV’s figures quickly increased. 2. Lez Cooke (2003) here links The Forsyte Saga with the raising of the profile of the new channel and the attraction of new viewers. I agree that the drama’s temporal and spatial situatedness is far from incidental, but it is necessary to bear in mind that the kind of ‘promotion’ which the programme may have offered is not comparable to the more aggressive promotion strategies today. 3. The ratings war over Daniel Deronda and Doctor Zhivago was followed closely by The Guardian (Plunkett 2002a, b; Deans 2002). 4. Caughie (2000) notes a similar distancing and differentiating of the past in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (BBC, 1996), where a highly composed shot is used to situate the drama ‘in a time, an ethos and a way of seeing. This precise loca- tion in time makes all the more shocking the theme of sexual and physical domestic abuse, giving us the same sense of horror which the novel gave the Victorians, and, at the same time, historicizing domestic violence’ (p. 218). 5. See for example Radio Times featurettes on David Copperfi eld (Toynbee 1999) and Wives and Daughters (Smith 1999). 6. Some of the exteriors used included Croxteth Hall (James and Emily’s house in Park Lane), Faulkner Square in Liverpool (standing in for Montpelier Square, home of Soames and Irene), Lyme Park and Tabley House in Knutsford, Cheshire. 7. Although arguably not more or less authentic than its predecessor, the discus- sion around the ITV Forsyte Saga indicates a preoccupation with the notion of the ‘authentic’ that, as numerous Radio Times articles on the transformation of settings into ‘real’ period locations show, is specific to more recent period drama and can be observed in behind-the-scenes featurettes, articles and booklets that accompany many adaptations. See for example the Radio Times features on Middlemarch, Tipping the Velvet or The Way We Live Now, which all emphasise the transformation of locations into the ‘real’ past and which all underline authenticity as a (re)construction of the past (see Purves 1994; Dickson 2001; Jenkins 2001). 8. This is reflected in the use of costume; the elaborate Victorian costume of the old Forsyte aunts reflects their fussy and old-fashioned characters, and is con- trasted with the clean-cut and more modern look of Irene Forsyte’s dresses. 9. See for example Higson (1993, 1996, 2003), Wollen (1991) and Cairns (1991). 2 Victorian Fictions and Victorian Nightmares 1. I am, in this context, not trying to argue for a generic category of Dickens adaptations, yet, as I also discuss later on in this chapter, the carnivalesque and theatrical nature of Dickens’s prose, and in particular also the often bizarre and even grotesque characters, place the Dickens adaptation apart from other Victorian novel adaptations. Just as Dickens as a novelist takes a special place within Victorian fiction, so adaptations of his novels fall outside clear generic categories and often refuse to conform to the norms within which classic novel adaptations tend to operate. 2. Thus, as promotion and background material shows, television programming is much more likely to be credited to an author/scriptwriter than a director. While films are often marketed through their often famous directors, in the case of television, scriptwriters often take the place of the ‘auteur’. The reasons for this Notes 211 difference in the reception of the television adaptation are historical and linked to television’s roots in radio as well as, ultimately, literature and theatre, which both emphasise the importance and impact of the written word. 3. See for example reviews of Middlemarch by Clark (1995), Elson (1994) and Hall (1995). Hall’s New Statesman article ‘Death of the TV Author’, for example, notes the appropriateness of the form in imitating the instalments of the original text: ‘Television’s great dramatic innovation has been the series or the serial ... Trevor Preston has called the series the “television novel” and to this extent Andrew Davies is the best contemporary representative of George Eliot. The popularity of the Victorian novel, with queues forming for the latest weekly instalment of Dickens in Household Words, is much closer to Shepherd’s Bush than Bloomsbury’ (Hall 1995, p. 2). 4. Davies takes this argument further by explaining that he is wary of working on a novel without a feisty female lead since ‘women viewers want to be like them ... while men want to go to bed with them’ (cited in Hall 2000, p. 2). 5. This fascination with alternative and unofficial histories is also reflected in the reassignment of the narrator’s voice from Walter Hartright (who acts as the editor of several narratives and thus perspectives, in Collins’s novel) to Marian. The change inscribes the significance of female subjectivity absent in the literary text, which again shows a focus on alternative points of view and marginalised historical voices. 6. The adaptation attracted an approximate 23 per cent audience share. It gained critical as well as popular acclaim and featured highly on the BBC website’s Best of 2004 Awards, winning in the categories of Best Drama, Best Drama Website, Best Actress (Daniela Denby-Ashe), Best Actor (Richard Armitage) and Most Desirable Drama Star (Richard Armitage). In addition, three different scenes from the drama were voted as ‘Favourite Moments’, with Thornton’s and Margaret Hale’s train-station reunion winning in this category (BBC 2004). 7. The rose is a recurring theme in the adaptation: Henry Lennox presents Margaret with one of the yellow roses surrounding her home in Helstone. Upon her return to Helstone, Margaret finds that the new parson has cut down the roses. Meeting Thornton at the station at the end of the last episode of the adaptation, she is presented with another rose, which Thornton was able to find in the undergrowth. 8. Locations which were used included Edinburgh, Keighley and London. Dalton Mill in Keighley was used for the outside of the Thornton Mill, and Helmshore Textile Museum in Rossendale for shots of the interiors. The Hale house interior was a set. The house was built at Ealing Studios, including two floors and the staircase. The Great Exhibition was filmed at Alexandra Palace in north London (information from www.bbc.co.uk/drama/northandsouth/ soundtrack_location.shtml). 3 Murder Rooms and Servants: Original Drama as Metadaptation 1. Indeed, as Peter Ridgway Watt and Joseph Green point out in their work on parodies and pastiches of Sherlock Holmes, ‘several writers have suggested that, since Sherlock Holmes was then at the peak of his powers, he might well have investigated the Ripper murders. However, it was not until 1966 that the 212 Notes first such Holmes pastiche appeared: Ellery Queen’s novel A Study in Terror (republished in England as Sherlock Holmes Versus Jack the Ripper)’ (2003, p.