Mini Austen
TELEVISION J. W. M. THOMPSON
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a television channel in possession of a good for- tune. must be in want of a serial. And so. in- evitably, Pride and Prejudice has this week come to the top of the heap of 'well-loved classics,' and is now undergoing the potting and slicing-up process of Sunday serialisation. A few weeks ago Mr Stuart Hood devoted this space in the SPECTATOR to that curious phe- nomenon, the television serialisation of un- readable novels. With Pride and Prejudice the matter is altogether different, for here a masterpiece is being quarried.
Plainly, from the sec's point of view the arguments in favour of televising such a work are appealing. The serial starts off with a large and well-disposed public already in existence. It has prestige, and a great many people have at some time read it with enjoyment. The scope it provides for the people who design interior sets and costumes is very great. Furthermore, Jane Austen was considerate enough to express most of the action in dialogue, which one would think could be pretty easily raided for use on the screen.
How unfortunate, then, from this point of view, that the first instalment on Sunday should have been, frankly, a dim affair. Instead of those moments of pleased recog- nition which it was presumably hoped to in- spire, hardly anything seemed absolutely right. Miss Nemone Lethbridge, in her adaptation, found it necessary to snip up the text so drastically, and to contribute so much of her own, that devotees must have felt uncomfort- able at the resulting transformation. Certainly any viewers unfamiliar with the book would be mistaken if they thought they now knew accurately what the opening chapters of Pride and Prejudice were like. Some of the acting, in particular that by Michael Gough as Mr Bennet, suggested the wonderful precision of Jane Austen's observation of character: but the general level of it turned her people into cardboard versions of themselves.
Worse than any of this, however, was the fact that the character most missed was that of Jane Austen herself. Miss Lethbridge is probably not to blame. To me, at least, it seems extremely doubtful whether this form of adaptation (i.e., converting the book into a purely dramatic work) could ever successfully carry with it this novelist's essential qualities. If television is to prey upon literature for its material, perhaps it ought to choose its victims more carefully. It might confine itself to the great sprawling second-raters (for example, those Forsytes) and leave alone such economi- cal pieces of perfection as Pride and Prejudice.
Of Jane Austen the ironist and novelist, little survived the breezy TV treatment. As a novelist she was content to take her plots from the restricted circumstances of her own life: the limitation was insignificant because her real subject was the interplay of human character and the analysis of human motive. But if you extract her modest little plot, and dispense with the envelope of irony and understanding in which she proffered it, it is hardly surprising if there is not much in the way of a master- piece left. The one indispensable voice. the voice which is to be heard on every page and
in almost every sentence, has very largely gone.
Perhaps the Pride and Prejudice serial will grow stronger in future instalments, but at best it can scarcely offer more than a severely scaled-down and blurred version of the original, like the coloured postcards of great paintings on sale at art galleries. I doubt if television really has any business to be messing about with works of art in this fashion; its talents ought to be turned to exploiting its own capabilities.
And as an example of what those can yield, I would like to cite gratefully another serial of a sort which reached its end on Sunday : Mr John Betjeman's little tour of English churches, in which he took the cameras along with him like a sympathetic friend eager to share in his erudition and his enthusiasm. The sight of Betjeman stumping around churchyards and along aisles, gossiping away happily about 'the dear old C of E,' was endearing and de- lightful, and in these unpretentious programmes one heard an authentic voice speaking without intermediaries.
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