Annoyed by Fanny
James Delingpole
So it’s Sunday night and I’m lying in bed watching Mansfield Park (ITV), stricken with a chest infection, feeling really rough, writhing at all the hideously tacky Sainsbury’s ads which bookend each commercial break, madly worried about the fact that I have to do Start the Week the next day, wondering how I’m ever going to be able to get to sleep, but bravely soldiering on nonetheless because I’ve got a TV review to write and I know how upset you’d all be if it didn’t appear.
We’re about three quarters of the way through and frankly I’ve had enough. It’s not an especially bad adaptation, I don’t think. Rather, it’s that the book on which it is based is so damned tedious. Plain, goody-two-shoes Fanny Price surely has to be Jane Austen’s most annoying heroine. And all the other characters are pretty grisly, too — stuffy Sir Thomas Bertram, creepy priggish Edmund, vaudeville villains Mary and Henry Crawford — so that it’s really quite hard to care what happens to anyone. You rather wish that this were the book Austen had left unfinished, rather than Sanditon, so that someone else could have been asked to rewrite the final quarter — e.g., me — and come up with something a bit more exciting and a bit less moralistic, like possibly a scene where Sir Thomas organises a shooting party, and Henry spikes the sandwiches with opium and all hell breaks loose.
Unfortunately, of course, in the book Patient Griselda eventually does get her man, for what it’s worth, which isn’t very much given how disgustingly poor (only £700 a year) he is. And we’re all supposed to go: ‘Aaah’, but, as I say, I don’t. It’s too pat. In the book, as in the adaptation, we can see it coming a mile off. More importantly I’ve started to feel promisingly sleepy, so, seizing the moment, I say to the Fawn, ‘Can we turn it off now?’ And, of course, being female she won’t let me because it’s Jane Austen and you can’t miss the ending of a Jane Austen, can you?
Bloody Jane Austen. I force myself just — to keep my eyes open to the end and then, of course, the second the programme’s over, the nerves and adrenaline kick in and I’m as wide awake as you can possibly be. Damn. Do I take a sleeping pill and risk being all fuzzy and at halfcock for Start the Week? Or do I not take a sleeping pill and get no sleep? I take the pill.
The reason I’m worried about Start the Week is that a) it’s about the most impor tant publicity thing any writer can do ever, so if you mess it up you’ve only gone and ruined your whole life and b) David Dabydeen.
David Dabydeen is co-author of a book called The Oxford Companion to Black British History which is very much not my idea of fun. Such interesting titbits as there are (e.g., in AD 138 Roman Britain was governed by an African — Quintus Lollius Urbicus) are overwhelmed by all the laboured, worthy sociology (racism, postcolonial theory, etc.) straight out of the most loony-left Black Cultural Studies department of some dreary Eighties polytechnic.
But I wasn’t going to say this on-air, obviously, because for one thing Dabydeen was on first and I thought any horrid thing I said to him would be bound to be returned to me in spades when my turn came. And, for another, Dabydeen seemed so nice and crumpled and cuddly. ‘Are we going to have a right old ding-dong?’ I said before it started. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Not unless you want one.’ ‘God, no,’ I said. ‘I’m all for an easy time.’ So, apart from having a gentle dig at Black History Month and the cult of Mary Seacole, I didn’t push too hard. Then, lo, when Dabydeen’s turn comes to comment on my book, he suddenly announces in his smiling, chuckly, reasonable-person way how very unfunny he thinks it is. Then he goes on completely to misrepresent one of the facts I’ve included about the Home Office’s disastrous positive discrimination policy for recruiting ethnic minorities, making out I’m having a gratitutous dig at poor, black cleaning staff. ‘You slimey cheat,’ I think. Still, lesson learnt.
The other two guests — the evolutionary biologist Dr Olivia Judson and Howard Jacobson — were great, though, and it was from good old Jacobson that I elicited a far more sophisticated critique of that Mansfield Park adaptation than the one I offered you at the beginning.
Mansfield Park, he insisted, is a great book which the adaptation trivialised deeply by casting the bouncy, sex-kittenish Billie Piper in what should have been a role for a mousey plain Jane. Also, he argued, it completely failed to grasp the complexities of the book’s moral schemata. Plus, he said, all the critical references to the slave trade were quite extraneous to the book. The only reason people think otherwise is that this is a theory which the infuriating Edward Said dumped on the book a few years back, and which was then allowed to dominate the last TV adaptation, whose cast included Harold Pinter.
Obviously, I agree with Jacobson totally. How could I not? He’s my new mate.
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