“A sexed-up Dickens with multi-ethnic casting is exactly what anyone and everyone would expect. It is the most predictable thing, like Tuesday following Monday. And yet every time the makers expect our gobs to be smacked, and the media scream ‘whoa Nellie, bit daring!’”
“Actor Ashley Thomas (aka rapper Bashy) who plays Mr Jaggers – the highly successful Victorian lawyer – tells the
Telegraph there were 15,000 black people living in London by 1760. Fair enough. The trouble comes when we are expected to believe that the country was full of perfectly integrated, thriving people of colour and was also – at the very same time – a hotbed of virulent racism and colonialism.”
“Elsewhere Fionn Whitehead, who plays hero Pip, reveals that he hasn’t read
Great Expectations as he couldn’t ‘even try to decode the language’. Terrifying, difficult, archaic language such as ‘I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right’ or ‘It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold’. But don’t worry, because Fionn hopes this version is more ‘accessible to young people’ because he gets to swear in it.”
Allow me to introduce you to a fun game you can play in your own parlour. You take it in turns for someone to shout out the title of a pre-21st century literary classic. The other player responds by giving the blurb of a 21st century television adaptation. It might go, for example...
www.spectator.co.uk
www.thetimes.co.uk
meaww.com
