(Not so) Great Expectations

I notice that the current BBC adaptation of Great Expectations has been reviewed online.  Usually I would have been looking forward to a new Dickens series from the BBC with - well - great expectations - but given the way the Beeb - most of the media, to be fair - can be now, I have decided to avoid this.  For a start I read that they had inserted a gratuitous sex scene between Mrs. Joe and Uncle Pumblechook - which somehow makes me think of dirty-minded schoolkids sniggering away behind the bike shed.

Yet they have done such wonderful Dickens series in the past.

Anyway, the reviews make me feel I made the right decision.  It says, in part:

What wrecks it beyond salvage is Knight's inability to create conflict between characters without resorting to sex, drugs or violence.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-11931555/CHRISTOPHER-STEVENS-dreadful-Dickens-adaptation-gets-ridiculous-week.html

If I do want to be entertained by sex, drugs, vile language and in your face violence, I can watch pretty much anything on the media these days, I don't need to watch Dickens being dragged into it.

And I don't need any more hectoring lectures about what my politics ought to be either.  

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/felt-like-the-product-of-a-night-in-the-pub-bbc1s-great-expectations-reviewed/

Shame though, as it is such a great story. And a sad one too.  Apparently Dickens was persuaded by his publisher to put a last line in - spoiler alert - that suggested Pip and Estella would finally be together. But that was not his intention, They would not and could not, both being too damaged by their childhoods.

Dickens is so good at writing about the pain of childhood.

Here is an odd thing about BBC adaptations. They did an excellent Martin Chuzzlewit back in 1994 - with Paul Schofield, Keith Allen and Julia Sawalha, among others.

Back then they could manage a script without adding the now routine vile language and gratuitous sex scenes - or having to have the hero take his shirt off for us to be able to understand that there was an attraction between him and the heroine.  But they could have put in a scene that really would have shocked us, one that was completely warranted by the book, but they did not.

Because, without giving us any onstage violence, Dickens makes it very clear that Mercy is a battered and abused wife.  There is a scene, in a graveyard, I think, when old Martin speaks to her to warn her not to marry her cousin Jonas.  He says plainly and clearly that if she marries him she will have no recourse against him, no-one will be able to help her.

She, full of her new found success as the belle of the ball at the unfortunately named Mrs.Todgers' boarding house, and happy with her triumph over her older and plainer sister (the one to whom Jonas ought to have proposed marriage), ignores him and goes ahead and marries Jonas.

There is a sad moment later in the book, when she and the older Martin remember this scene, both regretting they had not tried harder, he to persuade her not to marry her cousin, she to be persuaded.

Anyway, when her sister and fiance (the hapless Mr. Moddle, who had been one of Mercy's many admirers), see her after her marriage, when she is taking temporary refuge from her abusive husband at the boarding house,  they find her "terribly changed". 

There is also a scene - offstage, as the classical unities demand (and rightly so in my opinion) - in which Jonas is heard to be beating her.  So it is clear that the "terribly changed" Mercy would be battered and bruised, probably with some missing teeth, and very likely looking 10 years older. 

But when we see the "terribly changed" Mercy in the BBC version, we simply see Julia Sawalha, as pretty as ever, looking a bit sad, and with her hair not quite as perfectly groomed as it was before. 

That was a chance to stop us in our tracks, in a way perfectly in harmony with the book. But it was not done, even though, sadly, Mercy's tragedy is as relevant today as it was back then.

The enmity between men and women, starting from that moment in Eden when Adam blamed Eve, has not gone away. Far from it.  If anything, it seems to be getting worse.

And by the way, I do wish to point out that the Bible blames them both - and both suffered the same penalty. They died, they stopped existing, and returned to the dust of the ground from which they had been created, as their Creator had warned them they would.

And in fact, if anything, Adam is blamed more than Eve.  The Christian Greek Scriptures explain why.  And I, a damaged daughter of disobedient Adam, need to cling on tight to the truth to cope with the pain, difficulties and indignities of old age.