This is the sixth time the BBC will have serialised Great Expectations for TV. Six times!?* Talk about flogging a dead horse. Having read the book and seen several film and TV adaptations, I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to watch another re-tread.
This reminds me of a post I did about the over-veneration of the familiar idols, be it the Mona Lisa or The Beatles. It shows a lamentable poverty of imagination and ambition, and it narrows the range of culture that’s being made broadly available.
Indeed, it’s highly symptomatic of the malaise that grips our mainstream culture nowadays. With the Tory party staging a gradual takeover of the BBC, prior to doing away with it altogether (or reducing it, as they’ve been doing with the NHS for decades, to a ‘brand’ to be chopped up and sold off), it’s the result of having bean-counters inserted at every level.
Great Expectations is, like most of Dickens work, a pretty darn good yarn. But is it so good we should remake it every decade? Every time the BBC (or anyone else for that matter) spends millions re-making it, that’s millions not going on something different. Perhaps something more obscure and/or interesting.
As far as I’m concerned it’s a natural outcome of bottom-line capitalist economics. Something’s already popular? Great, let’s keep milking it and flogging it. If our art, literature and music, etc, form a culture that could be a richly diverse orchard, this modern consumer capitalist way has the effect of replacing all of that potential diversity with a bland mono-culture cash-crop.
This latest re-boot is by Steven Knight, whose most recent successes are Peaky Blinders and Taboo. Neither of which interest me remotely. In fact Peaky Blinders (which got Knight a CBE) annoys me, as I like ‘newsboy’ flat-caps ‘cause of Tom Waits, not Cillian Murphy and co.
Teresa watched some of Taboo. I tried. But couldn’t hack it. So much modern media culture – Peaky Blinders and Taboo both fall foul of this – partake of a shallow yawn-inducing pseudo-Goth graphic-novel style vision of masculinity and criminal culture, in a way that signposts the UK following the US into a MAGA/hillbilly hell of deluded machismo, tattoos and poor sartorial choices.
Even if this were to be the best ever reinterpretation of Gurt Spectorations, I wouldn’t be up for it. It’s already been done to death. And a cursory glance, as Teresa watched it, reveals any such hope to be massively unlikely (the visual design and colour palette show it to be very much a product of our times, and as far from original as one could imagine).
Defenders of it might say, well, it’s not aimed at you. Fine. Understood. But I’m entitled to my view. And I still massively resent that the BBC, an institution I cherish, should be, like all ‘commons’, under attack by the philistines of Toryland.
The BBC ought to be boldly expanding the reach of our media culture, educating, enlightening and inspiring. Not just spewing out the same old same old, just because the bean counters, whose minds are as straitjacketed as their suits, think it might sell.
* In 1959, 1967, 1981, 1999, 2011, and yet again now. That’s nearly every decade! Only the ‘70s and the ‘00s escaped!