It's great to moan about Christmas tv, I really look forward to being bored by it. This year there was some classic stuff, apart from the dreary soaps, the Moaning Minnies of EastEnders and Brookside, although The Street always remains good for a laugh. Admittedly we were spared, thank God, the graveyard of Ruth Rendall and P D James adaptations, but the toe-curling Poirot was there instead, and the grotesquely awful Jonathan Creek, which is so bad that one has to tune in to check that it's still the dud it was last week. It never disappoints.
Heartbeat still glitters with amazement that it's the success it is, and it should be amazed. Thanks be to all those sixties mould-breaking songs, their meaning and outlook a million miles from the stuffy conformity of Heartbeat. Hats off to crimewriter Nicholas Rhea who invented the thing in his books, and I'm sure it's not his fault that the show is so weak-kneed and formulaic. A hacked-out two-part Frost hit - or rather slobbered onto our screens, decently directed, but with a hoked-up, soapy script. This used to be a good police series with a definite darkside, but has now become crud, relying too much on David Jason's predictably mannered performance. The dire Midsomer Murders dared to make a reappearance. Less said the better.
The best crime came from Charles Dickens and Henry James in two sanitised adaptations half paid for by the Americans, and looking suitably scrubbed in Pears Soap. BBC1's David Copperfield was paced like a thriller, tending to obscure the noir in Dickens, and unfortunately emphasising his tendency to overripe caricature, with the usually reliable Trevor Eve being the heavy-handed stereotype as Murdstone. Adrian Hodges' adaptation was fuctional, as was Simon Curtis' chocolate box imagery. Lots of big stars popped up in the plumy roles but, despite this, some of it was good. The first half move deftly and had quite a grip. The second half sunk itself into Dickensian sentimentality.
ITV's The Turn of the Screw was classier. Still Pears Soap, but less obviously so. It was an evocative study of paranoia and genuinely James in a way that David Copperfield wasn't really Dickens - it only borrowed his characters and story. Nick Dear, an excellent writer, constructed a pretty good script from James' tale: strongly visual and atmospheric, faithful to James, but deftly filmic. Director Ben Bolt's pace was leisurely, possibly a bit too much so, yet it still got to me despite my knowing the story and resolution. A tricky one to bring off, since it's all in the mind, easier to create on the page than up on the screen, where it's so difficult to portray what is going on in the imagination of a protagonist. Inevitably, the story is better realised through James' manipulative sentences, but the idea of the ghosts being the product of the governess' psychosis was convincingly and powerfully depicted.
Here starring actor Jodhi May did brilliantly. At first I thought her performance was going to be awful, gauche and stiff, full of arch ponderousness. You could see the scaffolding of her performance, but then she is a character who moves through the world with self-conscious deliberation. Her gradual descent into hysteria was compulsive, beautifully timed, portrayed with a strong sense of rabid sexuality bubbling under a timid and fragile surface. At times she prowled the grounds with animalistic intensity, the obsession gnawing away at her evidenced in her increasingly neurotic face and body language as she tanked up on the evil she constantly saw elsewhere.
No masterpiece, but a notch above Christmas Casualty.
John Foster