Felt like the product of a night in the pub: BBC1’s Great Expectations reviewed

By now a genuinely radical way to turn a Victorian novel into a TV drama would be to take that novel and turn it into a TV drama. But while we wait for someone to do it, Great Expectations stays true to the current ideals of junking large parts of the source material and infecting what remains with the neuroses of our own age – thereby demonstrating once again the strange modern neediness to believe in our superiority to all those benighted bigots who came before us. (Please tell us we’re the best people who ever lived! Please!) Or rather, it takes those ideals to new heights that are either infuriating or hilarious depending on your mood.

In fact, last week’s first episode was – certainly by the standards of this week’s second – almost fair enough. OK, so Pip said ‘shit’ more often than in the original novel, and was less like a frightened, semi-literate boy than a poised, well-educated young man.