Netflix has massacred The Decameron

Unless you did English A-level and shoehorned a mention of it into your Chaucer paper to try to get extra marks, you probably haven’t even heard of Boccaccio’s The Decameron, let alone read it. Which no doubt partly explains Netflix’s decision to give it the Bridgerton treatment: no one, anywhere, is liable to complain about their most cherished classic being massacred.

But massacred it has been. Just as Bridgerton drives a coach and horses – or bulldozer with flashing rave lights and klaxons, more like – through anything that might remotely have resembled Jane Austen’s England, so this Netflix ‘adaptation’ does for 14th-century Florence. The costumes (generic late medieval) are wrong; the hairstyles are wrong; the sense of period and place is wrong. They could have called it the Mabinogian or the Mahabharata, for all the difference it makes, so vauntingly philistine and casual is its nod to the alleged source material.

Still, none of this would matter if it were as funny as it thinks it is. It attempts to be a black comedy set, like Boccaccio’s work, in a rural Tuscan villa to which various noblemen and women have fled in order to escape the plague ravaging Florence. In the original book they pass the time by telling 100 stories about lust, greed, religious belief, social satire and so on. But in the TV version, they just romp farcically like it’s Carry On Up The Black Death.

Possibly I’m just the wrong generation for this drivel. Younger viewers, for example, may not be as irritated as I am by hearing twentysomething female aristocrats from the Italian Rennaissance saying stuff like ‘Ugh! You’re so annoying!’ in the same intonation as a contestant on Love Island.