The insanely irritating advertisements for BBC Sounds – 30 seconds to make the spirits sink – have recently included one exhorting us to watch the new BBC adaptation of Great Expectations – by the man who brought us Peaky Blinders!
It’s a real achievement to lose every vestige of humour in Great Expectations
Poor Dickens can’t pull in the punters on his own; it seems it takes Stephen Knight to draw a contemporary audience. Yep, the Stephen Knight who brought us A Christmas Carol, which should have made the Corporation think twice before letting him near Great Expectations, the first episode of which aired last night.
This is no adaption; it’s the violent hijack of plot, title and characters to turn the externals of Great Expectations into a vehicle for Stephen Knight’s obsessions about empire, colonialism, sex and class.
Do you really need a spoiler alert? Miss Havisham, the atrophied bride, isn’t just corrupting young Estella spiritually; here she’s an opium addict (her father’s fortune derives from slaves and opium, obviously) who takes Pip’s education as a gentleman in hand to the point of hiring Mrs Goodwin to sort out his sexual initiation.
Pip, when his fortune goes, attempts suicide in the opening scene of this wretched series: the first point at which the viewer thinks, ‘I don’t remember that’, but not the last.
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