The Mayor of Casterbridge (1978)

(To be red by Mayor of Casterbridge aka Alan Bates )

Tha wor a Beeb adappshun in 7 bits.

As can see I, Michael Henchard, likes drap of tea in a fine china cup.

MInd I wunt stand no nonsense – Hey!

Mr Farfrae (Jack Galloway) knows witch side his bred be buddered.

I be commoan hay trusser be I, Michael Henchard.

One of Wessexs own flesh and blood.

I be no ones fool.

I be Mayor of Casterbridge see. A fine upstandin particular gentleman.

Allbe I dunt stand faw no funny hairs nor fancy graces.

Dunt know ways and whiles o’ wimmin.

Except them need cossettin tite.

Yoo talk very fancy Lucetta. Cum ere Lucetta! (Anna Massey)

‘As far as I be concerned yer an artful little woman Lucetta’.

An even though she be a bit of an ugly duck, I, the Mayor of Casterbridge, still plans to marry and make of Lucetta a devoted and respectable little wife.

‘Well will yoo have I or no? – Hey!’

And look ere – I got to tell truth to this slip of a young maid.

Yoo be called Elizabeth Jane (Janet Maw) Heh!

Well, it is I who am yer father Elizabeth Jane.

Dunt fret Elizabeth Jane. I promise to make up faw all the wrong I did thee. Except faw the Very Big Lie I dunt dare tell thee. Until it be too late to be undone.

And look ere – how that artful little Lucetta is wigglin away – Cum ere mi slip of a slippery Lady!

Marrid Donald Farfrae?!

Farfrae! FARfrae! FarFRAE!! Bah!

Well I’ll have a tussle wi him noow – Hey!!

This beer has the right ebb abd flow for I. Ebb an flow.

The more it Flow the more I Ebb.

Yoo want I stop?! Shut thee mouth! Shut thee mouf! A man can kill and drown his sorrows can’t he be dammed – Hey!

Michael Henchard goin to rack an ruin ere.

Everythin be lost. No more big shot. No more big house. No more Lucetta.

No more daughter. No more Elizabeth Jane.

No more Mayor of Casterbridge. No more Mr Somebody.

Let I slide away unseen and make I’s bed in unmarked paupers grave.

Here be mi Last Will and Testament: ‘Tell not Elizabeth Jane of mi death or be made to grieve on account of me. And that I be not buried on consecrated ground. And that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.  And that no one is wished to see mi body. And that no mourners walk behind me at mi funeral. And that no flowers be planted on mi grave. And that no man remember me’

So be it. So be I. I got everythin I got. Sowed the seeds o mi destiny wi mi own dirty haytrusser hands. Tragic it be. Tragical be I. But dunt cry faw I. Forget I ever lived or was considered to be worthy of bein Mayor or Man. An if yoo see that blasted Thomas Hardy – tell the miserable misery-guts to stop makin up stories about I – Hey!!.

Dir: David Thacker, England

7.5/10

PS: A proper account (review) of the Mayor of Casterbridge might be attempted in the future. Depends if I be bothered.

Under the Greenwood Tree (2005)

I don’t need to waste too many words or thoughts reviewing this load of trite.

If you didn’t know it was supposed to be Thomas Hardy you’d think it was Darling Buds of May lightly souffled upon a bed of Catherine Cookson.

Stereotypical soapy bubbled period costume drama replete with soft furry feelings of fuzzy feel-good glow. Old grannies would watch this and feel blessed that nothing too horrible ever happens in the world. My Mills and Boon mother would have been soothed gently into easeful dreams if she’d seen this (which she probably did, as she sucked up most of the frothy fluff served up by prime time ITV)

There’s nothing remotely distressing or disturbingly Hardyesque about this pappy bap of sugary confection.

Rural Victorian England rom-commed and reassembled as a bland bucolic idyll, and yet too sterilised and sanitised to be bearable, let alone believable.

Dir: Nick Laughland, England.

3/10

Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1998)

This 1998 ITV version of Tess of the D’Urbervilles works quite a bit better than the Beeb adapation of 2008.

The main reason is down to the casting of the 2 main leads.
Ollie Milburn is less wet than Eddie Redmayne as Angel Claire
And Justine Wadell is far more convincing and compelling as Tess than simpering Gemma Arteton with her trouty pout.

Justine Wadell conveys a native naive charm that Gemma Arteton totally lacked. As an earthy milk maiden she really gets stuck in to her cows udders. You could easily imagine her doing a full days work down on the farm; whereas Arteton just seemed like she’d mislaid her way down a dusky Dorset backlane on route to a Kensington & Chelsea wine bar.

Justine Waddell makes Tess look, and seem, irresistibly charming and cherishable

No wonder our likely lad Angel has fallen head over heels for the lovely lass.

I really enjoyed the whole middle section of the film on the farm with the cows and the curlews, where Angel and Tess are tentatively, and teasingly, falling in love with one another. He – Ollie Milburn – wasn’t such a limp lettuce as wimpy Eddie baby Redmayne.

The last hour of the drama, where much tragic melodrama starts kicking off, wasn’t really holding together too well. I don’t know if this might not be a fault of the novel itself. I mean, why does Angel have to abandon Tess so dramatically and drastically on their wedding night? It just doesn’t make coherent sense of his undying, almost devotional, love for her.

And why is Alec D’Urberville so obessively fixated on her if she’s a married woman? He turns into some psychotic stalker person who she intially resists, but is ultimately too weakened by circumstance (the impending doom of impoverished family) to repel. This breakdown of her resistance was too flimsily flirted over to be entirely convincing.

The twisty turns of too many coincidental events, the helpless hoops that Hardy makes his protagonists jump too torturously through, are what constitutes their ‘fate’ and tragic destiny I suppose. But it does make for somewhat convoluted and deterministic drama. As is the case here. Which unfortunately, makes Tess seem simplistically stereotypical, a tragically doomed heroine – and Justine Waddell soon loses all the contours of her hard won individual identity as Tess, and resorts to sleepwalking through the last half an hour on an autopilot of sugary sweet cliches. Her stoic forbearance all gone. To be replaced by lachrymose weeping and wailing.

Anyway, I doubt whether there is ever going to be a good, let alone a defintive, version of Tess. She’s doomed to be an under-realised, unredeemed, helplessly hopeless Hardyesque ‘victim’. Doomed to her flawed and fallen-like fate.

Director: Ian Sharp, England

6.5/10

Tess of the D’Urbervilles (2008)

Surprisingly, this is the first time the Beeb has had a go at Tess of the D’urbervilles.

They’ll have to have a re go at it. Because this adaptation is not good enough. Not for me anyway.

Primarily because I couldn’t buy into Gemma Arterton as Tess or Eddie Redmayne (left there) as Angel Claire. Hans Matheson (on the right) was okish as Alec D’Urberville.

The trout-pouts of Gemma and Eddie were continously distracting, and eventually quite irritating.

Here is Arterton with lips that look inflated with filler.

Have her lips been botoxed I kept thinking. They appeared distorted, unnatural, as if surgically enhanced especially for the part (as Tess is described in the novel as having ‘rosebud lips’).

And Redmaynes lips are just as bad.

Weird puffed up swollen things his lips.

Eddie looks, and behaves, throughout like an immature preppy 6th former.

It makes no sense why Tess (or any of the other milkmaids) are so obsessed with his hapless Eddie baby angel act. He’s so sickly sweet and innocent his cruel rejection of Tess seems too extremely out of character to be credible.

The biggest credibility gap of all is Gemma Arterton. She’s no Tess. Her Dorset accent keeps slipping into simpering post posh babydoll estuarine. There’s nothing roughly rusticated about her. Her pouty trout makes you think you’re watching a model in a collagen ad. Emotional volatility is subsumed inside a depthless dreary vapidity.

At least good old dear old Anna Massey doesn’t disappoint as blind bird batty Mrs D’Urberville.

This was one of the last dramas for TV she did before she died in 2011 (aged 73)

One of the biggest drawbacks in this adaptation is something that spoils just about every mainstream drama you see: the music.
This is, like they all are, strung up with an orchestrally lush soundtrack, a psuedo Vaughan Williams knock-off.
I’m not watching mainstream dramas (whether cinema or TV) so the amount, and extent, this lushing up infects the story telling becomes conspiciously and intrusively alarming.
And then I get to think how mediocre most mainstream drama is. The ersatz homogeneity and cliched predictability of it all; every climactic scene plastered with the same old grandioise cloying sentimentality. The sentiments you are meant to feel, and are going to feel, larded on with a size 10 trowel.

Then I get to think that when you start disliking something nothing it seems can drag it back from the brink of antipathy.
Everything becomes irritating.
And about half way through ep 2 thats increasingly how I felt about this souped up confection: irritated.

Dir: David Blair, UK

4/10