Several bloggers are taking part in a Gaskell blog tour and today it is my turn to celebrate Mrs Gaskell and her writing. I have revisited my posts of the BBC production of Cranford and have watched the DVD again and refreshed my memories of the superb acting in this dramatisation. Here is what I said then:
"The BBC can get on my nerves, seriously, with its crass voice overs at the end of programmes, the endless trailers, the endless repeats, the endless crap quiz shows, the endless 'let's make a show about a maverick loner detective', the endless reality rubbish. But then they produce something like Cranford and you forgive them.
I tell you now, if there is a finer actress living anywhere in the universe at the moment than Dame Judi Dench, please tell me and I shall have great pleasure in telling you all that YOU ARE WRONG. I have just watched the most sublime, heartbreaking performance over the last hour which outshines anything else I have seen for a long, long time. One scene with the equally sublime Sir Michael Gambon just reduced me to tears of delight and sadness. I would like to say that the acting is of an incredible standard, except that it is not acting, you watch Sir M and Dame J and they are not themselves, they are Miss Matty and Mr Holbrook and they are alive and real and in your living room.
You will have to forgive my transports of delight and I just wish I had the words to convey to you the sheer joy and magic of acting at this level. I have loved Judi Dench for years. She is a superb comedian as we all know from watching As Time Goes By. She is a superb Shakespearian actress (I saw her do Cleopatra years ago) and a superb film actress, but as Miss Matty in Cranford she just breaks your heart. Sir Michael also broke my heart last year as Falstaff at the National Film Theatre so to see these two together in one glorious hour on the television, well I tell you, it is worth every single penny of my licence fee.
I recently listened to Mrs Lirriper on Radio 4, title role being read and played by Julia Mackenzie quite beautifully, and last night after witnessing the scene in which she explained why she loved Miss Maddy so (I was in tears of course) I was struck all over again with how lucky we are in the UK with our magnificent English actresses. Not only Julia McKenzie, but Eileen Atkins in the first episodes, Imelda Staunton as Miss Pole, Francesca Annis as Lady Ludlow and of course, the utterly divine Judi Dench. And all in one production!
The weaving of the three stories into one to produce a whole has been seamless and though there have been minor changes to the story lines, these have been done with sensitivity and commonsense and add to the dramatic intensity.
"We took a lot of liberties with Elizabeth Gaskell," Sue (producer) continues. "We lost some of her characters, we amalgamated some and we invented. We shuffled story beats around and we added extras to some of the stories from the other books. And we lifted out two comic incidents from her essays about her childhood which weren't in the novels. In the end, we had interwoven parts of all the three novels so closely that it took on a life of its own, and essentially became a new drama.
"We did often ask ourselves 'what would Elizabeth Gaskell think of this? Would she approve?' So we asked Jenny Uglow, who is the world's expert on Elizabeth Gaskell and has written a definitive biography of her. Jenny's approval would be the closest we could get to Elizabeth Gaskell's approval. Jenny did have suggestions to make which we incorporated in the scripts. She also came on board as our historical and Gaskell advisor."
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I thought then and I do now that Cranford was one of the BBC's best dramatisations. One hopes that they will continue though I gather from recent publicity that there will be cuts across the board, more repeats will be shown on BBC2 and BBC4, in my opinion the best of the BBC channels, will also suffer.
If the BBC care to contact me I can point them in the direction of where they could slash millions off their bills and programming would not suffer. Jonathan Ross has gone, let us hope that Graham Norton might follow and other over priced stars who are no use to man or beast.
But I am letting my prejudices show again and this is not the post for it. We are here to celebrate Mrs Gaskell and so I would also like to point readers to two other BBC adaptations of her novels which are quite quite marvellous: Wives and Daughters (Sir Michael Gambon again) and North and South and when I say that the latter was when the full gorgeousness of Richard Armitae was introduced to me you will understand why I love it so. If that doesn't make you buy it, then nothing will.....
Thank you for dropping by.
