Recently I saw The Personal History of David Copperfield; an enjoyable romp through a book I have not read. The cast is starry but it’s a story that is a magnet for stars. Personally I like the 1935 version but you may prefer the 1969 film with Ralph Richardson, Richard Attenborough, Laurence Olivier, Susan Hampshire, Cyril Cusack, Wendy Hiller, Edith Evans, Michael Redgrave and Ron Moody.
A remarkably good adaptation of Dickens is the 1987 Little Dorrit, so long that it is shown in two three-hour screenings over two days. I would very much like to see it again and will lobby The Riverside Studios to put it on. The cast is excellent, especially Miriam Margolyes who was born to play Dickens’ characters; indeed she played twenty-three of them in a one-woman show, Dickens’ Women, in 1989. She is an actress to be reckoned with: Cambridge Footlights and University Challenge in the first series way back in the day, as people have started saying. I don’t know why, but the expression mildly irritates me.
Now let’s make a little jump. I read an article in The Oldie that I thought was by Miriam Margolyes, espousing Netflix. Here is an extract, with which I profoundly agree:
“The best of these dramas are comparable, in terms of creative talent, to the great Russian and English novels of the 19th century. The genre of TV series, with its numerous episodes, provides boundless scope for plot development, subtle characterisation and charting the ups and downs of relationships. Gifted directors and writers all over the world are making excellent use of this format.” The Oldie, March 2020.
But I made a bloomer. The article is by Miriam Gross, of a similar vintage and a distinguished journalist, heigh-ho. However, her point is well made; I am a recent convert to Netflix and like new converts am keen to persuade others to join me. Price is a factor. A TV licence costs £154.50. I pay even though we don’t have a TV because I sometimes watch the news and exciting programmes like the Opening of Parliament and the Birthday Parade live on a laptop. May I digress; it only costs £52 if you have a black and white set. Netflix costs me nothing. Robert stumps up £71.88 a year.
A jewel in the Netflix crown is The Crown. Before my Damascene conversion I had no interest in seeing a distorted portrayal of a Royal family some members of which I greatly admire. It seemed irreverent and disloyal to see the royal linen being washed. But I got it all wrong. The Crown is a well-crafted soap opera. Each episode so far has two storylines that are intertwined. One I saw recently is about evangelist, Billy Graham, coming to preach in London in 1954. The second strand is about the Marburg files, discovered buried in Germany at the end of the war. They document overtures by the Nazis to the Duke of Windsor trying to persuade him to support them. Both storylines are true. The Macguffin in this episode is that the Duke of Windsor comes to the Queen seeking a role in public life at the same time as she is told about the Marburg files. She turns to Billy Graham for advice on forgiveness. As you see, Billy Graham did preach to her at Sandringham but the moral dilemma is an invention. The whole series is like this; riveting viewing, based loosely on fact but seasoned with more than a pinch of fiction.
What the dickens, an expression that has nothing to do with Charles Dickens. It appears in The Merry Wives of Windsor when Mrs Page says: “I cannot tell what the dickens his name is …”.
The attendance figures surrounding Billy Graham’s 1954 crusade are staggering. More than 2 million people flocked to hear him preach. His visit was not short of controversy, with Parliament debating if he should be allowed to enter the country and the Archbishop of Canterbury telling him he wasn’t welcome. The Bishop of Durham at the time was one Michael Ramsey, who dismissed Graham as a promoter of ‘the menace of fundamentalism’. He changed his mind though, and shared a platform with the preacher 18 years later.
It was a remarkable time, and although Billy Graham encountered opposition, in particular from the Church establishment, his simple message of salvation through faith in Christ, resonated with a society which had grown weary of the high & dry format of Christianity in the UK, especially that which was on offer by the COE. The impact of his crusades on the Faith in these islands was phenomenal, and eventually some of that zeal and charisma permeated the staid functioning of the Anglican Communion. He not only made a lasting acquaintance with Her Majesty The Queen, but was invited to tea at Downing Street by Winston Churchill.
Grahams’s son, Franklin, was due to tour the UK this year, following in his late fathers footsteps, with his evangelistic campaign, but every venue has cancelled his appearance; surely a stark demonstration of how decidedly times have changed. In a post-modern society a figure such as Graham will be viewed as too radical, disdained by theologians and dismissed by intellectuals, yet the salient point is not to trust the teller: trust the tale.