allanhunter.net Blog

By now some of you will perhaps be thinking that all I do is watch PBS in order to say critical things about it. I hasten to point out that I do have a life in which I go to parties, laugh, meet friends for dinner, stroll out on balmy spring evenings and so on. And then, I also like to find out what the station that bills itself as dedicated to education, as non-commercial, as dedicated at least some of the time to the masterpieces of literature, is actually up to.

So I tuned to ‘Room With A View”. This is a short novel, and easily compressed into 90 minutes. Even so, the Andrew Davies version managed to truncate huge chunks of plot and coarsen the texture of the rest. It then spent 10 minutes of screen time with an entirely invented ‘unhappy’ ending. So we lost a lot of E. M. Forster and gained a large amount of undistinguished Davies. This was a poor trade.

If a work is a ‘masterpiece’ - whatever that means - and PBS decides it to be worthy of that title, then why are masterpieces to be hacked about like this? Would it be permissible to rewrite the entire ending of the Odyssey just for the heck of it and still call it the same work?

Purists are out of style. I’m not a purist. But I recognize a poor adaptation when I see one. And I remind myself that once upon a time I was involved in the production of an interactive computer version of “Macbeth” that was a shameless travesty of anything Shakespeare ever wrote. Why did I let myself be talked into that one? What could I have been thinking? Or was I simply giving in to the trends of the times? I suspect that somewhere along the line I had simply given up expecting that enough people still read Shakespeare seriously any more, and so no one would care. Thus I know my own failings on this one. And I have no wish for them to be perpetuated by others, either.

E. M. Forster was wiser than most of us when it came to his writing. We need to honor that. As Langston Hughes said. ” You done taken my blues and gone…”

Yes indeed.