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Spooks v Little Dorrit

Hermione Norris, Peter Firth and Richard Armitage in Spooks
  • Posted at 1:35pm
  • 13 November 2008
  • by AlisonGraham-RT
  • 11 comments

Recently, and rather regretfully, I expressed to a close colleague my lack of interest in Little Dorrit. Not because there's anything wrong with Little Dorrit, but because I'm not a Charles Dickens fan either in print or on television. I had the same problem with the much-lauded Bleak House adaptation.

This is possibly down to a formative brush with the indigestible Hard Times, which after the third reading made me want to go out and buy a mill to exploit the lower classes just as soon as I could afford my first loom.

After making my admission, this colleague gave me a pitying smile before sneering, "Never mind, you just stick to watching Spooks", the implication being that I couldn't handle anything even remotely "intellectual".

This person, it may not surprise you to learn, dear reader, is now night watchman at my Bolivian tin mine (it's a hobby) where he makes tea from yak's milk, eats Angel Delight with a fork and makes his socks from moths' wings.

I hope this will teach him not to diss my beloved Spooks and not to hold Dickensian adaptations, like the rest of the known world seems to do, as some kind of high watermark in television against which everything else must be judged.

Naturally, I'm quite prepared to accept that it's only me that feels this way; that it's only me whose heart sinks at the prospect of week after gloomy week of people dressed in brown called Zebediah Dogtremble or Ebenezer Icebucket meeting in coffee shops to discuss probate.

Of course, both of them are also pining for winsome, ringlet-ed foundling Esme Spittoon, who has hopes of a better life once she inherits her ailing uncle Squeegee Molasses' toffee fortune - but only after she has thwarted her fat cousin Flossie Outhouse's scheming ways.

Should Little Dorrit ever go undercover to infiltrate an al-Qaeda cell then my interest might be tweaked. And if she's pushed headfirst into a deep-fat fryer then you can guarantee I will stick around.

As this seems unlikely, I'll continue my crusade to persuade anyone who will listen that Spooks is currently the best drama on the box. Yes, it takes itself ridiculously seriously, but that's part of the fun. The real point is that Spooks tells great stories, every week, in a mere hour.

It's not all about explosions. In this week's episode no-one so much as lights a match in anger; it's all about a megalomaniac financier's plans to bring down the world's banking system. Mmm, topical, sort of. And it's thrilling, gripping and just about every word ending in "ing". It's great.

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Comments

  • Posted on 12 December 2008
  • at 7:49pm
  • by charles d

so she doesn't like my books but then I don't like her columns either.Can you get someone with a brain to do this article ?

  • Posted on 06 December 2008
  • at 12:53am
  • by reeb

What a dull column.

  • Posted on 29 November 2008
  • at 4:48pm
  • by miller

there's no dumbing down - we can't get any dumber and we're ever so proud of ourselves for being so superbly dumb isn't that right sis? See if ytou can be dumber next week.

  • Posted on 27 November 2008
  • at 3:04pm
  • by Gilly

I love both Spooks and Little Dorrit. The advantage of Little Dorrit is that it has an ex-Spook (and one that didn't die at that) in one of the lead roles so you can look back fondly at the olden days of Spooks when Matthew McFadyen was playing a slightly unhappy chap, thwarted in his attempts to woo the lady of his choice. Or is that Little Dorrit, I forget......

  • Posted on 19 November 2008
  • at 11:48pm
  • by Clare

I like Spooks lots - but I'm loving Little Dorrit too! (and not for any intellectual reasons!) It's so much fun, and the romance is so sweet...I always want to go 'aaah' - and in a nice way!

Matthew MacFadyen has such a gorgeously expressive face - I could watch him all day!

  • Posted on 17 November 2008
  • at 4:14pm
  • by Jen

Read your column every week Alison. You're one of the few people who SAY what they think. This week's had me in stitches (of Laughter) Thank you Keep it up

  • Posted on 17 November 2008
  • at 12:18pm
  • by Anne

well, you column made me giggle. Thanks Alison!

  • Posted on 16 November 2008
  • at 3:49pm
  • by Petronius

The point about Little Dorrit is that it is a book. You know, if you can remember that far back, that books are bound up pieces of paper with printing on them. Adaptations are not books: they are the same, intellectually, as those Classics Illustrated comics which tell the story of War and Peace in 64 colourfully printed pages. The television adaptation of a novel gives the marginally literate a parody of a work of literature. Like so much television, adaptations delude the middlebrow, the intellectually idle but pretentious all the same, that dozing in front of the tube is not the contemptible waste of time it obviously is.

You can almost certainly pick up a copy of Little Dorrit free, if you want to, on the web, and read the thing; but no, that's too much like hard bloody work, and anyway, if the two or three novels by Dickens that I have flogged through are typical, there will be plenty of penny-a-line verbiage that fills the pages and pads the action; and I prefer fiction to be more direct and concise.

BBC Classic adaptations solve Mark Twain's dilemma. He wrote that a classic is a book that everybody wants to have read, but nobody wants to read.

Compared with Spooks, which is a serviceable and unpretentious television programme, conceived as a television programme, not an adaptation of something else, Little Dorrit, and every other adaptation of a work of literature is an intellectually dishonest imposture.

And yes, Alison Grahan is right to ridicule the followers of BBC adaptations of Dickens: they are ridiculous for their air of intellectual superiority. The intellectually superior are the people who have read the book, or who have read a sufficient number of the novels of Dickens to decide for themselves if Little Dorrit is likely to be worth the effort. I have, and it isn't. I'd rather read Viz.

Of course one has to admit that somebody who can write the word 'diss' without dying of shame is probably not endowed with superior acuity or taste, but I suppose that even the most degraded can occasionally make a sound judgement though it be by accident.

  • Posted on 14 November 2008
  • at 9:36pm
  • by Phil

It's fine to say you don't like Dickens and I respect that point of view but why disrespect those who do like Dickens. By the way you don't have to read the books to like Dickens on film or TV. I never have.

  • Posted on 14 November 2008
  • at 1:33pm
  • by Carolyn

She didnt say she didnt get it - she just doesnt like Dickens. I dont either but apparently you are not allowed to say so. And yes, I have been sneered at and even been accused of not reading any of his books. I've read a few and apart from a couple - they are not to my taste.

  • Posted on 13 November 2008
  • at 8:51pm
  • by Phil

Poor Alison Graham, a few weeks ago she didn't get theatre now she doesn't get Dickens. Dumbing down has really reached a low point if it is considered that there is something intellectually superior about Dickens; if there was it wouldn't be on BBC1. The pity of it is that just because she doesn't appreciate Dickens she ridicules it, which is tantamount to ridiculing the people who do like it and, therefore, very alienating. I would agree that Spooks is the best drama on TV at the moment with Little Dorrit a whisker behind. I thoroughly enjoy both not for their intellectual value but for sheer entertainment, something I prize very highly. I appreciate that it may be very hard to fill the column inches each week but in this case Alison I feel you could do better.

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