![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/TMC_20240819_Unit_10827_RT-1038x778.jpg\")
\n Photo by Netflix<\/p>\n
\n Photo by Netflix<\/p>\n
The world is quite ludicrously disappointing at the moment, so I\u2019ve been taking refuge in television. It hasn\u2019t helped.<\/p>\n
I had, admittedly, been primed to be annoyed with Netflix\u2019s feature-length adaptation of The Thursday Murder Club \u2013 not because I don\u2019t like the book but because I do. Author Richard Osman has an obvious fascination with people and their foibles, something it\u2019s hard not to connect with his years working on game-shows, and his novels overflow with human warmth and sympathy. (I listened to the fourth as an audiobook, and one scene \u2013 if you\u2019ve read it, you\u2019ll know which \u2013 had me bawling my eyes out in the street.) But I was always cynical about the idea of squeezing a story whose joy lies in plot detours and wry narration into a two-hour film, and I\u2019m sorry, but Pierce Brosnan is not Ron.<\/p>\n
And lo, it came to pass. Brosnan is actually not bad \u2013 one of the genuine highlights is his beatific smile during a pensioner aquarobics class \u2013 but he\u2019s not obviously the character from the books, and should quite obviously be Ray Winstone. Worse, Joyce (Celia Imrie), who as narrator is the closest the books have to a protagonist, has been sidelined because Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) is more famous. If you\u2019re going to make a version so stripped down you\u2019re basically just expecting applause for familiar characters, you need to actually show those characters. (This, perhaps, is why at one point Mirren all but literally turns to camera to announce she was a spy.)<\/p>\n
Oh \u2013 and even nice old people\u2019s homes don\u2019t look like Downton fucking Abbey. Really, I don\u2019t mean to go on, but then I doubt the film-makers meant to muff the ending in a way that torpedoes later books either. This should have been a six-part BBC One series with budget to match. But I\u2019m sure the money was very nice.<\/p>\n
I would be coping better with all this had it not arrived in the same week as a second disappointing adaptation, this one of actual historical events. I\u2019ve wanted a TV show about the years leading up to the Norman Conquest of 1066 for literally decades, ever since I read the relevant chapter of Simon Schama\u2019s A History of Britain and realised it was basically England\u2019s I, Claudius. (The story of Emma of Normandy \u2013 a woman who marries an English king, then marries the invading Danish king who ends up replacing him, then helps a son from her second marriage to the throne, then does the same to a son from her first marriage \u2013 makes the empress Livia look positively shy and retiring.)<\/p>\n
The BBC\u2019s King & Conqueror \u2013 James Norton as Harold Godwinson, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as William the Bastard, reimagined here as sort mismatched political buddies \u2013 started a bit later than most of the good bits of Emma (Juliet Stevenson)\u2019s career. Exactly when, though, is not clear \u2013 Edward the Confessor\u2019s 24-year reign now lasts about six months. I can cope with that, and with the various name changes (the female name shortage in medieval England is well-attested, and you can\u2019t call everyone Edith or Matilda or Aelfgifu). But the bits where they just make stuff up<\/a>, which had me googling to see whether it was I or the writers who were wrong, is baffling because the story was more than interesting enough already.<\/p>\n Both these things are, to be clear, fine. They\u2019re not great; but they\u2019re not crimes against eyeballs, either. They pass the time. The reason they annoy me so is because of what I\u2019ve come to think of as the John Adams problem. The 2008 HBO miniseries about the second US president begins with two brilliant episodes about America\u2019s path to revolution. Then, though, it follows Adams to France in search of allies and thus misses both the War of Independence and the creation of a new nation-state. After that, it follows him out of France, so he misses the revolution there too. John Adams is a beautifully made story about a man with an incredible talent for walking out of rooms just before history happens in them.<\/p>\n
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