TELEVISION In last week’s five-part Criminal Justice (BBC1 Monday-Friday), a disc of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is bedtime listening for a teenager. Within the unrelenting grimness of the series, the Rada-vowelled lilt of the reading functions as a shard of educated upper-middle-class security about to be lost, as much a marker of class as a Volvo, or a Tuscan, estate.
But, first, another adaptation of Emma (BBC1 Sundays). Austen has a limited emotional range and clean narrative lines, perfect for TV and cinema adaptation, allowing the sophisticated pleasure of comparing how the well-known characters are made to discover their true feelings after an hour or two of mistaking them.
On the evidence of the first episode, this version puts the main characters in starker relief against each other than any I have seen before: Emma is almost brassy in her urge to interfere, Mr Knightley more sure of his superior judgment and more patient in waiting for Emma to realise it, Mr Woodhouse more firmly and fussily solipsistic, Harriet Smith (finely played by Louise Dylan) more clearly dazzled into suppressing her true feelings by Emma’s superior class confidence. Because of that, Emma’s line, “I could not visit you if you were married to [the farmer] Robert Martin”, strikes a clearer note than usual.
Back to Criminal Justice, the grimness of which is bent to the purpose of the rapid unfolding of a murder, and the much more difficult unfolding of the reasons for it. Its five hours had long passages when nothing, or very little, was said. This allowed Maxine Peake (pictured), as Juliet Miller, the depressive wife of a barrister, to show how beautifully she can convey a gamut of emotions – melancholy, confusion, desperation, mother love, rage.
In a Radio Times interview, Peake was unreflectively silly about her earlier adherence to communism, speaking of it as if it were a way of bearing allegiance to the working class, prompting the thought that some great actors have been politically screwy – see the Redgraves, Vanessa and Corin – as if the repeated acts of immersion in fictive characters leave room, when oneself, for only the most extreme fidelities.
Whatever. Suffering under a dimly glimpsed tyranny of an apparently caring husband who, in concert with the teenage daughter, seeks to control her every action under the rubric of saving her from the worst effects of her depression, Miller stabs him to death after, apparently, he has sexually assaulted her. The wife is plunged into the criminal justice system in which the husband was an admired figure; it is full of small cruelties and much larger indifferences, and of police, social workers, psychiatrists, lawyers and judges who assure themselves that they can separate professionalism from emotion and bias, but cannot.
If there is a hero, it is the detective investigating the case: he emerges like a figure from Conrad, seeking not a conviction (there is no argument as to the killing) but the truth of the story, through painstaking exhumation of its unexplained, contradictory parts.
Mishal Husain, the BBC news presenter, is – on the evidence of the first of a three-part series – a beautiful, over-tentative guide to the life of Gandhi (BBC2 Saturday), born 140 years ago this month. With the declaration at the outset that Gandhi’s life “is not what it seems”, she promises revelations of a dramatic kind, as well as prompting the question of what is meant by “seems”. We learn that at one stage he worked for the advancement of the rich Indian merchants who hired him for his lawyerly skills, and not, at first, for that of the poor Indian labourers; that he formed an Indian ambulance corps to assist the British during the Boer and Zulu wars; and that he was “cruel” to his family, refusing further sexual relations with his wife and treating his children no differently from his other followers.
These facts are largely well known, and for any who have gone even a little beyond the veil of divinity cast about the figure of the Mahatma, both comprehensible and unremarkable. No human being can be other than of his time; the remarkable ones make an imaginative and then a fateful leap out of their time into the creation of a new one, for good or ill. The world historical importance of Gandhi was that he grasped that the British empire, hollowed out at home by creeping liberalism, would not and could not use massive violence to suppress a nationalist movement. For this reason, non-violent resistance would, in time, work.
Hence its fitness for the purposes of such followers as Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela; by contrast, such methods would probably not avail much in contemporary Chechnya or Tibet. It might have been more interesting for Husain to make more of what she marks as Gandhi’s moment of clarity – when he was kicked off a train at Pietermaritzburg station in South Africa for the indignity of claiming, as a lower species, a first-class seat (he had a first-class ticket). There, he “decided to try to root out colour prejudice”. Much has been done by many in that great work – but Gandhi’s efforts still shine brighter than most, even if his sun has some spots.
john.lloyd@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd
