TELEVISION How to treat love was given ample space in last week’s television as love’s close kinship to fantasy was well explored.
Wuthering Heights (ITV Sunday, Monday) must be among the most “read” books in English, that is, both popular and subject to many critical interpretations. That it is the supreme expression of romantic love between a rebellious young woman and a Byronic hero is not wholly wrong; but it is Romantic capitalised, shaped by Emily Brontë out of extensive reading unusual for a vicar’s daughter in mid-19th century Yorkshire, and out of an imagination working within the limits of a family she could not bear to leave and a backdrop of moorland which, in the course of her walks, that imagination peopled.
And those people! The programme did them well. Heathcliff, played by Tom Hardy, was handsome but also brutish in looks, a mouth that could be sensuous, cruel and slobbering in turn, his obsession narrowing his feelings so that all others but Catherine are aggravations. She was striking, spirited and narcissistic, unable to comprehend that her self-abnegation in Heathcliff – “I am him” – could not be understood to cancel all else, including her marriage to the gentle – again, in both senses – Edgar Linton, whose Thrushcross Grange is well conceived as the Enlightenment counterpoint to the Gothic Heights. In the first, there are ladies sewing in the drawing room; in the second, there is raving, drunkenness, scourging and endless cruelty.
It loses much, of course – including , the innocent idiot first narrator, who sets the story off, striving to fit Heathcliff and his “family” into an ordered universe by assigning them roles they had long since refused to play, only to realise, through a servant who picks up the narration, that he has come to live among passion and savagery. But the servant, Nelly (Sarah Lancashire), is made a major figure, trapped in service to a crooked branch of humanity that her workaday decency cannot make straight.
It was well done; invested with a certain external poignancy, since if ITV continues to falter financially we will see fewer and fewer of such fine and expensive things. Yet towards the end, the well-worn quip of Oscar Wilde’s on the death of Little Nell surfaced. As the ethereal part became stronger, and the ghostly visitations of the dead Cathy returned, the clash of the Gothic moorlands’ Sturm und Drang with modern urban sensibility prompted at least an inward snigger. The only way to “read” it is to surrender: trying, like the absent Lockwood, to fit it into today, is to dilute and lose it.
In Framed (BBC1 Monday), his own enlightenment has bred in Quentin (Trevor Eve), a National Gallery curator, an over-refined shrinking from the world. When ancient pipes burst and threaten flooding, all the stock is removed to a disused mine by a depressed Welsh village – a reprise of a real-life evacuation during the second world war. Quentin is moved with them to supervise their storage. In the village, he finds not only love with the lively, wise and determinedly local schoolmistress but also a realisation that these unlettered semi-savages can be brought to an appreciation of art – and that it can enrich, in practical ways, their artificially stunted lives.
It is, with all its absurdities of plot, a terribly happy piece: two cultures do not, like those of CP Snow, remain icily distinct but mutually enrich each other. As also happened during the war, one picture a week is returned to London for display – a system which, contemporary art lovers attested, may have narrowed choice but also increased the intensity and pleasure of viewing hugely. Presently, the art dealer Anthony d’Offay’s “Artist Rooms” project creates a series of small exhibitions which travel the country, allowing people to see the work of late 20th-century artists in some depth. In Framed, the idea is transmuted into one masterpiece at a time being brought to the now uplifted village, while Quentin, himself transformed, explains to an absorbed audience what makes them masterworks: an implicit subversion of the exhaustion most people rapidly feel at the ranks of priceless paintings and sculptures massed in the National, the Louvre or the Uffizi.
Hardcore Profits (BBC2 Monday) was the first of a vivid two-part documentary (concluding Monday) on the porn trade. Its writer and presenter Tim Samuels emphasised two things: first, that it is difficult and sometimes painful work for the actors, and second, that for the respectable hotel chains, credit card companies and mobile phone operators without whom it would not be possible, it’s a goldmine.
Although porn is produced everywhere, only the Americans will speak openly about it. Yet two women, one a financial controller of a porn company, the other a lobbyist for the industry in Washington (yes, really), looked shifty when pressed, and fell back on the “I bring professional values to it” line. Strive as it might, the piece didn’t convince me that the trade is immoral but it’s surely grubby, the fag-end of love, the basest use of fantasy.
john.lloyd@ft.com
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