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behind tv
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It’s open season for books on television. Matthew Bell reports on an extraordinary literary revival
“What TV can do really well is to evoke the atmosphere and feeling of books.”
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Photos: George Orwell: A Life In Pictures and Channel 4’s The Story of the Novel
Television is extremely well read at the moment: Channel 4’s The Story of the Novel has just finished its run; the moderns, Larkin, Orwell and Pinter, and the classics, Shakespeare, Eliot and Austen, have been digested in the past year; and the BBC’s liter- ary behemoth, The Big Read, is midway through its quest to find the nation’s best loved book.
Books and TV, however, haven’t always got on so famously. Channel 4 head of specialist factu- al Janice Hadlow, a former editor of BBC2’s fondly remembered arts programme The Late Show, says the novel hasn’t been well served by TV for some time, certainly not since the demise of Bookmark.
Even this long-running and successful BBC strand had run out of steam before the end came in 1999.
“There came a point where you felt a bit sated, over-served by it,” says Hadlow. “Bookmark was one of those great warhorses of the BBC’s arts output – and it was responsible in its time for some fantastic films but as with all these things it’s quite easy for them to become a bit calcified, set in stone.”
The poser for programme- makers was to find new ways to sate an audience that hungers for literature. “As a television commissioner you’d have to be mad to ignore what we see around us. There’s all kinds of evi- dence, like the rise of book clubs, that there’s a massive popular interest in fiction.’ says Hadlow.
“You only have to go to the
Hay and Edinburgh literary festi- vals to realise that there’s a fan- tastically passionate audience out there who haven’t been served well for a couple of years by TV.”
With the exception of BBC4’s literary talking shop, The Readers and Writers Roadshow, however, the new-look book programme is likely to be a special, a short series or a TV event, like the BBC’s The Big Read, which launched last spring. From an initial longlist of 100 books nominated by view- ers, audiences will eventually vote for their favourite book.
To help them make up their minds, viewers can tune into BBC4’s summer series, The Battle of the Books, and a series of BBC2 films in the autumn on the short- listed top 20. Running alongside the television programmes, are campaigns to promote reading in schools and by book clubs.
“It used to be taken as axiomatic that you couldn’t do books on TV” says BBC creative director for arts, Mark Harrison. “When The Big Read launched, a journalist wrote a piece saying it was a ludicrous idea, but we got four times as many nomina- tions as we did for Great Britons.”
The strong response to The Big Read, he reckons, was down to framing the question correctly: “What is your best loved book?”, rather than, “What do you think is the greatest book ever written?”
There are lessons here for pro- gramme-makers. “The crucial thing is that you don’t try and assess books as a piece of litera- ture – the way the language and
structure works – that’s too aca- demic and doesn’t really lend itself to any kind of TV treatment,” explains Harrison. “But what TV can do really well is to evoke the atmosphere and feeling of books.”
Harrison says the BBC has absorbed this lesson and the result can be seen in its recent output. “What we’ve started to do now is to respond to what people are interested in. Lots of people have heard of Jane Austen, George Eliot or Mary Shelley – maybe they’ve read something, maybe they haven’t – but they have a sense of who they are and are intrigued to know more.
“We’re responding to that inherent sense of interest rather than offering them films about books or writers that we decide are particularly significant.”
The most acclaimed literary programme so far this year has been BBC2’s fictional documen- tary George Orwell: A Life in Pictures, which marked the cen- tenary of the writer’s birth. Chris Durlacher’s innovative film put the actor, Chris Langham, into a vari- ety of settings – from colonial Burma, via Orwell’s beloved English countryside to the frontline of the Spanish civil war – and gave him Orwell’s words to speak.
Durlacher, who made C4’s The Real Captain Bligh, chose this approach because Orwell’s pared down, direct prose is almost written to be spoken.
“The thing about Orwell’s jour- nalism is that you can read it and it’s like listening to somebody talk. You can turn it into dialogue,” says