By FIONA RAE
One can't go past a good BBC cossie drama, can one? Prime is treating us to the very excellent Great Expectations (Mondays 8.35 pm). Like all great books, Great Expectations is still as relevant as it was when it was written, with its themes of respectability, social mobility, interconnectedness and crime and punishment.
Screenwriter Tony Marchant says he realised when he started work on Great Expectations that it had many of the same themes as his previous series, the very modern Holding On.
It's what the BBC does so well, and they've been doing it ever since television started in Britain — adapting their literature for the small screen.
The Brits, of course, have an infinite inkpot into which they may dip their screen-adaptation pens, but it occurs to me that, if we're talking about cultural identity and "telling our stories," as Marion Hobbs would have it, we should have followed their example.
We had authors before we had television, whose concerns and themes are the very stuff of who we are. There have been a few translations to film — Jane Campion's brilliant An Angel At My Table, Once Were Warriors, End Of The Golden Weather, all now classics.
Why, when it won the Booker Prize, has The Bone People never been filmed? Witi Ihimaera's The Matriarch could have been our own The Sopranos, Nights In The Gardens Of Spain our version of Queer As Folk.
Novels are adapted for the screen every day. Anything halfway decent or popular is snapped up by the wolves of Hollywood. Stars regularly buy the rights to books lest someone else gets there first and so they can convince themselves that what they're doing is art.
Not that we don't do unique television. If there is another pair of yodelling lesbian twins in the world with their own telly show where they dress up in pink towelling, I've yet to hear of them. And Louisa Cleave's excellent story on the following page will be further testimony to the Topp Twins' uniqueness.
But our authors are not so much wasted as ignored by television. It's as if we've taken a leap from television's early days to today's desperate commercial scramble that behoves screenwriters to create stories from scratch, often without
context — and within a format that originated elsewhere.
And I know that I have a sense that we are
losing the past to television that goes in one eye and out the other.
Yeah, yeah, it's all about money, blah, blah, blah. But if we can make Greenstone, which looked good but had no story, why can't we make Season Of The Jew? Now there's a yarn worth the dramatising.
The Minister has been slow in defining her vision for New Zealand television. Towards the end of the year we should know what the charter will say and how quotas will work.
And if the networks are required to provide more New Zealand stories, then perhaps they should start with the storytellers.
<i>Powerpoint:</i> Losing the plot
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