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Driven to boredom
by Stephen Poliakoff
A ROOM WITH A VIEW EXCERPT
It was a week of big drama. All summer, there is not much more than The Bill and Americana to keep the flame of acting burning, then, all of a sudden, they're braying in your DVR like a green room full of actor-managers. Why would anyone want to remake A Room with a View (Sunday, ITV1)? It's the story of every sort of arch snobbery, intellectual, social, emotional, sexual; of the trite and embarrassing melodramatic incapacity of a lot of silly, idle people to do something as simple as go on holiday and snog a boyfriend. The characters are alternately elevated on plinths of their own smugness or wallowing in pits of their own sexual gaucherie. It is the most emotionally dishonest book - maybe not dishonest, probably just ignorant - written by a man who had not the slightest idea how teenage girls feel, either inside or outside. The Edwardian writers of Bloomsbury thought of little else but sex, and you can't believe that any of them ever had a shag that was worth sharing.
This is a minor, brittle little piece of Edwardian prudery, pretending to be brave and enlightened. It has no relevance or resonance today, other than as a historical observation: not socially, not culturally and certainly not sexually. It's one of those books that makes you yearn for the machineguns of the western front. A good cast - Elaine Cassidy, Laurence Fox, Timothy Spall and his son Rafe - made the best of a production that suffered in comparison with the lush Merchant Ivory film. The view from the fateful window might have been the Manchester Ship Canal.
© Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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