Review Arthur and George — 3-part TV drama
Review: Arthur and George — 3-part TV drama
To be fair, Arthur and George was always going to difficult to dramatise. The problem was not with characters, but plot: the original book was (in hindsight) a long-winded, rambling affair, following the lives of its joint protagonists from dawn to dusk. One can almost imagine the initial meeting, once the book had been optioned: “Let’s take a fresh look at the story, make it work for today’s audiences, bring out the drama.” And bring out the drama it did. To be fair.
But along the way, perhaps the same committee (and yes, the three-episode piece does give the impression of being written by committee) took the decisions that stripped the original story of any nuance or subtlety, any evocation of a kindlier, yet tougher time gone by, and replaced them with garish tropes that left no space for reflection.
Where to start? The potential for racism, writ so carefully in the book, was acted out in an early scene, with all the subtlety of a Little Britain sketch. Heaven forbid that it was presented otherwise, for fear that the audience might not be smart enough to spot it.
And if we’re not going to be subtle about that, why be subtle about anything at all? Think of clever, touching moments of period drama on film or TV, whichever takes your fancy: Remains of the Day perhaps, or Pride and Prejudice; then add a Pythonesque “let’s make sure they get it” layer of polyurethane varnish to the lot, and you have Arthur and George, the TV show.
It gets worse. Take out the nuance, and you find that the base plot isn’t actually that interesting: honourable man gets victimised; man gets banged up for a few years; miscarriage of justice gets exposed; man sighs with relief that his honour restored. It’s not much of a story, is it? We can’t have that, says the committee. It’s boring. We have to make it less so, for the audience’ sake.
Oh, but let’s not change it too much, suggests someone, who is starting to feel uncomfortable about this. Sure, it’s just some nips and tucks, some tweaks to dialogue, attitude, personality… Conan-Doyle’s assistant can be changed for a start, after all, he’s not a main character, is he? It’s the thin end of the wedge, fears the someone.
Rightly so, as the resulting plot has so many changes, it is almost unrecognisable. New characters to add intrigue. Falling-outs and making-ups. Macabre twists and turns involving half-rotted animal parts. And wait, no drama is complete without either a twist, or a violent altercation at the end, so we’d better throw those in as well.
But does it work, as a stand-alone piece of TV drama? The actors and cast perform reasonable turns, the characters are interesting, the backdrops well-constructed. However the patchwork of a plot, by attempting to be both true to the original and fitting some pre-conceived idea of mass appeal, succeeds in neither.
If Arthur and George had been squeezed into a two-hour TV special, it might have merited sitting through. But the hooks, crowbar-ed in to give the story reason to exist in this format, add very little, while taking away a great deal; meanwhile some key elements of the original story are missed altogether, thrown out with the subtlety as being somehow irrelevant. What a wasted opportunity.