| RATING: | 60% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
Out of Time
The BBC has done Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, et al to death and are thus struggling here to relate the same old plot in a new way. Few writers today are as good as those three, so British tv is stuck with endless, and increasingly-desperate, retreads of overly-familiar material.
The worst aspect of this adaptation is exactly what scuppered so many in the past, there is no real story because there are no real themes - just visual verisimilitude.
The White belief in self-fulfilling concepts like Social Darwinism, White supremacism, social snobbery, etc are never explored in favor of acontextual potting; along with characters to whom things are done, without rhyme or reason, but who never really act as agents in their own lives. People here are never masters of their own destiny, such that Oliver Twist simply moves across the barren landscape of a culture lacking in empathy.
As a drama-documentary of the times in which it is set - and its present-day legacy - this dramaturgical lack is fine, but as a solid piece of dramaturgy it is as lacking in feeling as most of its characters.
As Blacks are so often represented in White dramas, the poor are presented as completely unable to better themselves without the intervention of both Pale and Middle-class saviors. Such false genetics used in place of true demographics tells us as much about today’s makers of television as it does about the White culture in which it is set.
One wonders why modern tv is so obsessed with evading any truths about the culture that spawned it. Like the culture itself, the BBC remains hopelessly mired in a past that is always misrepresented. Modernizing the dialog (& the Carry On humor) only make the whole thing seem more anachronistic than ever before: As with genealogy, there really is no future in it.
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