{"id":2491,"date":"2010-01-04T11:44:51","date_gmt":"2010-01-04T11:44:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=2491"},"modified":"2010-01-03T23:32:23","modified_gmt":"2010-01-03T23:32:23","slug":"plant-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=2491","title":{"rendered":"Plant life"},"content":{"rendered":"

This weekend we finally got around to clearing the decks, settling down on the couch and watching the latest BBC adaptation of The Day Of The Triffids.<\/p>\n

I’d been looking forward to it since it aired, not because of anything to do with the cast or production, just because I’ve read the book a squillion times.<\/p>\n

I can’t remember the first time I sat down and opened the book. I can’t even remember if it was the first of John Wyndham’s works I’d read, but I do know that I have read and loved and reread The Day Of The Triffids (1951), The Kraken Wakes (1953), The Chrysalids (1955), The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) and Chocky (1968).<\/p>\n

John Wyndham was a legend. One of the founding fathers of post-war British SciFi, he was such a magnificent influence on my early life that my reading flowed, quite naturally, from Wyndham to Edmund Cooper and his <\/em>epoch-defining works: Transit (1964), Five To Twelve (1968), Who Needs Men (1972), The Cloud Walker (1973) and The Tenth Planet (1973).<\/p>\n

These men, these talented writers brought SciFi home to Britain from the transatlantic-flavoured worlds created by foreigners such as Isaac Asimov and Robert A Heinlein.<\/p>\n

Wyndham and Cooper wrote with skill, they defined situations that had relevance<\/em> to a British readership and they did it with panache and style and total – near clinical – craftsmanship.<\/p>\n

Oh I was so looking forward to the BBC’s adaptation of The Day Of The Triffids.<\/p>\n

Sigh.<\/p>\n

The key elements of Wyndham’s work are clearly defined in the BBC’s production.<\/p>\n

But gone is the brevity, absent are the clinical touches and the deft incisiveness is.. nowhere to be seen.<\/p>\n

The BBC have given us an over-written, over-produced mess of a project that is to televisual craftsmanship what the chariot race in Ben Hur is to considerate motoring.<\/p>\n

I have to admit, in all fairness, that the characterisations worked; the casting was almost completely comfortable and some of the performances bordered on – given the shortcomings of the project – heroic.<\/p>\n

But the script the actors were given to work with can only be described as…<\/p>\n